17 ms·

I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer. I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only rele

I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer. I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway). When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway. Utopia my ass.

xrd 8y ago
I'm curious, would your colleagues consider using bitcoin or ethereum as a method of exchange? Could you send them that to pay them back and they could pay on your behalf? If not, why? edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Is that more convenient than a bank transfer? Now the other party needs to sign up to a bitcoin exchange.
  - xrd 8y ago
    I'd say absolutely. I don't know of a bank where I can set up an account completely online through an app, which you can do with cex.io or coinbase. It's gotten harder but generally you create an account and then upload your ID and then can buy very soon afterwards. That makes it tenable in my opinion to ask even the most Luddite of friends to do it before the event and then pay people back that way.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      I don't know of a bank where I can set up an account completely online through an app In my EU country, there are already six banks that let you do this, and I doubt we're pioneers.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      But how do they get their money out of the exchange? In the example provided I’m sending my pal BTC for some shared purchase because there’s no cash. My friend didn’t have a BTC address / wallet or whatever, now they do, and I’ve just transferred them 0.0028 BTC to cover my share of lunch. Now what?
- kristofferR 8y ago
  My "music festival colleagues"? :P Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea. If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly trusting me to send it back.
  - xrd 8y ago
    Got it, none of your friends or people you know there are using it. Getting set up on an exchange is challenging these days, at least in the US. I didn't know if there were better options that people there in Scandinavia were using, sounds like no. It's sad, because once you have crypto in an exchange it is super simple to send to an address, and the current exchange rate is easy to see. Seems like it solves your problems in that no one would need to use one of the different and incompatible banking systems. I'm sort of surprised the cost of signing up for a crypto exchange makes the banking system still a consideration. It's an interesting place you are in, highly mobile within Europe, with the financial system getting more complicated when you travel within it.
- xrd 8y ago
  To the downvoters: care to say why? I read the entire article, read the comment I'm referring to, and have personal experience that the solution I'm proposing works as I'm describing. I'm left with only that everyone must think my question reeks of crypto currency evangelism, and that's a BAD thing here on HN. Is it something else? My grammar or phrasing?
  - Moru 8y ago
    Im just guessing but replacing something that is used by almost everyone here in sweden with something almost noone uses is a bit counter productive. Just start using cash again would be the easiest solution. Swift payments is mostly used to accept payment easy and costfree between private people at fleamarkets and similar since noone carries cash any more.
    - rs23296008n1 8y ago
      Network effects and the "good enough" effect. At some point no one used swish. Then it became useful for some and then it became useful for many. Then it became the "must have" or "should have" for everyone else. Crypto's could do this. They just aren't set up as easy right now. I'm pointing at bitcoin etc. They are also slow. I can tap my MasterCard contactless card/phone and pay for coffee and the merchant is happy. I've had bitcoin take >30 minutes to transfer. Unacceptably slow.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    You're probably right, the downvotes are probably because people are sick of people saying "Crypto is the solution!". IMO he might as well have said "Can you lend me money, I'll pay you back with these chicken eggs, bartering is a valid form to pay for goods and services!", except crypto has hype around it that he'd probably find a taker or two...
patd 8y ago
Aren't you asking a bit too much info for a simple SEPA transfer ? The IBAN should be all you really need, the rest are nice to have.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  True, but that doesn't weaken his point.
  - masklinn 8y ago
    It removes the entire second paragraph. It takes about 5mn to do a SEPA bank transfer: open banking client, open transfers, create new transfer, enter destination IBAN, enter amount, optionally set a data & some text, confirm.
    - avip 8y ago
      So assume he's an Aussi and paste that second paragraph back.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Which is much longer than handing someone a 10 euro note.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        That would be of limited value to someone in Sweden, which uses the krona. Automatic currency conversion is one of the advantages of electronic payments over cash.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      And then you wait 3 days for the money to actually arrive. I frequently send money between EU countries and the speed of transaction is abysmal unless you want to transfer to be denominated in Euro which means that if you're sending money between two non-euro currencies you're losing money twice.
eksemplar 8y ago
That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet. It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  The best payment experience I’ve had is cash. I pay for what I need and when I leave the festival I can still use my “credits” hassle free anywhere I like.
  - tedivm 8y ago
    Most of the cashless festivals return your unused "credits" pretty quickly after the festival. The real problem comes when the system breaks down- which I've seen happen at plenty of festivals. At that point if cash isn't an option then commerce simply stops- screwing both vendor and customer alike.
    - gammateam 8y ago
      > Most of the cashless festivals return your unused "credits" pretty quickly after the festival. for a $5 processing fee
      - metildaa 8y ago
        With a delay of their choosing, and a conversion factor for those of us that aren't locals. Cash has frictionless instant settlement, which is very hard to compete with as a centralized payment processor.
        icebraining 8y ago
dingaling 8y ago
> Utopia my ass It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion. The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands the misery it requires.
- yellow_postit 8y ago
  I fail to see how Sweden in this case is enforcing the cashless trends through surveillance or coercion.
  - edoceo 8y ago
    Maybe the near monopoly of the payment network is the coercion?
    - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
      "either use Swish or go without food/water/travel/etc" is coercion by any definition
      - o-o- 8y ago
        Food is payed with VISA och Mastercard. Water is payed through the online banking service. Travel with VISA/Mastercard (even local buses accept credit cards). "Etc" is also payed with VISA or Mastercard. Swish is a mere conveniency for transferring money without having to log onto your online banking service. I use it once a month tops.
        fouc 8y ago
        What happens if you don't have visa/mastercard or even a bank account?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eigenvector 8y ago
You can have a very similar experience in China. So many things are now paid for by mobile wallets such as WeChat Pay that do not support foreign accounts. It's great for locals and for the government that - in an authoritarian country - gets unfettered access to all that personalized spending data. For tourists, not so much.
- joosters 8y ago
  WeChat payments work fine with foreign cards...
  - kenneth 8y ago
    Not really. It's very finicky at best. Activating a WeChat wallet requires a Chinese ID or a bank card, and the latter works very unreliably with any foreign cards.
  - zmk_ 8y ago
    I didn't try with WeChat but I did try with AliPay. You can register your non-Chinese card, but it will not let you pay with it.
  - Jommi 8y ago
    No it doesn't. Not in mainland China. Who told you this?
- Markoff 8y ago
  anyone can send money to your account if you hand them cash without linking card, only thing you need to create account it's phone number plus cash it's also accepted everywhere
microcolonel 8y ago
Every time people talk about a cashless society, I tell them about stuff like this both abstractly and concretely, and then I just get called a luddite. I think, unfortunately, that people will have to learn this lesson the hard way. I don't own a working smartphone, my last one (like the one before it) failed randomly in the display, and was unjustifiably difficult to RMA (no box provided, no postage, unclear details on how to mark). I don't get why people want to use these cumbersome, life-running pocket computers to control access to their money on a day-to-day basis. Here in Canada we have Interac, which is mostly everywhere, but we also have cash, and three or four credit networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and sometimes Discover). There are only really three physical modes of operation, and they all have a time and a place: Tap card 95% of the time, insert and use pin when fraud detection gets a funny feeling, and use cash when all else fails (because sometimes that means you have to call up your creditor's fraud department and let them know you're just on a roadtrip, your card hasn't been stolen). I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade. Then these people talk about making state payment processors. What happens when fraud prevention completely stops you from being able trade any money? Do they drive out to fix your problem on the spot? How on earth could they expect that to work out well?
- akvadrako 8y ago
  What you describe as "just fine" sounds a lot like the US, except that most transactions have enormous fees tacked on by credit card companies. Maybe in Canada you have negotiated better deals. Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
- AngryAnt 8y ago
  > I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade. Agreed. Though I also don't think that this was suggested anywhere in the article? If you want a mapping to your situation, your wallet could have an additional card reading "Bank of Canada" next to your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover cards.
quickthrower2 8y ago
IOUs from friends: the most resilient form of peer to peer money. There shouldn't be a rush to pay them back either unless they are hard up (or you preferred not to keep track of IOUs)
dmitriy_ko 8y ago
That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!" Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  I've noticed this with mature technology. There comes a point where a product is perfect, no need to add anymore features. But the manufacturer still wants to continue adding new features so that they can use those as new selling points. Unfortunately the new features end up making the product worse.
  - gsich 8y ago
    Smartphones today.
    - kadendogthing 8y ago
      Really? I think the smart phones we have are pretty brilliant and functional.
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        Noot being able to upgrade the OS is a glaring design problem, so there's still work to be done.
        kadendogthing 8y ago
        I upgrade my OS all the time.
      - reshie 8y ago
        pretty much. nothing can be perfect for everyone. we still have room for advancement and refinement though and who knows of future breakthroughs.
      - 8y ago
isodude 8y ago
There will always be other solutions at hand, these guys are doing something about it: https://www.revolut.com https://www.revolut.com Same as swish but no need for Swedish banks nor BankID. I use Swish extensively because it works for giving kids cash remote and at the same time buying a car. If I would stumple on someone who is unable to use it it would be troublesome, but I think most swedes would break their neck to solve it anyhow in that case. If they know they have the possibility. Bank transactions between countries have always been a burden, I so hope that we will see big change in the near future.
- the_clarence 8y ago
  Monzo is so much better, but UK only. Revolut in the US is super expensive to top up
- zmk_ 8y ago
  There are fintech companies that make transfers between countries painless and cheap.
shellkr 8y ago
Ok... so you went to a festival without money? How would you have solved this without Swish? As you said there was no ATMs. Card readers are expensive and not really viable for most booths. They are also kind of a monopoly. You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too. For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.
- megaremote 8y ago
  They had money, most places did not accept money.
iiv 8y ago
What are your thoughts on [Vipps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipps)?
jancsika 8y ago
In other words, it became the civic responsibility of all the Swedes at the festival to ensure that foreigners-- who had no access to goods/services-- were properly fed, hydrated, and housed. Actually, this sounds like it could become a utopia given the right social strategy by the Swedes. They just need to buy beers, lunches, and festival tickets for the kinds of tourists they desire. Then ignore the loud obnoxious ones who will become hungry and irritated and end up leaving early and never coming back to Sweden. Of course the risk is that it is even more cost effective in the short term for the citizenry to become xenophobic.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
plufz 8y ago
Atleast 99% of my payments in sweden are with a totally normal credit card, the rest with swish. I only use paper money to give to homeless people, can’t remember when I bought something with bills and coins. I think it’s great, I’m more worried about tax evasion than my government knowing what I buy. I’m more interested in my speech being free than my purchases, even though I can see the problem in non-functioning democracies and dictatorships.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Its not just the government that has this data, but every intermediary in the non-cash payment chain. Mastercard for example sells its payment data to Google, who uses it to correlate online ad viewing with in store purchases. There is no way to opt out of this if you use Mastercard, and other intermediaries do similar shady things with your data.
  - o-o- 8y ago
    Ooo nasty...
  - bjelkeman-again 8y ago
    IF you can’t opt out of this in EU then it goes against GDPR (actually they must let you opt in). It would be interesting to dig deeper here.
    - king_phil 8y ago
      You actually can opt out. There is a hidden online form, I saw it once.
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    but such purchase is untraceable to you as PII. neither google nor mastercard learns the linkage details to the data the other holds, they just learn that data is linked. you can opt out by not using your gmail account as an addres on your mastercard. and i believe there’s an explicit opt out as well. this measures conversion but in a privacy safe way, so it’s actually good thing. the google implementation that is. i guarantee anyone else doing this (i haven’t heard of such though) is leaking data like crazy
jakewins 8y ago
> it only accepts Swedish bank accounts I have a Swedish bank account, but I still can't use Swish because I have an American phone. It's infuriating.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not. The only requirements are that you 1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and 2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone. If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not. That sounds like it makes it impossible for any other phone OS to enter the Swedish market.
    - tjoff 8y ago
      Depending on your bank you might need a Swedish phone number, but you actually don't need a phone to receive money. (In reality the phone number has nothing to do with it, it's just a pre-existing ID) You need the app to be able to send money though (iOS, android or windows phone). Yes it is stupid. Unfortunately it is convenient, which is enough for 95% of the population.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
      To a degree. A bigger issue would actually be BankID, which is the secure online authentication service in Sweden, used by banks, government, insurance companies, etc. But there are still, somehow, banks in Sweden which don't support one or the other. And, well, useful as Swish is, it's not actually obligatory for life in Sweden. For what it's worth, BankID and Swish also support Windows Phone… for the remainder of 2018, anyway.
Aeolun 8y ago
This has been my experience going on holiday in the Netherlands. Everything functions on cards and touch payments. I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...
- jeofken 8y ago
  There are many ways in which Japan is more civilized than Sweden is. Speaking as a Swedish native who lived in japan for years
  - zmk_ 8y ago
    Cash is not one of those things though. Nor is the system of buying metro tickets with cash only and without an option to change language.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Metro tickets with cash only seem fine to me. What is your problem with that? I believe inside of Tokyo almost all the machines also support a variety of languages now, but there might be a scattered few with only Japanese.
      - wtdo 8y ago
        I just left Osaka yesterday. I didn't use every machine, but I never found one that didn't support English.
    - mav3rick 8y ago
      There is a big "English" option. Plus other languages as well.
      - zmk_ 8y ago
        I might have been unlucky then, but the one machine I was in contact with before I ceded all responsibility on my host was Japanese only.
jeofken 8y ago
Anglophones, please, please, excuse me for replying in my native tounge. The cashless society engages my aversion such that it is hard to say in my second language. Så jävla enig alltså! Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad. Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter. Ser fram mot min årliga skridskosemester i Norge.
- ptr 8y ago
  ... huh? Or I guess this is sarcasm? This response hardly seems warranted, given it’s just a festival exclusively accepting swish. I never use swish except for sending money to friends, so I don’t think it’s widespread for businesses. Contact less credit card is easier than everything, including cash.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    The Danish version, MobilePay, is fairly widely accepted by small and some medium businesses. Very small businesses might only accept MobilePay or cash (e.g. come and see an obscure band perform in Copenhagen, the ticket, cloakroom and bar might have these choices.) Larger places offer it as an alternative. The canteens at Copenhagen University, for example.
- adobeeee 8y ago
  How did you type those knots over a? I'm on windows.
  - username90 8y ago
    Swedish has three extra letters in its alphabet, åäö, so Swedish keyboard layout has 'å' where american keyboards has '['. You can type them by switching to Swedish layout and pressing [.
    - teddyh 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Swedish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Swedish
sundvor 8y ago
That sounds painful. I'm a Norwegian in Australia. We've got Paypass / Paywave just about everywhere here. With Samsung Pay supporting both, I don't bring my wallet out most days. I'm sure a lot of the readers support Apple Pay as well. Of course we can still use cash if we want to, but tapping is just easy these days.
caperfee 8y ago
Australian who travelled through Sweden and Norway in September of this year for two weeks. I just used contactless payments on my credit card the entire time and never had any issues. To me it seems more like Swish-specific issues rather than cashless in general? However, if some people are disadvantaged by different cashless options then that is a definite issue.
gigatexal 8y ago
The locked down nature of Swish and it’s monopoly status is worrisome. I was thinking there was just a ton of NFC readable payment devices that could accept any form of contactless payment like Apple Pay or Alipay or Google Pay etc... this is definitely not a good sign. Regarding the article saying that if central banks become irrelevant due to cash going fully out of favor: that’s such BS. Deposits would just become credits from central banks to lending banks private or not so that customers could get credit and pay for goods digitally. No exchange of paper money is ever needed. There’s already orders of magnitude more money in asset valuations than there is paper money to back them in the world economy why should we hold back because we are so fixated on paper currency. With the advent of token based contactless payment services like how Apple Pay works the future is secure payments without cash and those burndensome coins I have to handle while getting Che he after a purchase. Lastly, if things go digital fully it could mean that securing and auditing and processing could be even cheaper and could allow for entrants that can still profit on transaction processing but at much lower rates than the current incumbents charge retailers. It’s the opposite here in Germany. Some places have support for contactless payment, take credit cards, etc., but most even if they do prefer you to pay with cash as it’s cheaper for them. There’s also this German only banking alliance where they have put forth a EC card that has very low to no fees for participating entities as the funding and processing is all done in Germany amongst the member financial institutions. But my N26 account doesn’t offer one so I’m out of luck there. The thing is the incumbents both state and private want to keep the status quo alive: the Mastercards of the world want to keep fees high and central banks want to keep control of interest rates by influencing the supply of currency in the market. I think both can still be done without cash and it leaves the possibility that with time and good legislation and technological improvement and some enterprising people there might become solutions that take the friction of paying for and make the settling accounts and such cheaper for all parties involved.
- jnurmine 8y ago
  Why is Swish worrying you? It is basically a payment overlay on top of whatever technology runs in the mobile devices. If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working. It is not tied to a US or Chinese megacorporation, so there is no risk of geopolitically-influenced political decisions ruining the show, like those threatening SWIFT, for example. Swish works just fine inside Sweden, for Swedes. All countries should have the equivalent of Swish and then make them interoperate if sending money to another country. I can think of one thing why Swish and "e-krona" is not a good idea: if the lights go out temporarily, it will be difficult to pay for something (although figuring this out is a technical problem -- the payments could be queued in the terminals or something). If the lights go out forever and we enter the quiet apocalypse, then there is very little use for cash either, aside from use as tinder or drying shoes, and plastic notes will not work for those either.

xrd 8y ago

I'm curious, would your colleagues consider using bitcoin or ethereum as a method of exchange? Could you send them that to pay them back and they could pay on your behalf? If not, why? edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Is that more convenient than a bank transfer? Now the other party needs to sign up to a bitcoin exchange.
- xrd 8y ago
  I'd say absolutely. I don't know of a bank where I can set up an account completely online through an app, which you can do with cex.io or coinbase. It's gotten harder but generally you create an account and then upload your ID and then can buy very soon afterwards. That makes it tenable in my opinion to ask even the most Luddite of friends to do it before the event and then pay people back that way.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I don't know of a bank where I can set up an account completely online through an app In my EU country, there are already six banks that let you do this, and I doubt we're pioneers.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    But how do they get their money out of the exchange? In the example provided I’m sending my pal BTC for some shared purchase because there’s no cash. My friend didn’t have a BTC address / wallet or whatever, now they do, and I’ve just transferred them 0.0028 BTC to cover my share of lunch. Now what?
kristofferR 8y ago
My "music festival colleagues"? :P Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea. If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly trusting me to send it back.
- xrd 8y ago
  Got it, none of your friends or people you know there are using it. Getting set up on an exchange is challenging these days, at least in the US. I didn't know if there were better options that people there in Scandinavia were using, sounds like no. It's sad, because once you have crypto in an exchange it is super simple to send to an address, and the current exchange rate is easy to see. Seems like it solves your problems in that no one would need to use one of the different and incompatible banking systems. I'm sort of surprised the cost of signing up for a crypto exchange makes the banking system still a consideration. It's an interesting place you are in, highly mobile within Europe, with the financial system getting more complicated when you travel within it.
xrd 8y ago
To the downvoters: care to say why? I read the entire article, read the comment I'm referring to, and have personal experience that the solution I'm proposing works as I'm describing. I'm left with only that everyone must think my question reeks of crypto currency evangelism, and that's a BAD thing here on HN. Is it something else? My grammar or phrasing?
- Moru 8y ago
  Im just guessing but replacing something that is used by almost everyone here in sweden with something almost noone uses is a bit counter productive. Just start using cash again would be the easiest solution. Swift payments is mostly used to accept payment easy and costfree between private people at fleamarkets and similar since noone carries cash any more.
  - rs23296008n1 8y ago
    Network effects and the "good enough" effect. At some point no one used swish. Then it became useful for some and then it became useful for many. Then it became the "must have" or "should have" for everyone else. Crypto's could do this. They just aren't set up as easy right now. I'm pointing at bitcoin etc. They are also slow. I can tap my MasterCard contactless card/phone and pay for coffee and the merchant is happy. I've had bitcoin take >30 minutes to transfer. Unacceptably slow.
- netsharc 8y ago
  You're probably right, the downvotes are probably because people are sick of people saying "Crypto is the solution!". IMO he might as well have said "Can you lend me money, I'll pay you back with these chicken eggs, bartering is a valid form to pay for goods and services!", except crypto has hype around it that he'd probably find a taker or two...

patd 8y ago

Aren't you asking a bit too much info for a simple SEPA transfer ? The IBAN should be all you really need, the rest are nice to have.

StavrosK 8y ago
True, but that doesn't weaken his point.
- masklinn 8y ago
  It removes the entire second paragraph. It takes about 5mn to do a SEPA bank transfer: open banking client, open transfers, create new transfer, enter destination IBAN, enter amount, optionally set a data & some text, confirm.
  - avip 8y ago
    So assume he's an Aussi and paste that second paragraph back.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Which is much longer than handing someone a 10 euro note.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      That would be of limited value to someone in Sweden, which uses the krona. Automatic currency conversion is one of the advantages of electronic payments over cash.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    And then you wait 3 days for the money to actually arrive. I frequently send money between EU countries and the speed of transaction is abysmal unless you want to transfer to be denominated in Euro which means that if you're sending money between two non-euro currencies you're losing money twice.

eksemplar 8y ago

That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet. It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.

bamboozled 8y ago
The best payment experience I’ve had is cash. I pay for what I need and when I leave the festival I can still use my “credits” hassle free anywhere I like.
- tedivm 8y ago
  Most of the cashless festivals return your unused "credits" pretty quickly after the festival. The real problem comes when the system breaks down- which I've seen happen at plenty of festivals. At that point if cash isn't an option then commerce simply stops- screwing both vendor and customer alike.
  - gammateam 8y ago
    > Most of the cashless festivals return your unused "credits" pretty quickly after the festival. for a $5 processing fee
    - metildaa 8y ago
      With a delay of their choosing, and a conversion factor for those of us that aren't locals. Cash has frictionless instant settlement, which is very hard to compete with as a centralized payment processor.
      - icebraining 8y ago

dingaling 8y ago

> Utopia my ass It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion. The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands the misery it requires.

yellow_postit 8y ago
I fail to see how Sweden in this case is enforcing the cashless trends through surveillance or coercion.
- edoceo 8y ago
  Maybe the near monopoly of the payment network is the coercion?
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    "either use Swish or go without food/water/travel/etc" is coercion by any definition
    - o-o- 8y ago
      Food is payed with VISA och Mastercard. Water is payed through the online banking service. Travel with VISA/Mastercard (even local buses accept credit cards). "Etc" is also payed with VISA or Mastercard. Swish is a mere conveniency for transferring money without having to log onto your online banking service. I use it once a month tops.
      - fouc 8y ago
        What happens if you don't have visa/mastercard or even a bank account?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eigenvector 8y ago

You can have a very similar experience in China. So many things are now paid for by mobile wallets such as WeChat Pay that do not support foreign accounts. It's great for locals and for the government that - in an authoritarian country - gets unfettered access to all that personalized spending data. For tourists, not so much.

joosters 8y ago
WeChat payments work fine with foreign cards...
- kenneth 8y ago
  Not really. It's very finicky at best. Activating a WeChat wallet requires a Chinese ID or a bank card, and the latter works very unreliably with any foreign cards.
- zmk_ 8y ago
  I didn't try with WeChat but I did try with AliPay. You can register your non-Chinese card, but it will not let you pay with it.
- Jommi 8y ago
  No it doesn't. Not in mainland China. Who told you this?
Markoff 8y ago
anyone can send money to your account if you hand them cash without linking card, only thing you need to create account it's phone number plus cash it's also accepted everywhere

microcolonel 8y ago

Every time people talk about a cashless society, I tell them about stuff like this both abstractly and concretely, and then I just get called a luddite. I think, unfortunately, that people will have to learn this lesson the hard way. I don't own a working smartphone, my last one (like the one before it) failed randomly in the display, and was unjustifiably difficult to RMA (no box provided, no postage, unclear details on how to mark). I don't get why people want to use these cumbersome, life-running pocket computers to control access to their money on a day-to-day basis. Here in Canada we have Interac, which is mostly everywhere, but we also have cash, and three or four credit networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and sometimes Discover). There are only really three physical modes of operation, and they all have a time and a place: Tap card 95% of the time, insert and use pin when fraud detection gets a funny feeling, and use cash when all else fails (because sometimes that means you have to call up your creditor's fraud department and let them know you're just on a roadtrip, your card hasn't been stolen). I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade. Then these people talk about making state payment processors. What happens when fraud prevention completely stops you from being able trade any money? Do they drive out to fix your problem on the spot? How on earth could they expect that to work out well?

akvadrako 8y ago
What you describe as "just fine" sounds a lot like the US, except that most transactions have enormous fees tacked on by credit card companies. Maybe in Canada you have negotiated better deals. Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
AngryAnt 8y ago
> I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade. Agreed. Though I also don't think that this was suggested anywhere in the article? If you want a mapping to your situation, your wallet could have an additional card reading "Bank of Canada" next to your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover cards.

quickthrower2 8y ago

IOUs from friends: the most resilient form of peer to peer money. There shouldn't be a rush to pay them back either unless they are hard up (or you preferred not to keep track of IOUs)

dmitriy_ko 8y ago

That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!" Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.

felipemnoa 8y ago
I've noticed this with mature technology. There comes a point where a product is perfect, no need to add anymore features. But the manufacturer still wants to continue adding new features so that they can use those as new selling points. Unfortunately the new features end up making the product worse.
- gsich 8y ago
  Smartphones today.
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    Really? I think the smart phones we have are pretty brilliant and functional.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      Noot being able to upgrade the OS is a glaring design problem, so there's still work to be done.
      - kadendogthing 8y ago
        I upgrade my OS all the time.
    - reshie 8y ago
      pretty much. nothing can be perfect for everyone. we still have room for advancement and refinement though and who knows of future breakthroughs.
    - 8y ago

isodude 8y ago

There will always be other solutions at hand, these guys are doing something about it: https://www.revolut.com https://www.revolut.com Same as swish but no need for Swedish banks nor BankID. I use Swish extensively because it works for giving kids cash remote and at the same time buying a car. If I would stumple on someone who is unable to use it it would be troublesome, but I think most swedes would break their neck to solve it anyhow in that case. If they know they have the possibility. Bank transactions between countries have always been a burden, I so hope that we will see big change in the near future.

the_clarence 8y ago
Monzo is so much better, but UK only. Revolut in the US is super expensive to top up
zmk_ 8y ago
There are fintech companies that make transfers between countries painless and cheap.

shellkr 8y ago

Ok... so you went to a festival without money? How would you have solved this without Swish? As you said there was no ATMs. Card readers are expensive and not really viable for most booths. They are also kind of a monopoly. You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too. For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.

megaremote 8y ago
They had money, most places did not accept money.

iiv 8y ago

What are your thoughts on [Vipps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipps)?

jancsika 8y ago

In other words, it became the civic responsibility of all the Swedes at the festival to ensure that foreigners-- who had no access to goods/services-- were properly fed, hydrated, and housed. Actually, this sounds like it could become a utopia given the right social strategy by the Swedes. They just need to buy beers, lunches, and festival tickets for the kinds of tourists they desire. Then ignore the loud obnoxious ones who will become hungry and irritated and end up leaving early and never coming back to Sweden. Of course the risk is that it is even more cost effective in the short term for the citizenry to become xenophobic.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

plufz 8y ago

Atleast 99% of my payments in sweden are with a totally normal credit card, the rest with swish. I only use paper money to give to homeless people, can’t remember when I bought something with bills and coins. I think it’s great, I’m more worried about tax evasion than my government knowing what I buy. I’m more interested in my speech being free than my purchases, even though I can see the problem in non-functioning democracies and dictatorships.

metildaa 8y ago
Its not just the government that has this data, but every intermediary in the non-cash payment chain. Mastercard for example sells its payment data to Google, who uses it to correlate online ad viewing with in store purchases. There is no way to opt out of this if you use Mastercard, and other intermediaries do similar shady things with your data.
- o-o- 8y ago
  Ooo nasty...
- bjelkeman-again 8y ago
  IF you can’t opt out of this in EU then it goes against GDPR (actually they must let you opt in). It would be interesting to dig deeper here.
  - king_phil 8y ago
    You actually can opt out. There is a hidden online form, I saw it once.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  but such purchase is untraceable to you as PII. neither google nor mastercard learns the linkage details to the data the other holds, they just learn that data is linked. you can opt out by not using your gmail account as an addres on your mastercard. and i believe there’s an explicit opt out as well. this measures conversion but in a privacy safe way, so it’s actually good thing. the google implementation that is. i guarantee anyone else doing this (i haven’t heard of such though) is leaking data like crazy

jakewins 8y ago

> it only accepts Swedish bank accounts I have a Swedish bank account, but I still can't use Swish because I have an American phone. It's infuriating.

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not. The only requirements are that you 1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and 2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone. If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.
- anoncake 8y ago
  > Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not. That sounds like it makes it impossible for any other phone OS to enter the Swedish market.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    Depending on your bank you might need a Swedish phone number, but you actually don't need a phone to receive money. (In reality the phone number has nothing to do with it, it's just a pre-existing ID) You need the app to be able to send money though (iOS, android or windows phone). Yes it is stupid. Unfortunately it is convenient, which is enough for 95% of the population.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    To a degree. A bigger issue would actually be BankID, which is the secure online authentication service in Sweden, used by banks, government, insurance companies, etc. But there are still, somehow, banks in Sweden which don't support one or the other. And, well, useful as Swish is, it's not actually obligatory for life in Sweden. For what it's worth, BankID and Swish also support Windows Phone… for the remainder of 2018, anyway.

Aeolun 8y ago

This has been my experience going on holiday in the Netherlands. Everything functions on cards and touch payments. I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...

jeofken 8y ago
There are many ways in which Japan is more civilized than Sweden is. Speaking as a Swedish native who lived in japan for years
- zmk_ 8y ago
  Cash is not one of those things though. Nor is the system of buying metro tickets with cash only and without an option to change language.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Metro tickets with cash only seem fine to me. What is your problem with that? I believe inside of Tokyo almost all the machines also support a variety of languages now, but there might be a scattered few with only Japanese.
    - wtdo 8y ago
      I just left Osaka yesterday. I didn't use every machine, but I never found one that didn't support English.
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    There is a big "English" option. Plus other languages as well.
    - zmk_ 8y ago
      I might have been unlucky then, but the one machine I was in contact with before I ceded all responsibility on my host was Japanese only.

jeofken 8y ago

Anglophones, please, please, excuse me for replying in my native tounge. The cashless society engages my aversion such that it is hard to say in my second language. Så jävla enig alltså! Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad. Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter. Ser fram mot min årliga skridskosemester i Norge.

ptr 8y ago
... huh? Or I guess this is sarcasm? This response hardly seems warranted, given it’s just a festival exclusively accepting swish. I never use swish except for sending money to friends, so I don’t think it’s widespread for businesses. Contact less credit card is easier than everything, including cash.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The Danish version, MobilePay, is fairly widely accepted by small and some medium businesses. Very small businesses might only accept MobilePay or cash (e.g. come and see an obscure band perform in Copenhagen, the ticket, cloakroom and bar might have these choices.) Larger places offer it as an alternative. The canteens at Copenhagen University, for example.
adobeeee 8y ago
How did you type those knots over a? I'm on windows.
- username90 8y ago
  Swedish has three extra letters in its alphabet, åäö, so Swedish keyboard layout has 'å' where american keyboards has '['. You can type them by switching to Swedish layout and pressing [.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Swedish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Swedish

sundvor 8y ago

That sounds painful. I'm a Norwegian in Australia. We've got Paypass / Paywave just about everywhere here. With Samsung Pay supporting both, I don't bring my wallet out most days. I'm sure a lot of the readers support Apple Pay as well. Of course we can still use cash if we want to, but tapping is just easy these days.

caperfee 8y ago

Australian who travelled through Sweden and Norway in September of this year for two weeks. I just used contactless payments on my credit card the entire time and never had any issues. To me it seems more like Swish-specific issues rather than cashless in general? However, if some people are disadvantaged by different cashless options then that is a definite issue.

gigatexal 8y ago

The locked down nature of Swish and it’s monopoly status is worrisome. I was thinking there was just a ton of NFC readable payment devices that could accept any form of contactless payment like Apple Pay or Alipay or Google Pay etc... this is definitely not a good sign. Regarding the article saying that if central banks become irrelevant due to cash going fully out of favor: that’s such BS. Deposits would just become credits from central banks to lending banks private or not so that customers could get credit and pay for goods digitally. No exchange of paper money is ever needed. There’s already orders of magnitude more money in asset valuations than there is paper money to back them in the world economy why should we hold back because we are so fixated on paper currency. With the advent of token based contactless payment services like how Apple Pay works the future is secure payments without cash and those burndensome coins I have to handle while getting Che he after a purchase. Lastly, if things go digital fully it could mean that securing and auditing and processing could be even cheaper and could allow for entrants that can still profit on transaction processing but at much lower rates than the current incumbents charge retailers. It’s the opposite here in Germany. Some places have support for contactless payment, take credit cards, etc., but most even if they do prefer you to pay with cash as it’s cheaper for them. There’s also this German only banking alliance where they have put forth a EC card that has very low to no fees for participating entities as the funding and processing is all done in Germany amongst the member financial institutions. But my N26 account doesn’t offer one so I’m out of luck there. The thing is the incumbents both state and private want to keep the status quo alive: the Mastercards of the world want to keep fees high and central banks want to keep control of interest rates by influencing the supply of currency in the market. I think both can still be done without cash and it leaves the possibility that with time and good legislation and technological improvement and some enterprising people there might become solutions that take the friction of paying for and make the settling accounts and such cheaper for all parties involved.

jnurmine 8y ago
Why is Swish worrying you? It is basically a payment overlay on top of whatever technology runs in the mobile devices. If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working. It is not tied to a US or Chinese megacorporation, so there is no risk of geopolitically-influenced political decisions ruining the show, like those threatening SWIFT, for example. Swish works just fine inside Sweden, for Swedes. All countries should have the equivalent of Swish and then make them interoperate if sending money to another country. I can think of one thing why Swish and "e-krona" is not a good idea: if the lights go out temporarily, it will be difficult to pay for something (although figuring this out is a technical problem -- the payments could be queued in the terminals or something). If the lights go out forever and we enter the quiet apocalypse, then there is very little use for cash either, aside from use as tinder or drying shoes, and plastic notes will not work for those either.