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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

#701

Post by jonathanlydall »

Freak_NL wrote: post #301
joevandyk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you expect to be able to use a creditcard in a physical shop in the Netherlands? Surely you knew? It works if the payment terminal has support for it, but since no Dutch person uses a creditcard outside of the internet, your kinda going against the grain.

Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?

In South Africa where I live, anywhere that accepts cards accepts Visa and Mastercard. Outside of the "informal business" sector (e.g. tiny "businesses" like a roadside stall), card acceptance is so ubiquitous I don't carry cash anymore and it's very rarely an issue.

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

#702

Post by nottorp »

Item one, that has been mentioned a lot of times in this discussion, is that a payment system that is independent of Visa/MC but is dependent on US based smartphones is about as useless.

Item two is convenience. All these systems are "faster wire transfers". I don't really see the point of them when you can already do instant IBAN or even phone number based transfers.

What they do not have is a line of credit backing them. Got to make sure you have money in "the particular system your merchant accepts". Also at least in eastern europe credit cards come with the possibility to pay in a few installments with zero interest (paid for by the merchant of course, so not everyone does that). This is gone in the new system.

What they also do not have is the fraud protection of a credit card. You may be able to revert a transaction but the money is gone from your account and it will take a long time to see it back.

On the other hand it's harder to spend money you do not have so perhaps the EU is trying to make its citizens more financially responsible? :)

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

#703

Post by t0mas88 »

wiseowise wrote: post #249
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…

Wero is iDeal.

I thought they were interconnecting all those ideal-like systems from different countries and then rebranding to Wero? So the tech may be different per area but they all interconnect and the UX is the same.

But maybe I misunderstood and other places are actually replacing tech.

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

#704

Post by techpression »

kergonath wrote: post #660
the_fall wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII. It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

Maybe in theory, but the idea that nations that trade doesn’t go to war is a naive one, it has happened plenty and will happen again. As for the structure of voting etc, it’s just a matter of pushing until people give up.

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

#705

Post by watwut »

barbazoo wrote: post #298
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.

Growing up in the EU, living in North America now, it's mind blowing to me how much credit these companies are making available to me. Not that I ever would outside of an actual emergency but I can see how it's tempting to someone who didn't grow up in a financial risk averse society.

> grow up in a financial risk averse society.

It is not risk taking, it is a system that not just normalized the debt, but punishes people for not taking it. When you are recommended to use credit card, so you can function on debt, so that you can get better mortgage later on, then the thing in play is not just "risk aversion".

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

#706

Post by IshKebab »

pennaMan wrote: post #284
fhdkweig wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> they are trying to quickly create alternatives to anything American They're the same bright minds that ensured no alternatives could naturally come out of the European market trough relentless bureaucratic central planning. I have zero hopes of a good outcome

It isn't bureaucracy that has prevented any alternatives emerging; it's network effects. Mastercard and Visa have a solid duopoly.

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

#707

Post by TonyStr »

plastic_bag wrote: post #649
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.

Indian banks had already switched to RuPay. Most Indian banks issue RuPay debit and credit cards.

"RuPay" is a hilarious name for an Indian payment service. Kudos to whoever thought of that name

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

#708

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

raven12345 wrote: post #652
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Europeans spent years scolding us for being warmongers. Then when Ukraine got invaded, they quickly switched to scolding Biden for not warmongering harder in Ukraine. Zero self-awareness. America was called an "enemy of Europe" (before the Greenland stuff) even though it was more generous towards Ukraine than a bunch of European countries, and essentially every country outside of Europe. Polls showed that China h…

Is there a problem? Americans keep saying that China has no combat experience and its weapons have not been proven in actual combat. Is there any doubt that a country that hasn't fought a war in decades is more popular than countries like the US and Russia, which are constantly at war?

I'm an advocate for the US withdrawing from NATO so we don't have to fight so many wars. I'm an isolationist, and I advocate a non-imperialist, Swiss-style foreign policy for the US. If you'll join me in that advocacy, then good.

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

#709

Post by varjag »

fhdkweig wrote: post #528
varjag wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink was never available in Russia due to the sanctions regime. It's only use by Russians was via grey import terminals on the frontline in Ukraine (made possible due to complications of geofencing).

I guess I was misunderstanding. I thought that Starlink was deliberately ignoring the sanctions because they were able to shut it off real quick once Musk got that tweet https://x.com/sikorskiradek/status/2016221397396168995

It wasn't easy to geofence due to fluid nature of the frontline and lack of single official supply channel to Ukraine. A huge part of Ukrainian terminals were also procured abroad by volunteers.

However a recent development was Russian use of terminals on attack drones. Out of that Starlink was able to block terminals with certain velocity (and possibly bearing) in the region. In addition Ukraine got around to making internal registry of all frontline terminal allowing Starlink to white-list. So no it was a bit more than a tweet involved.

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

#710

Post by shaokind »

compounding_it wrote: post #13

When India moved to UPI in the last few years something very interesting happened. The same devices that accept UPI (usually some android based POS) also accepted a plethora of cards. Previously merchants would be hesitant to take anything other than cash or charge 2% for visa/mastercard. But with wide adoption of digital payments they now just accept any payment with the goal that they don't want bad reviews and/or…

Anecdata here, but the last times I tried to use VISA/MasterCard in a shopping mall meant to serve people from all over the world, it just did not work. UPI was flawless, though.

(And then as pointed out, anyone smaller straight up doesn’t support anything outside of UPI.)

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