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One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials w
by 202508042147 9mo ago
One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
- mpol 9mo agoWero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.
- 202508042147 9mo ago+1 for Wero! Unsure where I can see their timeline.
- pronik 9mo agoAnd within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoNo it's not. Wero is another name for iDEAL, it has been pushed by Dutch, but it is an engineering fiasco. There is no way Poland would adopt it. Blik is just on another level price- and feature-wise.
- Cwizard 9mo agoI am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco? Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoI see one engineering job ad https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/6909459-senior-full-stack-engineer-digital-identity-eudi-wallet-eidas2-remote-first https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/6909459-senior-full-stack... if we can call EU Digital Wallet speculation "engineering". But you just answered your own question. Wero is a money extraction business that secured European Commission support. There is no engineering nor payment system to it.
- woodpanel 9mo agowhat ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoOld Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website. I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium. In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
- woodpanel 9mo agoSounds more like you have some axe to grind https://epicompany.eu/members https://epicompany.eu/members
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoOthers joined quite recently, indeed. Wikipedia gives an overview by year. As for the axe, I have no personal interest.
- seec 9mo agoI have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free. It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.
- hermanzegerman 9mo agoThe big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff
- FireInsight 9mo agoI recently heard of Wero and it seemed promising. What makes Blik so much better in your opinion?
- _bent 9mo agoWero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro. Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me! And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
- brugidou 9mo agoFrance has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.
- fainpul 9mo agoI wish GNU Taler would become more concrete. https://www.taler.net https://www.taler.net
- F3nd0 9mo agoIt seems like Taler has been coming along great and the biggest things it’s missing are more interest and adoption. There has been some first ‘real-world’ use recently, but it’s still far from becoming widespread, which would be a dream come true.
- s_dev 9mo agohttps://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht... The digital Euro has not been implemented yet. Some analysts are skeptical but this is the EUs answer for Visa/Mastercard.
- BlackFly 9mo agoIt merged with Mastercard almost two decades back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29
- 0xDEAFBEAD 9mo agoEh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too. Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ceo-is-grilled-by-a-senators-about-high-cost-of-ozempic https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
- lava_pidgeon 9mo agoWhile Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 9mo agoThis website appears to indicate that Visa/Mastercard fees are about 6x as high in the US vs EU: https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-interchange-fees-by-country/129627 https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-interchange-fees-by-co... The EU had such a good deal with the US. But they couldn't resist making fun of us. They made fun of us for our military spending while we deterred Russia. They made fun of us for our health spending while we subsidized their drug development costs. They made fun of our long work hours, while demanding Ukraine contributions based on our high GDP (which is high in part because we work long hours). They talk so much about America's soft power in Europe, without realizing that Europe's soft power in America is practically all gone at this point.
- aucisson_masque 9mo agoYou are paying more for everything because your country is extremely anti social, people alone have no leverage to negotiate prices with visa, pharmaceutics and so on. Trump is only pushing that « free for all » policy even more, I wouldn’t expect to see things improve for you. Instead of fixing your country and making the rich accountable, you’re being manipulated to look elsewhere. Anyway, I believe that the eu cutting ties with the USA is the best thing that could happen to us and I’m glad you’re satisfied. We should have spent much more on military and put an end to the USA military supremacy across the world a long time ago.
- hermanzegerman 9mo agoThe big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well. If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks) Wero is coming and it should work across Europe
- hyperman1 9mo agoIn Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.