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European Payments Initiative (EPI)
- vmoore 5y ago> EPI will bring true value for both retail payments and payments between individuals “peer-to-peer” How does something that is highly traceable bring 'value' and is preferred over plain cash?
- krastanov 5y agoThere are plenty of situations where I would prefer this over cash if I trust the government to have my interests in mind (something true of some Europeans). Not carrying easily stolen cash, having it tracked so you can dispute things in court, just being more convenient the way NFC payments are. And the government gets to clamp down (or better, simply tax) on dark and grey markets. But then I also want to have a stash of cash "just in case" and be able to buy substances and tools that might be illegal... So YMMV. I guess, ideologically, I prefer to lobby the government to make something legal, not to ensure there are loopholes so that I can get away with illegal stuff I want to do. But I understand that is not always possible.
- abricot 5y agoIn Denmark we have an app called mobilepay. Almost everyone trading peer to peer in e.x. Facebook marketplace and in local and in flea markets prefer using it over cash, especially when sending parcels, as you have something to go by if someone scams you. Also pretty much no one has cash any more.
- teekert 5y agoIn the Netherlands we can send each other payment request via iDeal, they are also instant and involve sharing a link (over chat or whatever) you tap it and pay with your own banking app. Very handy, but sadly only in the Netherlands, consequently it is the only thing I miss from my banking app (N26) and iDeal requires me to keep a Dutch bank around.
- ksec 5y ago>in e.x. Facebook marketplace Um... Does it require 30%+ if it was on iOS?
- abricot 5y agoI'm not sure what you're asking. Facebook Marketplace just list items, payment does not happen through it.
- andai 5y agoI'd say the main value over cash is that cash will stop existing soon. I tried to deposit cash at my bank in the Netherlands a few weeks ago and they refused to accept it, telling me I had to use a new inter-bank ATM system for deposits ("to make things easier for everybody"). I spent a week traveling to local towns trying to find an ATM that wasn't out of service, and which took deposits.
- Reason077 5y ago> ”I tried to deposit cash at my bank in the Netherlands a few weeks ago and they refused to accept it” I’m surprised that it’s legal for a bank to refuse a cash deposit.
- andylynch 5y agoIt's not that surprising - only a couple of the banks around where I work still have traditional counters, though the suburban braches do.
- bobthepanda 5y agoThat sounds like a good reason to mandate that bank branches must accept cash.
- ksec 5y ago>I'd say the main value over cash is that cash will stop existing soon The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago"How does something that is highly traceable bring 'value'" Everyone claims they want untraceable money untill they get screwed over by a merchant or employer, then having traceability makes it much easier to go after the crooks. I, for one, would rather not use anonymous untraceable crypto if i am about to pay for a house
- dtech 5y agoIn my country - and most I suspect - you have to make your house payment to a notary, about as far away from anonymous untraceable as you can get. I think that's good.
- lottin 5y agoExactly. Untraceable money is incompatible with proof of payment, which means it's unusable for commercial transactions.
- pimterry 5y agoI've only just heard of this, but it looks like it's an attempt by lots of big European banks to beat Mastercard & Visa at their own game! It says they're building on EU Instant Payments, which has been standard for a while, and for supported banks (a good percentage now, and presumably all 30 banks listed here) means bank-to-bank euro transfers are free & take less than 10 seconds, 24/7. See https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_payments/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa.... Sounds like they're planning to produce card infrastructure on top of that, so with an EPI-supporting merchant and an EPI consumer card, a card transaction is implemented directly as an instant bank transfer, with no traditional credit card companies involved. Oh and they're proposing to support p2p in the same way too. I guess that's more like competing with Revolut et al, since you can't really sign up to process Visa/Mastercard as an individual today anyway. Does anybody know any more background on this? I have no idea about the seriousness of the proposal or anything at all, but it sounds like a big deal if they can pull that off.
- bobthepanda 5y agoWhat I’m curious about is, how does credit card fraud get handled in the EU? At least in the US that kind of fraud is the bank’s problem, which is why I prefer using credit over debit.
- athenot 5y agoIn EU, in many cases you can go below zero in your checking account. So there's some buffer in case things go wrong.
- pimterry 5y agoIt's reduced as a problem I think, and in general credit cards are certainly far less popular than in the US. I suspect fraud is less of an issue because accepting signatures for card purchases hasn't been common for at least a decade (you need the PIN for all spending above the contactless limit - about 30 euros in most countries) and PSD2 (mandatory for transactions since 2020) requires 2FA authentication for most online transactions too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_customer_authentication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_customer_authentication. That means copying or stealing a debit card, or capturing entered online card details by themselves won't get you very far in the EU, which removes a lot of classic fraud. In the remaining cases though, I have no idea!
- ginko 5y agoWhy not just use Vipps[1] for instance? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipps
- sam_lowry_ 5y agoIt's just a Norvegian thing. We have a similar app here in Belgium. I guess these banks just want a pan-European standard of p2p payment supplant national systems.
- Ciantic 5y agoIt makes sense to have single standard. Denmark and Finland use yet another called MobilePay. So there clearly is cottage industry of these by the banks themselves.
- hocuspocus 5y agoEventually we should see some convergence and interoperability between these systems: https://empsa.org https://empsa.org But EPI solves a different issue.
- mstade 5y agoAnd in Sweden there's Swish. The writing is on the wall, if it's not this initiative there'll be another I'm sure, sooner or later.
- piaste 5y agoItaly has Satispay which has pretty good user penetration, at least among the younger crowd. Satispay's killer feature is that it's aimed heavily at paying bar and restaurant checks, which is more common than sending money between acquaintances. So if you share your location with your app, and the restaurant you're in is a Satispay merchant, it will show up automatically as a receiver without the need to scan codes or anything. I'm sure other countries' payment apps have their own neat little features that others don't. Best case scenario would be for a common infrastructure to be adopted by all of them, and then they can interoperate and compete on feature sets, or even merge.
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoThis sounds very similar to India's UPI. UPI has been a great convenience for people since its introduction and it has a very good penetration. https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-overview https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-overview
- payme 5y agoWhile UPI is completely online, EPI looks like it's working on a card based solution (which makes it a competitor to visa & mc)
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoIn a sense it was created to limit the influence of duopoly card processors on Indian Internet payment systems and were successful in it; So UPI is indeed a competitor to VISA and MASTERCARD.
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoRupay is from the same corp as UPI
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- ratherlongname 5y agoYeah, UPI is an absolute godsend. EPI looks heavily inspired by UPI. Somewhere I read even USA is looking into a similar system.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoYes it's indeed modeled after UPI it shows how forward thinking it was and great execution as well. My qualms with it are its is association with mobile number as identity and lack of open-source apps both a limiting factor when it comes to preventing oligopolies or monopolies from influencing control over it.
- pdpi 5y agoA European initiative intent on delivering a "pan-European payment solution", but out of 31 founding banks, 16 are Spanish, 7 French, and 3 German. Italy, Finland, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands each have a single participating bank, and no other country is represented. Not sure what to make of that, but interesting nonetheless.
- mojuba 5y agoHard to draw conclusions without knowing the sizes of those banks. For example the 16 Spanish participating banks might be smaller or equivalent to the few French and German ones (likely true actually).
- bildung 5y agoCan only speak for Germany, but those 3 are certainly huge. Probably 2/3 of all bank accounts in Germany.
- pdpi 5y agoThe bigger Spanish banks are surprisingly large. Going by Wikipedia[0], there's three Spanish banks in the top 20 largest in Europe, and only one German bank. And Santander is a chunk bigger than Deutsche at that. In fact, when measured by revenue, Santander is about as big as BNP. Sizes aside, the fact that Spain got this many banks on board this project is in and of itself pretty noteworthy. The fact that there are so few participating countries is also pretty interesting. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_in_Europe#Largest_banks_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_in_Europe#Larges...
- floitsch 5y agoNote that "nets" is on the list. They represent 250 banks across Europe (according to their web-page): https://www.nets.eu/who-we-are https://www.nets.eu/who-we-are For example, Danske Bank (the biggest Danish bank) uses them.
- pdpi 5y agoNets doesn't "represent" banks, they provide them with services. In this particular case, they're there representing themselves. If you're going to build a competitor to Visa/MasterCard, you need banks on board, but also somebody specialised in rolling out the infrastructure.
- dnpp123 5y agoI don't know about America, but when comparing payment infrastructure in Europe vs. Asia, I'm always amazed at how bad the EU is. Hoping that this will work but I highly doubt it - most European banks were created a very long time ago and like all legacy systems it's really hard to change their habit. Even if I'm using this "immediate payment system", I'm pretty sure my local bank will still delay my payment by a few days "because they are used to do it that way".
- cblconfederate 5y agowell it seems SEPA didnt take too long to implement, and frankly most banks have gotten used to frequent changes in EU banks regulation so, if this is real, it might not take too long
- hestefisk 5y agoBanks by EU law have to comply with SEPA / instant payments. Payments in Europe is very good compared to US and in most cases also better than Asia. After all, Europe invented open banking and PSD2. Asia is very fragmented. Countries like China, HK and Singapore are very good on instant payments, in particular because card payments have very high MDR and fees. Other countries like Indonesia and Philippines are just now starting to implement fast payments and national clearing infrastructure. And, unlike Europe, cross-border payments are still highly fragmented and expensive.
- rozab 5y ago
- hestefisk 5y agoWill this be based on ISO 20022? If all EU member state national clearing and settlement switches speak this format, it should be fairly easy to integrate across countries as well. Singapore and Thailand have recently introduced a similar 24/7 bridge between their national clearing / settlement systems (PayNow to PromptPay) and it works really well. You can basically send money to any Thai / Singaporean phone number in real time.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- streamofdigits 5y agoBanks need to do something to fend off the likes of Paypal, Square and Adyen who seem to be eating their lunch...
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- hocuspocus 5y agoBanks are getting the interchange doing very little work compared to the payment processor. Some banks are operating their own processor, but I really doubt the typical bank is interested in that. EPI is all about doing away with Visa and Mastercard, while providing interoperability across Europe, "simply" leveraging infrastructure that already exists.
- anonymousDan 5y agoI wonder if some of the motivation behind this is political (e.g. to avoid becoming dependent on US based payments infrastructure that can block transactions to certain countries in order to comply with US sanctions even when EU countries don't agree)?
- jakub_g 5y agoEU being dependent on duopoly of American companies for online payments has been bothering me more and more in recent years. Good to see something happening in the subject. In Poland, there's BLIK which is a pretty cool thing: a system developed by all major Polish banks, you only need an Android/iOS app of your bank, which generates a 6-digit token valid for 120s, then you use it on payment processor website, or to withdraw money at most ATMs in Poland. Then you get an in-app push notif to confirm the transaction fee and recipient. Are there any similar solutions anywhere where you can withdraw money without physical debit/credit card? (I'm surprised BTW I never saw an ATM compliant with Google Pay/Apple Pay, they all want plastic)
- darkhorn 5y agoWhat I've seen so far and what I've heared from Turks in Europe is that European banks are like 10 years behind Turkish banks in terms of services. In Turkey you can send money to another bank account instantly even on weekend nights, open USD, EUR, gold etc accounts anytime, opend lots of different types of accounts, send money easly by providing receiving end's phone number, citizenship number, email, IBAN, Swift etc, open virtual credit card that you can refill and empty at any time, apply credit card, pay bills automatically, lits of stock buying options, login to your egovernment account using your bank account, notifications when you receive money, apply for credit card online, you can cash out from ATM without clicking buttons but scanning barcode from your bank app, when you call your bank they use 2FA using your voice, from online account you can change your repayment options for the credit cart like repay in 3 months (hire-purchase?) this spending, lots of 2FA options like SMS or app code or flash mobile message, Troy credit card, if you keep your mobile phone number same but change your SIM card even if you don't change your mobile operator your online account is paused and you need to call them and reidentify yourself to login again, you cannot obtain lots of credit from different banks becouse every bank can see your debts, you can pay insurance online, there some kind of special bank operations when you buy or sell car, and many more that I didn't bother checking. Did I mention APIs for individual users?
- mike939 5y agoI got my programmed and blanked ATM card to withdraw the maximum of $ 5,000 daily for a maximum of 30 days via (williamscothackers@gmail.com). I am so happy about this because I got mine last week and I have used it to get $ 150,000. William Scot Hackers is giving out the card just to help the poor and needy though it is illegal but it is something nice. He also give loans at 3%. get yours from William Scot Hackers today! Just send an email to (williamscothackers@gmail.com). whatsapp no; +1 (347) 593-8976
- mike939 5y agoI got my programmed and blanked ATM card to withdraw the maximum of $ 5,000 daily for a maximum of 30 days via (williamscothackers@gmail.com). I am so happy about this because I got mine last week and I have used it to get $ 150,000. William Scot Hackers is giving out the card just to help the poor and needy though it is illegal but it is something nice. He also give loans at 3%. get yours from William Scot Hackers today! Just send an email to (williamscothackers@gmail.com). whatsapp no; +1 (347) 593-8976..
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoHmmm. Based in Brussels. Why do I have to think of Nostradamus and The Mark of the Beast now? ;-> Besides that, I don't really understand what it improves? I have that already. Be it via browser from desktop, via phone(Landline!(by talking to a human!)), or some crappy app on some f---ing gadget: SEPA number, amount of money, some text, optional time and date(for not being instant), bzzzzt, there! (Since about 2 years?)
- nicolinox 5y agoRevolut is already working in the real time payment space for consumers and B2B, cross-country and cross-currency (mobile for consumers and B2B APIs for businesses) and it's active in EU, USA and Asia (SG, JP, AU) and expanding its footprint.