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Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#301

Post by rsynnott »

tlogan wrote: post #91
poisonborz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In EU most people use direct debit. The term "credit card" is almost synonymous with debit. Chargebacks theoretically exists but they are more complicated, I don't know anyone who ever did that.

Yes, but the EU is quite diverse. I have some Irish friends. And Ireland seems similar to the US when it comes to credit card usage (vs debit). I assume that is because Ireland is heavily influenced by US and UK banking habits. On other hand, Germans only use debit cards.

> And Ireland seems similar to the US when it comes to credit card usage (vs debit).

That's definitely not the case. Many people would have credit cards, but there's a lot less incentive to actually use them than there is in the US, because the interchange (paid ultimately by the merchant) is capped at 0.3% in the EU (whereas in the US it can be upward of 3% on high-end cards). The interchange pays for the 'reward' schemes that US card issuers provide, largely. Without those, why bother?

I've a credit card, but I essentially never use it, except when visiting the US (where some vendors actually refuse debit cards, or at least used to).

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#302

Post by rsynnott »

tlogan wrote: post #180
padjo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Irish and in my experience most people use debit cards these days. I have a credit card but almost never use it.

I assume this is my “bounded rationality” / “bubble” bias (my impression was based on the people I know and not the full picture) I checked the stats, and about 40% of purchases in Ireland are made by credit card. In the US, it is around 70%.

Where'd you find that stat? I can't find any stats which break out spend by debit and credit card for Ireland, but what I can find is that (as of 2024), there were 7.95 million active debit cards and 1.58 million active credit cards in Ireland (which has 5.2 million people). Given that, the 40% stat seems implausible.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#303

Post by mdp2021 »

dgellow wrote: post #86
jasonvorhe wrote: post #2

I'm not gonna use CBDC because they'll get hooked up to digital id, no matter what they're "promising" right now. This is just another shitcoin no one asked for.

You don't have to use it. you can continue to use your bank account (which is linked to your id, obviously)

As long as we can still use cash - on the condition that it is not linked to any ID.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#304

Post by rsynnott »

illiac786 wrote: post #282
verzali wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not correct. You may be thinking of a prepaid card or something like vpay. Debit cards are accepted practically everywhere.

Do you really pay online, like flight tickets, with your debit card, that works? I try regularly, it never works. In shops the main issue is that the terminal they use can only read Apple Pay credit cards. If you’re using you’re banking app to pay wirelessly, it may fail to work with some merchants. It’s not that they don’t want to accept it, the physical card would probably work (I don’t physical cards anymore), but…

> Do you really pay online, like flight tickets, with your debit card, that works? I try regularly, it never works.

Which country is your card from? Many countries used to have their own weird debit card schemes, which often worked... erratically online. This is now rare, and even where it persists (eg Germany, with girocard), cards tend to be dual branded.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#305

Post by rsynnott »

freediddy wrote: post #204
illiac786 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live in Europe? This has simply not been my experience at all in France, Germany, UK, Italy and Spain so far. Online shops most of all don’t take debit at all and bricks and mortar shops will accept credit more often than debit. Again, my experience. And I prefer to pay with debit because I know the shop will pay less fees. I get refused at Starbucks, random shops in train stations, etc.

Unless they have a direct agreement with a credit card company, most payment providers will give one-size-fits-all blended rate about 2.7% per transaction, even if it's debit.

This is incorrect; 2.7% sounds like a US merchant fee. Most payment providers have considerably lower fees for EU merchants. Larger merchants can generally get lower fees by negotiating with their payment provider (this is the case for both EU and US merchants). Having direct agreement with a network _is_ somewhat a thing, but mostly in the US, where the network's fees are less regulated.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#306

Post by mdp2021 »

dewey wrote: post #12
jasonvorhe wrote: post #2

I'm not gonna use CBDC because they'll get hooked up to digital id, no matter what they're "promising" right now. This is just another shitcoin no one asked for.

That's a clear case of perfect being the enemy of good. Are CBDC privacy friendly? No, but it's better than 100% of the credit cards currently being used in Europe being part of the network of two big US companies.

> perfect [as] the enemy of good

In real critical systems, that seldom happens. Satisficing is the recipe for disaster. The current disastrous "world" is built on imperfect systems, "what could possibly go wrong" style.

It takes full work to create an acceptable instrument.

You are mentioning an improvement over credit cards - we would like to have a payment system acceptable by - say, the more "attentive", "discriminative" members of this community.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#308

Post by Ekaros »

Dries007 wrote: post #71
blenklo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU is very good, most of the time. Besides this GDPR Website thing, usb-c is great, energy standards are great, etc.

GDPR could have been great, if it was actually enforced in the way it was intended. Cookie banners and dark patterns are not actually allowed, but without enforcement, it's basically meaningless. IMO the biggest issue is that the member states are individually required to set up agencies to police this. This makes perfect sense for local companies, but is meaningless against large entities that operate across the ent…

GDPR fixes at least some actors. There is no solution for all actors especially bad ones. But many big actors will take steps to be in compliance. Which is lot more actors than without such regulation. Perfect being enemy of better.

And at least now developers can have reasonable reason to ask do we actually need to store this or do we want to store it. Before that would have been stonewalled.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#309

Post by rsynnott »

larkost wrote: post #88
Hikikomori wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just don't have that much fraud instead.

I don't have numbers for you, but I do know that every European I know is much more worried about card fraud than the Americans I know. One quick example is that the Europeans get very nervous when the waiter takes the credit card away from the table in the U.S.. This is just not done in Europe because there is a (at least perceived) history of skimming in much of Europe. One big difference is that in the U.S. cardho…

> One quick example is that the Europeans get very nervous when the waiter takes the credit card away from the table in the U.S.. This is just not done in Europe because there is a (at least perceived) history of skimming in much of Europe.

... No. It's just not done in Europe because it is _not permitted_. Chip and pin was made mandatory decades ago, and for that the cardholder must be present. It's not unreasonable to be disconcerted when something which just doesn't happen in your experience (the waiter takes your card away!) happens.

Skimming is also mostly now a US thing, as non-US cards no longer require a magnetic stripe at all (the only US has a stay of execution; Mastercard plans to completely phase out magstripes by 2033, and I think Visa is similar).

The US has _far_ more card fraud than the EU (about $15bn vs $1.5bn/year), largely for technological reasons (the US doesn't require, and many issuers don't even support, chip and pin, or 3dsecure, and of course there's the magstripe thing, though most card fraud is online these days where 3dsecure is more relevant).

> Whereas in Europe the burden of evidence (not proof) is with the cardholder.

This is the case for chip and pin transactions. It would generally _not_ be the case for foreign non-chip-and-pin transactions, though cardholders may not necessarily be aware of this.

Re: Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

#310

Post by rsynnott »

__rito__ wrote: post #95

Can someone tell me why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay? Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share. They also integrate seamlessly to UPI. Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currenci…

If you were starting from scratch today, though, would you really re-invent credit cards? There was at some point I think a vague plan for a European debit card network (at least one of the national debit card network actually supports foreign issuers on a technical level, though I don't think in practice this was ever implemented), but really, why use the card format, beyond "well, this is already a thing"?
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