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Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

lesnumeriques.com

141–150 of 811 posts

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#141
post #71

This is the EU equivalent of Zelle, but pushing into merchant payments and owned and run by the banks. When the telcos tried to compete with the cloud providers by offering OpenStack they learned the business wasn't as simple as offering 10-15 services with some racks. I can imagine the same hidden complexity for payment rails On the other hand regulations have taken too much power away from merchants and Wero could…

UK Open Banking is a counter example to this argument. It’s been a huge success. Transfers between accounts are seamless, and I never need to authorize Plaid to maintain a permanent session in a headless Chromium instance reading my bank account. The APIs are well-defined, universally supported, and include authorization scopes for viewing balance, authorizing transfers, etc.

That said, I don’t do many p2p payments in the UK (mostly because I’m an adult now, not splitting every bill like I was in college). And I wouldn’t like to add every one of my friends to my banking transfer history. The UK is missing something like Venmo with wide adoption. I assume the kids these days mostly use features like Apple Cash or Monzo transfers.

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#142

I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you all that Wero is called Wero because Euro is pronounced "you-ro" and when you share your you-ro it becomes a we-ro.

And when anything goes wrong, that's a ruh-ro.

Internet comment of the day awarded to CharlesW.

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#143

I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you all that Wero is called Wero because Euro is pronounced "you-ro" and when you share your you-ro it becomes a we-ro.

And when anything goes wrong, that's a ruh-ro.

What's wrong with good old uh-oh??

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#144
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Wero was a real alternative but it seem to be a thin wrapper around Bank APIs and SEPA instant transactions. It has pretty much non of the functionality that PayPal or other services give. It just makes it easier to send money with a phone number instead of an IBAN. My bank doesn't even support it.

Isn't a wrapper making the ergonomics better valuable enough? In Sweden we have Swish for domestic transfers, if I could use Swish (or if Wero took it over) the same way to transfer money to my friends living in other EU countries I'd be very, very happy. What kind of functionality PayPal offers that is much better? Using cards instead of direct debit?

That’s what EMPSA[1] is trying to push. But Swish aren’t particularly interested in playing an active part.[2]

[1] https://empsa.org/

[2] https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/ekonomi/privatekonomi/1452366-d...

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#145
post #49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahahah! so true. those names are silly. also, French and Spanish can already send money for free via IBAN / SEPA

That's not the point at all. Currently I'm using paypal to send money to friends when we split dinner or share other costs. I'd like to use a similar European service instead and not go through a ceremony to open my banking app, initiate transfer, write the recipient's IBAN, confirm and wait a day for the transfer to take place.

You shouldn't need to wait for a day, instant transfers have been a thing for a while now. Unless you're in terribly bad luck to be stuck with one of the few banks that are lagging behind.

International money transfers, even between currencies, now take seconds whenever I do them.

The "map phone number to bank account" services do make this whole thing a lot easier, but on the other hand I kind of don't want to help scammers by giving them the option to look up what bank they need to pretend to be before dialing a number.

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#146
I tried Wero just now. Crashes at once on my phone.

I run Lineage is, want backups on my own NAS. I have a feeling that if I want this European payment app I need to accept backing up my data on an American cloud.

(I've nothing against Google really. But I want my backups at home.)

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#147
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares at this point. Nothing has ever managed to unite Europeans as effectively as the orange man’s unrelenting torrent of temper tantrums over the past year and a half. Americans, we know some of you aren’t crazy. Can’t wait for the grown-ups to be in charge again, but in the mean time we’ll be moving on.

> Who cares at this point. Nothing has ever managed to unite Europeans as effectively as the orange man’s unrelenting torrent of temper tantrums over the past year and a half. > Americans, we know some of you aren’t crazy. Can’t wait for the grown-ups to be in charge again, but in the mean time we’ll be moving on. Assuming by "grown-ups" you mean Team Blue, then you'll be disappointed, because they manufactured conse…

[flagged]

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it comes down to who you would trust more - your own government which you have some control over via elections or some (potentially multinational) corporation which you have exactly zero control over?

It's the other way around. You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad. You have very, very coarse-grained control with the government every few years.

In the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take.

Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.

Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PIX is also better because it gives control back to the central bank (as it was with cash) and not private industry although they are providing the service. The central bank controls what payments are permitted by what laws exist, not some risk management system that has decided that your legal purchase is too risky or some foreign state has applied sanctions against you.

That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.

I trust my government (Switzerland) way more to do the thing that is right for the people and the law then some private company that has the primary goal of making money. It doesn't mean that governments don't make mistakes but the primary goal is to serve its people.

That is what government is for in a functioning democracy. A functioning government is of the people for the people.

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