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Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

riksbank.se

121–130 of 581 posts

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#121
post #6

1yr timeline is ambitious if it means fully deployed. Clearly the right thing for Sweden and others to do. Also worrying that even 3yrs into the Russian invasion, bordering countries are urgently increasing their preparedness for future conflicts.

The standards are already designed and widely implemented in Europe and a smallish percentage of transactions are already fully offline. I suspect this could be implemented with just policy and config changes, with no need to reissue cards or deploy new readers.

Right, basically all EMV cards are ready. You just need one that has some offline tolerance, as there are limits on both the amount and number of consecutive offline transactions. I believe these settings can be updated on the chip, i.e. your bank will tell you to go to an ATM perform any operation to make sure it's up to date.

Payment terminals might be trickier as we've observed during outages that they currently don't fall back to offline transactions. But their software and business rules can obviously be updated.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#122
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from the UK where not accepting cash is only ok in hipster areas of London (or, was at the time). When I joined my gamedev studio I had colleagues asking me why I had cash, and many of them didn’t even recognise what it looked like (there was a switchover of the notes a year or two prior). There was an insinuation that I would use it for drugs. So, I suspect that the parent is right here.

Natives asking why someone has cash, and not even recognizing bank notes...? It sounds so absurd that I'm certain you're exaggerating wildly. If not, you've had an outlier experience during a limited window of time in the country. Just like the parent. This isn't really representative. Add.: another poster suggested that someone had a bit of a laugh with you by saying it, which is also entirely possible. Basic joke.

[deleted]

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#123
post #5

Some context might be useful here. I spent some time living Sweden not too long ago and Swedes practically don't use cash. It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal, to the point that most don't have any at all. Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc. This worked nice…

> "It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal ..." Are you sure this isn't impression you've gotten from isolated reactions involving a small number of individuals, perhaps just a single individual? I can't relate to the sentiment at all, having lived here for just over three decades and experiencing the popularity shift from cash to debit card. I can, in fact, not recall a…

This is something I've heard from multiple locals, not something I inferred myself. As you can see, even here in the comment section you have people both for and against the idea. The notion definitely exists, how widely it's held exactly, hard to say. In my experience, that explanation came up often enough to catch my attention.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#124
post #7

It's a check, they have invented checks.

If the "check"/offline payment bounces, I wonder if it's the merchant that is out the money? Or is there any assurance from anyone else, like maybe the network would go halfsies?

Edit: on second thought, that doesn't really make sense and would be a great way to defraud the network of a ton of guaranteed money

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#125
post #18
post #9

It's not about paying by cash but paying by card offline. How is this going to be implemented I wonder. On planes they often accept credit cards even when there's no internet. I assume this is a trust in-credit-based system because they don't accept debit cards, i.e. if you are worth being trusted with a card you can have your sandwich now and we will take care of the bank processing once we are on the ground. So may…

Exactly like that most likely, I am old enough to remember those machines where credit cards left their mark on the receipt, that is why their numbers are higher than the card. Here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

When I was working retail (almost 20 years ago :[ ) we imprinted more often because of a failed magstripe, than a computer outage. In the event the card couldn't be swiped, you could key the number in, but the printer would create an extra-long signature slip instead of the normal kind, and we'd imprint the card onto it, as proof the actual card was there. This was I assume to prevent us from having to pay a higher 'card not present' interchange fee, and in terms of fraud, made it really obvious if someone was doing something shady like typing in card numbers without the card or cardholder being present.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#126
post #5

Some context might be useful here. I spent some time living Sweden not too long ago and Swedes practically don't use cash. It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal, to the point that most don't have any at all. Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc. This worked nice…

> "It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal ..." Are you sure this isn't impression you've gotten from isolated reactions involving a small number of individuals, perhaps just a single individual? I can't relate to the sentiment at all, having lived here for just over three decades and experiencing the popularity shift from cash to debit card. I can, in fact, not recall a…

I’d say he’s correct, people under 60 that uses cash are considered, if not criminal, at least suspicious, like they have something to hide. Or simply wackos. I haven’t used cash for the last 15 years or so. Except for when I had carpenters at home who wanted to get paid in cash (to avoid taxes, so called black money).

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#128
post #5

Some context might be useful here. I spent some time living Sweden not too long ago and Swedes practically don't use cash. It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal, to the point that most don't have any at all. Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc. This worked nice…

How do kids get pocket money in Sweden? I can't imagine grandparents handing over prepaid debit cards to 8 years old to go buy candy at the neighborhood store?

Swedbank offers debit cards to kids as young as seven [1]. Depending on the kid's age (and what the parents configure), there will be different limits on how much the kid can spend.

Swish is the de facto standard for sending money between individuals [2], and that's what grandparents tend to use to send money to their grandchildren. It's fee-less (for person-to-person transfers use at least) and it connects your bank account with your phone number. So if anyone wants to send you money, they can just open Swish and enter your phone number (or scan a QR code) and send you some. You also have to sign the payment with the BankID app, which is the de facto standard for authentication [3].

And when I write de facto standard I really mean it. 99.9% of Swedish residents age 18-67 have BankID (8.6M users), while Swish has 8.7M private users (93% of which use Swish at least once per month).

[1] https://www.swedbank.se/privat/kort/bankkort/bankkort-master...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID_(Sweden)

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#129
post #5

Some context might be useful here. I spent some time living Sweden not too long ago and Swedes practically don't use cash. It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal, to the point that most don't have any at all. Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc. This worked nice…

How do kids get pocket money in Sweden? I can't imagine grandparents handing over prepaid debit cards to 8 years old to go buy candy at the neighborhood store?

My 9 year old has a debit card in her own name. She gets her allowance on that, and can use it for candy, Robux, or whatever she wants.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#130
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly like that most likely, I am old enough to remember those machines where credit cards left their mark on the receipt, that is why their numbers are higher than the card. Here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

Wikipedia claims they aren’t being used in the 2020’s, but I’ve still seen stores in the past year pull them out when the internet is down.

My company had them on-hand until around 2021, when I told everyone to throw them out. They'd last been used - at one location, during a complete POS meltdown (I don't miss Aloha at all) - in maybe 2018? No one could remember a previous time.
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