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Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

europeanbusinessmagazine.com

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Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#211

Post by direwolf20 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #83
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #8

I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated. No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect. Time to do away with these foreign entiti…

Creating Acceptance is super difficult. Hence why crypto hasn't taken off with merchants. Because who's going to pay for merchants to change their point-of-sale systems to accept a new payment method.

Crypto is also a shit payment method though. Expensive and difficult to run and with high transaction fees. And if you use a chain with low transaction fees, there's no consensus on which chain that is (otherwise transaction fees would be high) so you have to support all of them. Then you might as well outsource the whole thing.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#212

Post by markvdb »

bluegreen10294 wrote: post #77
mzajc wrote: post #56

Can I use it without installing their software on my smartphone? Question is rhetorical - of course not, and your smartphone also needs to pass Google's or Apple's remote attestation schemes. Good riddance. Is it really just PayPal left offering a sane online payment service? --- From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240... : > It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.

Yes, you can. They have an app, but also integrations into bank apps.

That's interesting. In Belgium the pre-integration Payconiq could not do that.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#213

Post by rcbdev »

Coeur wrote: post #165

Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users. Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roam…

In Austria EPS is also very commonly used.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#214

Post by aspbee555 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #172
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many countries where debit cards are the norm and credit cards are extremely rare. In France, people are so afraid of consumer credit that cards are renamed ‘deferred debit cards’ rather than credit cards, otherwise people do not want them.

Debit cards come with the same fraud protection as credit cards do, which is the most important benefit of Visa/MasterCard.

with a debit card your cash is gone from your bank account in that moment, even if you get it back later (hopefully). With a credit card they are not able to drain your bank account, the risks are entirely on the cc company and they will be significantly more motivated to get that back than a bank would. it's entirely their problem, not yours

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#215

Post by hiire »

severino wrote: post #135

Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone. Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from the…

Wero is expanding around Belgium, France and Germany while Bizum has "joined" the European Payments Alliance with Bancomat and SIBS from Italy and Portugal respectively, not sure how these work exactly as I'm also located in Spain.

My point being, if these payment systems start becoming more interconnected and join within a standard, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually saw Bizum cards around here, Wero cards in other places, and many more.

At least that's my take on it. Of course there's still a long way to go, such as developing the system, banks adopting it, businesses adopting it, then customers (which would probably take years, many people wouldn't bother switching at least until their current card expires)

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#216

Post by mbesto »

hirako2000 wrote: post #31
hnfong wrote: post #20

Even putting aside issue of geopolitics, it's quite baffling to me that every country besides China and Russia are paying ~0.2% "sales tax" to corporate America.

Not 0.2% Visa: 1.3% to 2.3% Mastercard: 1.5% to 2.6% Mastercard: 2.3% to 3.5% Nothing precise as it depends on whether that's debit vs credit cards, and the type of card. Also volume related and what the bank may subsidize, or take on top.

This is incorrect.

Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.

EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#217

Post by direwolf20 »

jlarocco wrote: post #72
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #8

I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated. No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect. Time to do away with these foreign entiti…

I can't disagree that they have a moat, but it's a hard problem and if it were as easy as you say somebody would be disrupting them already to get a share of that $24T. Just dealing with fraud is a major problem in itself.

Fraud is mostly resolved by the two banks involved. The network is just that, a network.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#218

Post by volkl48 »

joevandyk wrote: post #82
ericmay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect. I don't know that the problem is sophisticated, but it's certainly complex [1]. It's a bit of both in terms of complexity and defending a moat, which all businesses do, including, and especially European ones. And companies like Visa, Mastercard, Ame…

This last summer, I couldn’t use my US-issued Visa or Mastercard credit card in most places in the Netherlands. Had to use debit.

Literally just got back from a trip there and didn't find a single business or transaction that I couldn't pay for with various US-issued (Chase + BoA) Visa credit cards via tap.

Even more surprisingly to me - a pretty decent chunk of businesses even would accept AmEx. By no means all, but I recall it being basically nonexistent not that long ago.

And to be clear - much of my time was not in areas that get a ton of foreign tourist visitors.

Not saying your experience didn't happen, but given our very different experiences it might be something with your particular bank/issuer/card?

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#219

Post by jacekm »

Like the article mentioned many EU countries have their own payment systems. The challenge is not to build something from the scratch but rather to make existing solutions interoperable. The first talks about cross-border integrations started many years ago but they went very slowly. However, some work is being done, just a week ago a first transfer was done from Spanish Bizum to Polish Blik.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#220

Post by alistairSH »

carlosjobim wrote: post #172
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many countries where debit cards are the norm and credit cards are extremely rare. In France, people are so afraid of consumer credit that cards are renamed ‘deferred debit cards’ rather than credit cards, otherwise people do not want them.

Debit cards come with the same fraud protection as credit cards do, which is the most important benefit of Visa/MasterCard.

Just by their nature, that is inherently untrue.

If your CC is stolen, you are not out all the cash in your account until the dispute is resolved.

If your debit card is stolen, you lose that cash, making it more difficult to pay whatever other obligations you have that period.

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