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For US readers - in my country in europe I'd say that 95% of people have only debit card, not credit card. it's very not common to have a credit card here. Card

For US readers - in my country in europe I'd say that 95% of people have only debit card, not credit card. it's very not common to have a credit card here. Card payments are extremely common, but everyone uses debit card.

avianlyric 24d ago
The EU caps all card interchange fees at 0.3% for credit cards and 0.2% for debit, which is an order of magnitude lower than some of the fees in the US. That’s why you don’t see the same kinds of credit card deals in the EU compared to the US.
- adrian_b 24d ago
  I think that there was a recent HN thread that linked to an article which argued that the credit card system of USA has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich, and the estimated amount of the money transferred in this way was huge. The EU limits for card fees prevent this in Europe, which is very good.
  - derektank 24d ago
    Wouldn’t it be simpler for European countries to simply raise the VAT and redistribute the proceeds to poor people, rather than regulate the interchange fees if the concern is inequality
    - post-it 24d ago
      Your solution sounds significantly more complicated actually.
      - derektank 24d ago
        In what way? There are many sources of inequality. Trying to play whack a mole with each one seems much more laborious than simply deciding how much inequality you want in society, and then setting it with the tax code
        opinion-is-bad 24d ago
        Inequality isn’t as simple as pulling one tax lever, and not all levers are equally effective at all points of the pull. Dead-weight loss is an important concept when designing tax policies, otherwise why not simply eliminate ALL taxes in place of an expanded VAT or income tax or corporate tax or whatever.
    - klrefg 24d ago
      So.. you’d have both higher taxes and higher interchange fees? What’s the appeal of that?
    - dns_snek 24d ago
      VAT is a regressive consumption tax. Raising VAT, hurting poor people the most, skimming a bit off the top and then "redistributing" it back to them would make no sense. Do you mean a higher corporate tax paid by companies like VISA and Mastercard? Either way, the solution is already on the horizon: Digital Euro.
  - mayli 24d ago
    Yep, pretty much the credit card tax. One of the most ugly things.
  - shimman 24d ago
    Do you have a link? Highly interested in that thread. Do you know if people discussed how state solutions faired? I'm assuming something like Pix from the Brazilian Central Bank does an even better job at prevention while providing a public service.
    - crossroadsguy 24d ago
      https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/how-credit-card-rewards-became-multibillion-dollar-wealth-transfer https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/how-credit-car... probably this Pix, UPI, and a few more
      - gpvos 24d ago
        That would be this post of 16 days ago, 453 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201
  - canjobear 24d ago
    A refutation of that view: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-rewards-interchange/ https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-r...
    - SkiFire13 24d ago
      I reached the midpoint of the podcast without seeing a proper argument against this then I gave up. It tries to argue that higher reward rates are necessary to attrach customers that pay a lot (for credit card companies) and that lower income people are generally subsidized by taxes (obvious but unrelated), but at no point (until where I read) it seems to address the issue of merchants having to generally increase prices due to these cards.
      - johnnyanmac 24d ago
        > lower income people are generally subsidized by taxes Pretty flimsy argument to begin with. Because the rich then argue to lower their taxes and/or simply not pay them and the whole system falls apart. Not to mention that lower income people paying more to keep afloat debt than taxes (which at worst is a much better interest deal for an installment plan) is a much worse model for society.
    - adrian_b 24d ago
      Looking now at that, it does a poor job of making a true refutation. What that article explains, is that the system of credit card fees and rewards that is used in USA is extraordinarily complicated, variable and obfuscated in comparison with other countries, so it is extremely difficult to discover who gains most and who loses most. So the conclusion is more like "there is insufficient evidence because we cannot access all the required financial information" for the claims of the other article and the refutation itself presents no evidence that the claims of wealth redistribution are incorrect.
  - skybrian 24d ago
    Assuming they pay their credit card bill themselves, it's effectively a volume discount for big spenders (though that "volume" goes to multiple vendors). The argument that the money "comes from" other customers is sort of like claiming that when you "save money" by buying things on sale, the money comes from other customers who paid full price. Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money. Similarly, the "whales" in a casino get lots of "free" benefits, but only because they're losing a lot of money gambling. They paid for them. Contrast with frequent-flier miles where businesses pay for plane tickets but the points go to individuals. That's pretty clearly siphoning off business expenses.
    - 8note 24d ago
      ok, but what about for equivalent spenders? one cash, one credit? the credit payer is clearly paying less, with the difference paid by increased prices overall. That is the cash purchaser paying the credit one
      - CaptainNegative 24d ago
        That is the cash purchaser paying the retailer more than they need to. There's no conservation law stating that store revenue is a constant and missed revenue from one customer must be made up for by another, nor that every additional operating cost must be directly pushed onto customers. Similarly, we do not say that October shoppers transfer wealth to Black Friday shoppers, even though the only tangible difference from your scenario is an irrelevant temporal one.
    - johnnyanmac 24d ago
      The model is inverted here, though. The whales essentially get the big discounts at the expense of those who go into debt for one reason or another. That's why there's an argument of wealth transfer up. The "biggest spenders" will end up paying little or no interest
    - adrian_b 24d ago
      > Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money. You are spending money, but you are spending far less money than the poor spend when paying for exactly the same products or services. If I want to buy a few server CPUs or a few server computers or a few "datacenter" GPUs, I have to pay at least 2 or 3 times more than billionaires pay for them. The same if I want to buy any other kinds of components that can be used to build things, e.g. power MOSFET transistors. There is no "economy of scale" here, because those products are already fabricated in the high volumes that reduce their production costs. For shipping, the costs are typically the same, regardless if the recipient is a big company or a small company or an individual, so they do not justify the price differences. Even when the handling and shipping costs were bigger for small quantities, a small business or an individual could just pay the difference in handling and shipping prices, but that does not happen in reality, when the discounts given to the rich are many times higher than the shipping costs. This policy of huge discounts is one of the main causes why all the markets end up in being dominated by monopolies or quasi-monopolies, because it is impossible for new entrants to compete with the incumbents, who pay much less than them for everything. Thus the biggest companies end up selling mostly between themselves, excluding any others.
  - rootusrootus 24d ago
    > has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich Are you saying it is intentional? Is it not more simply explained as simple greed by two companies colluding to keep competitors out of their market?
    - johnnyanmac 24d ago
      It may be a partial factor. Similar to how CC companies have a logical reason to reject high charge chargeback items , but may also be ideologically driven to push certain agendas as well.
    - pocksuppet 24d ago
      But simple corporate greed is the same thing as taking money fro the poor and giving it to the rich?
- bux93 24d ago
  Note that the caps were introduced because the EU already had widespread use of bank cards, but local schemes were being replaced with Mastercard/Visa debit - the caps were brought in to prevent the duopoly from profiteering. (Apple/Google pay also use Mastercard/Visa virtual cards in the EU.) Before the cap, credit cards had way higher fees and there were some reward cards, which led to merchants simply not accepting Mastercard/Visa. Local schemes included Mastercard-owned Maestro (used in Germany, The Netherlands and for some reason Brazil) but also local schemes like Belgium's Bancontact/MrCash. It's unfortunate some of those schemes didn't just merge and started competing in foreign countries as well.
  - _bernd 24d ago
    At least in Germany as far as I'm aware all banking cards are in fact "simple" visa cards who uses "V-pay", since 2012/2014? Personally I "like" or prefer V-pay because it made payment in the EU more easily for me without the need of a credit card even 8 years ago. Since the pandemic, I only pay for a (real) credit card (with daily billing) because some goods or services can only be paid with a "real" card, like more expensive cars at a car renting company or sometimes hotel rooms and the like. In general I try to pay with cash so nobody needs to pay extra fees. But more and more smaller businesses prefer electronic payments. Then I use the banking card with V-pay and to state it again, the real visa card is only used when no other options are available.
    - KellyCriterion 24d ago
      > o nobody needs to pay extra fees Processing cash is by far >not free<! In fact, it costs a lot of money due to all the things involved (counting/collection/recycling etc). Anf it inwolves additional risks for the handling party.
      - yayachiken 24d ago
        People often say that but does the cost for handling cash really scale (even approximately) proportionally with the number of transactions or revenue? Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all? If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.
- alibarber 24d ago
  Note that these are interchange fees charged by the networks. Unless you're operating at massive scale, merchant account suppliers still charge the shop whatever they want. The shop is paying far more than 0.2 / 0.3%. 2.5% for credit and 25c fixed for debit is the usual ballpark.
  - erincandescent 24d ago
    The rates you're quoting are far higher than you get without negotiation from various providers these days . SumUp, as one random example, quote a flat 1.39% _on their free plan_.
danvayn 24d ago
Yes, it’s because Americans have to build credit or otherwise optimize their credit score to finance large purchases. In most other countries there either isn’t a credit score concept or your credit score does not have to be built up over a long period to be effective like it does here. It doesn’t help that a third of Americans dont really have savings either; credit helps them to work around this
- smelendez 24d ago
  I use credit for the purchase protection (I believe many debit cards have this as well but it’s easier when you haven’t yet paid the charge, and seems better enshrined in law for credit), for the rewards (which including signup bonuses can be huge), for the float period, and for security — if somebody fraudulently uses a credit card versus a debit card, there’s no actual money missing while the situation gets resolved.
  - enaaem 24d ago
    Every time I had issues with fraud it was with a cc. The fraud protection is just bandage for an inherently unsafe system that you are paying for yourself. That being said, I do get that for US individuals it is completely rational to use cc's. I would do that too. If you are paying 3% Visa/MC tax anyway, then you might as well use their perks.
    - Shog9 24d ago
      What smelendez is alluding to is the matter of who is liable while fraud is being resolved. In the US, a charge on your bank card results in at least a hold on your bank account - money you can't spend on anything else until the hold is lifted. Worst-case, there can be significant fees associated with this (overdraft, declined payments, etc.). For most of us, that's a much bigger problem than a debt we may or may not end up paying interest on. From personal experience, getting a credit card company to quickly resolve fraud cases is also much easier than getting a bank to do the same, even when it's ultimately the same institution.
- 24d ago
klrefg 24d ago
How do any of they rent cars when they travel? I think that still requires a credit pretty much anywhere in Europe. I’s bet the proportion is way higher than 5% even if the overwhelming majority use their credit cards the same was as debit.
- franga2000 24d ago
  The only time I "needed" a credit card is when I tried to sign up for some US company's service. It rejected my debit card because it wanted credit, so I just took my business elsewhere. Other than that, I've rented cars, rented other things with a "X will be charged to your card if you return it late", unattended gas stations... all the usual places you'd think need a credit card. It's fine. We do have a "negative limit" that banks often give you, which means you can go into the red and pay it back later, but that has nothing to do with the card, it works even for normal bank transactions.
  - brnt 24d ago
    I had a car rental in Oslo that only allowed debit cards if you took out their full insurance. I was already insured, we rented though some sort of front, but they only allowed that on a credit credit card.
- LelouBil 24d ago
  You pay a deposit with your debit card and get it refunded afterwards ?
- _bernd 24d ago
  IIRC then normal bank cards and debit cards can be charged with these future payments up to 500 Eur. So for small and normal cars this works. I too have a real credit card to be able to rent for instance "bigger" cars like even an Audi A6. Most often hotels also block 500 Eur, or they state upfront that you need a proper/real credit card and not just a debit card. That's for me the only reason I have VISA and use it like 3 or 4 times a year...
- AnAfrican 24d ago
LelouBil 24d ago
I don't know for other European countries, but in France a lot of people call them "Cartes de crédit" AKA Credit cards, even though, like you said, they are actually debit cards for 95% of people, so this adds to the confusion
- sersi 24d ago
  Yup and even when they are credit cards, "cartes à débit différé", they behave more like automated charge cards. The amount is automatically taken out of your account at the end of the month, you are supposed to pay in full and don't have the option of making minimum payments. So the poor banks cannot make nearly as much money with interest rates and instead are forced to have relatively high account maintenance fees (that are published and much more transparent to the customer). That said as a French person with a ssn living in Asia, I don't have a french credit card because it's so expensive and foreign conversion fees are very high, whereas I use a us card because the currency conversion rate is very close to the market rate and it costs a lot less to maintain the account.
gnfargbl 24d ago
This is not a universal, however. In the UK, two-thirds of adults have a credit card.
TacticalCoder 24d ago
> For US readers - in my country in Europe I'd say that 95% of people have only debit card, not credit card. it's very not common to have a credit card here. In the countries I've been to in the EU (Belgium, France, Spain, Luxembourg), when they give you cards they give you typically both a debit and a credit card. It's extremely common to have both. I've got debit cards, a pre-paid debit card (which I top up when I plan to spend) and credit cards. And getting up to 2% cashback in the EU (even if the fees vendors can add in the EU are maximum 0.3) is not that hard. It's very common to pay for mostly everything with a debit card and then use a credit card to, say, book a plane or vacations or to open a tab when you check-in at some hotel. Heck, I don't even know if you can book a plane with a debit card!? (and anyway then you probably don't get the cancellation insurance etc. that you typically automatically get with a credit card).
fsuts 24d ago
Uk law gives significantly more protection on credit card purchases than debit card. As it’s treated as a finance product so the lender is has responsibilities.
skrtskrt 20d ago
In the US there are very strong fraud protections for credit cards, but a debit card is just unfettered access to your bank account. For safety reasons I never use a debit card for anything but an ATM.
- karlosvomacka 18d ago
  you can just do a chargeback in case of fraudulent transaction.
  - skrtskrt 18d ago
    That is not true for debit cards in the US, which is my point.

avianlyric 24d ago

The EU caps all card interchange fees at 0.3% for credit cards and 0.2% for debit, which is an order of magnitude lower than some of the fees in the US. That’s why you don’t see the same kinds of credit card deals in the EU compared to the US.

adrian_b 24d ago
I think that there was a recent HN thread that linked to an article which argued that the credit card system of USA has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich, and the estimated amount of the money transferred in this way was huge. The EU limits for card fees prevent this in Europe, which is very good.
- derektank 24d ago
  Wouldn’t it be simpler for European countries to simply raise the VAT and redistribute the proceeds to poor people, rather than regulate the interchange fees if the concern is inequality
  - post-it 24d ago
    Your solution sounds significantly more complicated actually.
    - derektank 24d ago
      In what way? There are many sources of inequality. Trying to play whack a mole with each one seems much more laborious than simply deciding how much inequality you want in society, and then setting it with the tax code
      - opinion-is-bad 24d ago
        Inequality isn’t as simple as pulling one tax lever, and not all levers are equally effective at all points of the pull. Dead-weight loss is an important concept when designing tax policies, otherwise why not simply eliminate ALL taxes in place of an expanded VAT or income tax or corporate tax or whatever.
  - klrefg 24d ago
    So.. you’d have both higher taxes and higher interchange fees? What’s the appeal of that?
  - dns_snek 24d ago
    VAT is a regressive consumption tax. Raising VAT, hurting poor people the most, skimming a bit off the top and then "redistributing" it back to them would make no sense. Do you mean a higher corporate tax paid by companies like VISA and Mastercard? Either way, the solution is already on the horizon: Digital Euro.
- mayli 24d ago
  Yep, pretty much the credit card tax. One of the most ugly things.
- shimman 24d ago
  Do you have a link? Highly interested in that thread. Do you know if people discussed how state solutions faired? I'm assuming something like Pix from the Brazilian Central Bank does an even better job at prevention while providing a public service.
  - crossroadsguy 24d ago
    https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/how-credit-card-rewards-became-multibillion-dollar-wealth-transfer https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/how-credit-car... probably this Pix, UPI, and a few more
    - gpvos 24d ago
      That would be this post of 16 days ago, 453 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201
- canjobear 24d ago
  A refutation of that view: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-rewards-interchange/ https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-r...
  - SkiFire13 24d ago
    I reached the midpoint of the podcast without seeing a proper argument against this then I gave up. It tries to argue that higher reward rates are necessary to attrach customers that pay a lot (for credit card companies) and that lower income people are generally subsidized by taxes (obvious but unrelated), but at no point (until where I read) it seems to address the issue of merchants having to generally increase prices due to these cards.
    - johnnyanmac 24d ago
      > lower income people are generally subsidized by taxes Pretty flimsy argument to begin with. Because the rich then argue to lower their taxes and/or simply not pay them and the whole system falls apart. Not to mention that lower income people paying more to keep afloat debt than taxes (which at worst is a much better interest deal for an installment plan) is a much worse model for society.
  - adrian_b 24d ago
    Looking now at that, it does a poor job of making a true refutation. What that article explains, is that the system of credit card fees and rewards that is used in USA is extraordinarily complicated, variable and obfuscated in comparison with other countries, so it is extremely difficult to discover who gains most and who loses most. So the conclusion is more like "there is insufficient evidence because we cannot access all the required financial information" for the claims of the other article and the refutation itself presents no evidence that the claims of wealth redistribution are incorrect.
- skybrian 24d ago
  Assuming they pay their credit card bill themselves, it's effectively a volume discount for big spenders (though that "volume" goes to multiple vendors). The argument that the money "comes from" other customers is sort of like claiming that when you "save money" by buying things on sale, the money comes from other customers who paid full price. Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money. Similarly, the "whales" in a casino get lots of "free" benefits, but only because they're losing a lot of money gambling. They paid for them. Contrast with frequent-flier miles where businesses pay for plane tickets but the points go to individuals. That's pretty clearly siphoning off business expenses.
  - 8note 24d ago
    ok, but what about for equivalent spenders? one cash, one credit? the credit payer is clearly paying less, with the difference paid by increased prices overall. That is the cash purchaser paying the credit one
    - CaptainNegative 24d ago
      That is the cash purchaser paying the retailer more than they need to. There's no conservation law stating that store revenue is a constant and missed revenue from one customer must be made up for by another, nor that every additional operating cost must be directly pushed onto customers. Similarly, we do not say that October shoppers transfer wealth to Black Friday shoppers, even though the only tangible difference from your scenario is an irrelevant temporal one.
  - johnnyanmac 24d ago
    The model is inverted here, though. The whales essentially get the big discounts at the expense of those who go into debt for one reason or another. That's why there's an argument of wealth transfer up. The "biggest spenders" will end up paying little or no interest
  - adrian_b 24d ago
    > Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money. You are spending money, but you are spending far less money than the poor spend when paying for exactly the same products or services. If I want to buy a few server CPUs or a few server computers or a few "datacenter" GPUs, I have to pay at least 2 or 3 times more than billionaires pay for them. The same if I want to buy any other kinds of components that can be used to build things, e.g. power MOSFET transistors. There is no "economy of scale" here, because those products are already fabricated in the high volumes that reduce their production costs. For shipping, the costs are typically the same, regardless if the recipient is a big company or a small company or an individual, so they do not justify the price differences. Even when the handling and shipping costs were bigger for small quantities, a small business or an individual could just pay the difference in handling and shipping prices, but that does not happen in reality, when the discounts given to the rich are many times higher than the shipping costs. This policy of huge discounts is one of the main causes why all the markets end up in being dominated by monopolies or quasi-monopolies, because it is impossible for new entrants to compete with the incumbents, who pay much less than them for everything. Thus the biggest companies end up selling mostly between themselves, excluding any others.
- rootusrootus 24d ago
  > has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich Are you saying it is intentional? Is it not more simply explained as simple greed by two companies colluding to keep competitors out of their market?
  - johnnyanmac 24d ago
    It may be a partial factor. Similar to how CC companies have a logical reason to reject high charge chargeback items , but may also be ideologically driven to push certain agendas as well.
  - pocksuppet 24d ago
    But simple corporate greed is the same thing as taking money fro the poor and giving it to the rich?
bux93 24d ago
Note that the caps were introduced because the EU already had widespread use of bank cards, but local schemes were being replaced with Mastercard/Visa debit - the caps were brought in to prevent the duopoly from profiteering. (Apple/Google pay also use Mastercard/Visa virtual cards in the EU.) Before the cap, credit cards had way higher fees and there were some reward cards, which led to merchants simply not accepting Mastercard/Visa. Local schemes included Mastercard-owned Maestro (used in Germany, The Netherlands and for some reason Brazil) but also local schemes like Belgium's Bancontact/MrCash. It's unfortunate some of those schemes didn't just merge and started competing in foreign countries as well.
- _bernd 24d ago
  At least in Germany as far as I'm aware all banking cards are in fact "simple" visa cards who uses "V-pay", since 2012/2014? Personally I "like" or prefer V-pay because it made payment in the EU more easily for me without the need of a credit card even 8 years ago. Since the pandemic, I only pay for a (real) credit card (with daily billing) because some goods or services can only be paid with a "real" card, like more expensive cars at a car renting company or sometimes hotel rooms and the like. In general I try to pay with cash so nobody needs to pay extra fees. But more and more smaller businesses prefer electronic payments. Then I use the banking card with V-pay and to state it again, the real visa card is only used when no other options are available.
  - KellyCriterion 24d ago
    > o nobody needs to pay extra fees Processing cash is by far >not free<! In fact, it costs a lot of money due to all the things involved (counting/collection/recycling etc). Anf it inwolves additional risks for the handling party.
    - yayachiken 24d ago
      People often say that but does the cost for handling cash really scale (even approximately) proportionally with the number of transactions or revenue? Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all? If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.
alibarber 24d ago
Note that these are interchange fees charged by the networks. Unless you're operating at massive scale, merchant account suppliers still charge the shop whatever they want. The shop is paying far more than 0.2 / 0.3%. 2.5% for credit and 25c fixed for debit is the usual ballpark.
- erincandescent 24d ago
  The rates you're quoting are far higher than you get without negotiation from various providers these days . SumUp, as one random example, quote a flat 1.39% _on their free plan_.

danvayn 24d ago

Yes, it’s because Americans have to build credit or otherwise optimize their credit score to finance large purchases. In most other countries there either isn’t a credit score concept or your credit score does not have to be built up over a long period to be effective like it does here. It doesn’t help that a third of Americans dont really have savings either; credit helps them to work around this

smelendez 24d ago
I use credit for the purchase protection (I believe many debit cards have this as well but it’s easier when you haven’t yet paid the charge, and seems better enshrined in law for credit), for the rewards (which including signup bonuses can be huge), for the float period, and for security — if somebody fraudulently uses a credit card versus a debit card, there’s no actual money missing while the situation gets resolved.
- enaaem 24d ago
  Every time I had issues with fraud it was with a cc. The fraud protection is just bandage for an inherently unsafe system that you are paying for yourself. That being said, I do get that for US individuals it is completely rational to use cc's. I would do that too. If you are paying 3% Visa/MC tax anyway, then you might as well use their perks.
  - Shog9 24d ago
    What smelendez is alluding to is the matter of who is liable while fraud is being resolved. In the US, a charge on your bank card results in at least a hold on your bank account - money you can't spend on anything else until the hold is lifted. Worst-case, there can be significant fees associated with this (overdraft, declined payments, etc.). For most of us, that's a much bigger problem than a debt we may or may not end up paying interest on. From personal experience, getting a credit card company to quickly resolve fraud cases is also much easier than getting a bank to do the same, even when it's ultimately the same institution.
24d ago

klrefg 24d ago

How do any of they rent cars when they travel? I think that still requires a credit pretty much anywhere in Europe. I’s bet the proportion is way higher than 5% even if the overwhelming majority use their credit cards the same was as debit.

franga2000 24d ago
The only time I "needed" a credit card is when I tried to sign up for some US company's service. It rejected my debit card because it wanted credit, so I just took my business elsewhere. Other than that, I've rented cars, rented other things with a "X will be charged to your card if you return it late", unattended gas stations... all the usual places you'd think need a credit card. It's fine. We do have a "negative limit" that banks often give you, which means you can go into the red and pay it back later, but that has nothing to do with the card, it works even for normal bank transactions.
- brnt 24d ago
  I had a car rental in Oslo that only allowed debit cards if you took out their full insurance. I was already insured, we rented though some sort of front, but they only allowed that on a credit credit card.
LelouBil 24d ago
You pay a deposit with your debit card and get it refunded afterwards ?
_bernd 24d ago
IIRC then normal bank cards and debit cards can be charged with these future payments up to 500 Eur. So for small and normal cars this works. I too have a real credit card to be able to rent for instance "bigger" cars like even an Audi A6. Most often hotels also block 500 Eur, or they state upfront that you need a proper/real credit card and not just a debit card. That's for me the only reason I have VISA and use it like 3 or 4 times a year...
AnAfrican 24d ago

LelouBil 24d ago

I don't know for other European countries, but in France a lot of people call them "Cartes de crédit" AKA Credit cards, even though, like you said, they are actually debit cards for 95% of people, so this adds to the confusion

sersi 24d ago
Yup and even when they are credit cards, "cartes à débit différé", they behave more like automated charge cards. The amount is automatically taken out of your account at the end of the month, you are supposed to pay in full and don't have the option of making minimum payments. So the poor banks cannot make nearly as much money with interest rates and instead are forced to have relatively high account maintenance fees (that are published and much more transparent to the customer). That said as a French person with a ssn living in Asia, I don't have a french credit card because it's so expensive and foreign conversion fees are very high, whereas I use a us card because the currency conversion rate is very close to the market rate and it costs a lot less to maintain the account.

gnfargbl 24d ago

This is not a universal, however. In the UK, two-thirds of adults have a credit card.

TacticalCoder 24d ago

> For US readers - in my country in Europe I'd say that 95% of people have only debit card, not credit card. it's very not common to have a credit card here. In the countries I've been to in the EU (Belgium, France, Spain, Luxembourg), when they give you cards they give you typically both a debit and a credit card. It's extremely common to have both. I've got debit cards, a pre-paid debit card (which I top up when I plan to spend) and credit cards. And getting up to 2% cashback in the EU (even if the fees vendors can add in the EU are maximum 0.3) is not that hard. It's very common to pay for mostly everything with a debit card and then use a credit card to, say, book a plane or vacations or to open a tab when you check-in at some hotel. Heck, I don't even know if you can book a plane with a debit card!? (and anyway then you probably don't get the cancellation insurance etc. that you typically automatically get with a credit card).

fsuts 24d ago

Uk law gives significantly more protection on credit card purchases than debit card. As it’s treated as a finance product so the lender is has responsibilities.

skrtskrt 20d ago

In the US there are very strong fraud protections for credit cards, but a debit card is just unfettered access to your bank account. For safety reasons I never use a debit card for anything but an ATM.

karlosvomacka 18d ago
you can just do a chargeback in case of fraudulent transaction.
- skrtskrt 18d ago
  That is not true for debit cards in the US, which is my point.