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

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

storus wrote: post #444

pjmlp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Portugal we have the Multibanco network, which already provided Internet like services for buying stuff on the terminals and eventually graduated to have online payments as well, however only in Portugal. Likewise, in Germany we can have SEPA for most stuff. And in Greece there is Viva. Problem is getting something that actually works across all European countries.

SEPA gets blocked immediately when you try to buy something expensive, like a top-end graphics card (8k+).

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

rkomorn wrote: post #368

pjmlp wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I know from Minitel, the same Internet before the Internet applies. I was buying tickets on MB, before it became common place in the Internet.

Could you search for tickets and such on MB? All the stuff I'm familiar with is only payments (with entity and reference). Now that I think about it, you could search for things on Minitel but I don't remember if payments were made as phone charges or if they could also be done with transfers. Minitel was so prohibitively expensive to use (just about every service cost multiple francs per minute), I didn't do much wi…

Post by TulliusCicero » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

laksjhdlka wrote: post #90

close04 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most obvious difference being that unlike China or India, Europe (or the EU) is not a single country. This doesn't make things impossible but certainly complicates them.

Exactly, now that the internet is ubiquitous, none of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical . They are regulatory, they are political, they are social.

Post by TulliusCicero » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #155

mentalgear wrote: post #35

Would be nice of the EU to provide a digital payment service quasi free of charge - without commercial provider's typical predatory fees and other costs. And don't counter with "privacy" .. it's not like all the American companies already have to provide backend access to their data to the NSA and other 3 letter agencies.

The problem with these is always who pays for fraud. With credit cards, they actually claw that money back from the merchant, and then if the merchant can't pay they just eat it themselves. So the merchant has to work in fraud rates into their pricing, and the credit card company has to work in fraud rates that the merchant can't cover into their rates. It always seemed toxic it to me that the merchants are the one's…

Post by prmoustache » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

severino wrote: post #203

gdulli wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my credit and debit cards the same way today as I did before smartphones existed. I never invited the extra surveillance middleman of Google/Apple into my transactions. And the convenience of tapping or swiping a plastic card is simpler than using my phone anyway. Is this not possible in Spain?

Yes, but in Spain all of our cards are Visa or Mastercard, afaik, so you can't really avoid using American tech in your daily payments (unless you use cash, which remains a very convenient method, by the way).