Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

europeanbusinessmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

781–790 of 1001 posts

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

#781

Post by joe_mamba »

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.

> It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary)

So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.

Hell of a solution.

Surely the better solution to issues like Hungary is ensuring we get more democracy to Hungarian people, not giving authority over Hungary to someone else the Hungarian people can't elect.

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

#782

Post by dwedge »

carlosjobim wrote: post #189
jimnotgym wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard. Hard disagree. Until Covid, many small shops didn't take cards in Europe. Taxis, restaurants, market stalls, even trains were often cash only not that long ago. I in the UK ran accounts in companies that had people travel extensively in Europe. We used to issue travellers with EUR200 for the things that cards couldn't buy. Mo…

What is Europe in this sense? In the Europe I know, every small business has accepted cards for decades. The exception if there are some children selling strawberries to tourists. As for your second paragraph, you seem to be dreaming. Americans are some of the best tourists to deal with, and anybody who works in the tourism sector is happy to receive them.

Germany is a massive exception to your claim. Cash only is very common there.

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

#783

Post by padjo »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #520

The irony is that this new payment method has the exact same issue: it's deeply tied to US corporate. Their site claims that it can only be used on iOS or Android: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240... Also: > It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer. This seems an even worse situation than carrying around a Maestro (mastercard) with me.

It is comical. Exchanging one set of US overlords for another. I suppose it is possible to use a degoogled android but most people won't be doing that.

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

#784

Post by avianlyric »

gizmo wrote: post #609
avianlyric wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastercard and Visa also use immediate settlement models and basically always have done. The settlement buffer between end parties is created entirely by entities that are all basically banks. There’s nothing special about Mastercard and Visa rails that prevents you recreating all the functionality that the broader ecosystem provides, without Visa and Mastercard. Hell all of that functionality could be provided by ex…

Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor. It's not a perfect system, but it's much better than direct bank debit where the customer has very little recourse. There is also a significant privacy issue. Today my bank can only see the sum total of my credit card purchases but not what I buy and from which vendor. Amex can see wh…

> Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor.

That’s not how chargebacks and refunds work. Mastercard and Visa are not involved in the vast majority of disputes at all, it’s entirely handled by the card issuer and card acquirer. Mastercard/Visa only get involved in cases where network party has broken one of the technical rules of the network. For cases of missing or faulty goods etc, Mastercard/Visa do nothing except transport the messages used by bank/merchant to litigate the dispute.

When Mastercard/Visa are forced to step in and make an arbitration decision, they charge a hefty fee (hundreds of dollars) to the losing side to do so. So they have no issue with people raising disputes, it makes them a lot of money.

> Amex can see what I purchase but knows very little about me otherwise. I like this separation, and I like that it's hard for the government to get a complete picture of my financial affairs.

This is naive, all banks and credit card issuers are required by law to perform KYC (Know Your Customer) to ensure they know exactly who they’re transacting with. It’s trivial for the state to buildup a complete image of your financial situation by sending a small number of court orders to banks and financial entities to turn over all their records on you. That’s ignoring the automated tax reporting that banks also have to do.

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

#785

Post by joe_mamba »

Archelaos wrote: post #463
Cyph0n wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. In some areas, sure - like GDPR. In other areas, absolutely not - like chat control. As another commenter pointed out, it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK, while violations by corporations are quickly shutdown. It’s like the opposite of how it works here in the US.

> chat control The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.

The problem is they will keep trying just like before, and they only need to get lucky once to succeed, while we need to be lucky very single time.

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

#786

Post by em-bee »

albumen wrote: post #547
em-bee wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed. my credit card requires me to preload money from my bank account. it's like there is a second account that keeps a balance that i can spend using the credit card. whenever i use it, the balance is updated. how the credit is paid off i don't know. it could be either right away, or the amount is just hidden by my bank until it is time to pay off at the end of the month. either way, the credit limit is zero. so…

So, your credit card is in practice a debit card?

yes. it is possible that i can get a real credit limit too, but i didn't check.

these debit like credit cards put a different light on the statistics. as some people here have said, europeans don't use creditcards, and then someone contradicted that with a statistic of how much is paid with credit cards. how much of those credit card payments are made with debit like cards like mine?

europe doesn't want their people to get into credit debt. possibly protection for people is stronger and makes it harder for banks to recover if people fail to pay? but most likely countries just want people to be able to protect themselves from overspending.

like i can get an overdraw limit on my bank account. it is set to a default value based on my income. but i deliberately reset that to zero. i don't want an overdraw limit. if i really need to overdraw i'll change the limit at that time and i think i can even set that it is valid only for a short time and then it resets automatically.

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

#787

Post by jahnu »

glenneroo wrote: post #103
krunck wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And don't forget that most businesses have in their payment processing contract terms (set forth by Visa/MC ) that prevent the business from directly charging card users the card processing fees. Which means that everybody - even cash users - pay for those fees. What a racket.

The official Apple store (McShark) in Vienna used to pass this ~3% charge on to consumers (a few years ago, not sure if it's still true today - and also there is a real Apple Store now).

Wow I didn't see that. Usually it's forbidden in the terms of agreement between the merchant and the payment processor to add a surcharge for using the card so everyone else ends up subsidising it.

Vienna/Austria is such a strange place wrt payment right now. Some places are cashless, many are cash only, many are card only above a certain amount. I had one lady running a ramen restaurant accept instant SEPA.

And it's going to be interesting tax wise when they remove the requirement for receipts on transactions under 35 EUR.

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

#788

Post by Etheryte »

eastbayjake wrote: post #97
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'm a little shocked that of all the comments so far, no one has mentioned the financial risk borne by this whole value chain. OP is operating as if it's just a debit system moving money from one account to another but: - For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk i…

This shows a fundamental understanding about the market you're commenting on. The European market is nothing like the US market. The vast majority of transfers are already debit based. Most people have a credit card, but for most part it's not a daily driver. Many European countries don't have credit scores at all, and in the ones that do, it isn't nearly as important as in the US. Since there isn't much of a practical need to take on debt, most people don't do it (leaving aside mortgages and leases, but you don't take those on a credit card anyway).

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

#789

Post by pydry »

TonyStr wrote: post #707
plastic_bag wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Rupee payment?

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

#790

Post by AdamN »

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…

Cards are really slow and expensive to distribute and (tech forward) people would also prefer to just use their phone or watch. This is the kind or project that will take years to work and almost everybody now has a smartphone on one of those two operating systems in their pocket every time they leave the house.

Cards will have a slow demise over the next 10 years but it's coming whether we like it or not.

Post reply on HN