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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

#411

Post by miki123211 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #333
ignoramous wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does Attestation in on itself isn't unwarranted which (to me) is an important security measure. Attestation as commonly implemented on Android via Play Integrity (the way banking apps are known to do) is restrictive, sure: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... / https://archive.is/snGEu

An important security measure for who, though? The servers at the bank should "never trust the client" in case the attestation is bypassed or compromised, which is always a risk at scale. If it's an important safety measure _for me_, shouldn't I get to decide whether I need it based on context? I think it's fair for banks to apply different risk scores based on the signals they have available (including attestation s…

It's an anti-brute-force mechanism. It's not for you, it's for all the other accounts that an unattested phone (or a bot posing as an unattested phone that just stole somebody's credentials via some 0-day data exfiltration exploit) may be trying to access.

Sure, banks could probably build a mechanism that lets some users opt out of this, just as they could add a Klingon localization to their apps. There just isn't enough demand.

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

#412

Post by scotty79 »

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.

If we could create a single solution on Europan level, based on cellphones first and order banks to provide service of access to it for all of their customers, free of charge, for the privilege of remaining in the market, it could be done.

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

#413

Post by Hikikomori »

phoronixrly wrote: post #347
carlosjobim wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your debit card is stolen, your bank has to return all money that was used or withdrawn to you. Since it is unauthorized use of your funds. Same for credit cards of course. Such money is returned swiftly. But the more concerning fraud is when you purchase something and don't receive what you should have received from the merchant. Whether it is due to outright fraud or not. In these cases you will also have your m…

You guys use the debit card linked to your primary bank account??? There's been virtual cards for online shopping for 10+ years now. They're meant to be linked to an empty or low amount bank account. Now with Revolut you can schedule auto top-up to keep this low amount up to date. Not to mention the per-purchase (online/in-person) limits, mandatory PIN entry, and daily maximums...

We have virtual cards as well, maybe used it once. But we also have a lot less fraud and typically require 2fa for online purchases and chip+pin every x purchases.

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

#414

Post by miki123211 »

So I guess we'll have a system whose API is "open and interoperable", meaning "spread across 3000 pages of 5 ETSI TS PDfs that nobody can understand, with the only integration environment available after an expensive security audit, and requiring you to send an email to an email address that hasn't existed for the last 5 years."

/s

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

#415

Post by tflinton »

codyb wrote: post #227
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…

Sounds like you should build a competitor if that's literally all it is... I suspect there's quite a few other things you have to consider when you're managing trillions of dollars of transactions a year. Fraud, settlement times, up times, security, customer service, debt collection, interest rate calculation, reach, KYC, record keeping, legal inquiries. But I'm sure we're just a couple grok comments away from a comp…

Don't forget stand-ins, much of this hasn't discussed that credit card networks do a lot of "stand-ins" when the issuer is unreachable (bank goes down, latency too high, etc). It's a bit unclear how things like Wero would operate when a network issue hits as Wero and EU rails won't just assume the liability for the transaction and hope it clears later as it does on Visa/Mastercard.

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

#416

Post by celsoazevedo »

mrits wrote: post #304

Once European banks realize how horrible EU is to do business with they will reunite with Visa

European banks operating in EU countries, using Euros, and under the European Central Bank already know things work.

Not to mention that some of the alternatives are owned by a consortium of... European banks.

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

#417

Post by hkpack »

fhdkweig wrote: post #233
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…

> Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone. I would also hope so, that is the entire point. The reason they are scrambling right now is because Starlink just shut off all of Russia. Because Starlink was so cheap and easy (and stable for the last 4 years of the war), a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access. And while all of Europe is happy…

> Starlink just shut off all of Russia

What are you talking about? Starlink never worked in russia. It worked in Ukraine, and it was shutdown in Ukraine by using a white list for which any Ukrainian can easily apply.

The goal was to shutdown Starlink usage by russian drones in Ukraine and by anyone on the occupied Ukrainian territories.

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

#418

Post by tamimio »

trinix912 wrote: post #405
tamimio wrote: post #79

> Wero lets users send money using just a phone number Of course, what could go wrong!! Unbelievable, a chance to make a whole new standard, new system, new everything, but yet we still have the need to tie it to ancient protocols, only to find later it’s broken by design and we start adding all sort of duct tape solutions to make it “secure”.. This is either a completely and entirely stupid move by some boomers livi…

We have had these apps in various EU countries for quite a while and it's been fine. You can get a prepaid SIM from a grocery store and register it with them, and so on. You can always SEPA transfer the money if you don't want to use this. It's also more convenient than giving out an opaque UUID to your friend to transfer you money or something similar. The bigger problem I see with this is it being one more service…

> You can get a prepaid SIM from a grocery store and register it with them

After you provide your gov ID

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...

So now this phone number is tied to your gov ID and bank account, amazing design of a single point of failure based on a broken protocol (GSM).

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

#419

Post by buzer »

joe_mamba wrote: post #363
scythe wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking device might be the wrong thing to focus on. The US has other ways of messing with foreigners who depend on services provided by US companies, like suddenly cutting off those services in the case of ICC judges.

IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those. Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable. For example, a few years ago, a power tripping gov bureaucrat turned off my unemp…

According to AP News (https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...) at least one judge had his bank accounts closed. So it's not just your own government who can debank you in Europe.

Of course in this judge's case there might still be some banks who are willing to work with him even at the risk of getting sanctioned as there weren't language in the news that he was completely debanked which I assume they would highlight if it was the case.

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

#420

Post by port11 »

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…

I don’t see why they can’t just piggyback on existing, proven solutions such as Bancontact, Carte Bleu, etc., which are all based on a card running on its own network. If it’s app-based, we’re excluding quite some citizens from it.
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