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

riksbank.se

361–370 of 581 posts

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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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'm Swedish and if someone insists on doing a transaction using cash when Swish or card is available, I'd immediately start to wonder if it's for some kind of more or less shady reason, probably tax evasion at the very least.

Swish uses the proprietary "BankID" system, and the company behind it has let frauds go on for years and blaming the victims. Therefore I have chosen not to support them.

It didn't have proper two-factor authentication when you just had to tap a button on the smartphone to approve a log-in or a bank transfer (and users didn't always tell which was which). Now it requires reading a QR code — which it should have done all the time.

AFAIK it still does not use any secure key storage on the smartphone, so if your phone gets rooted by an attacker, the attacker could gain access to your bank accounts. So far, frauds have been much easier to pull off, so criminals have not bothered to hack it. (that we know of)

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

#362
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 you pay for things that are just one or two euros? In my local boulangerie they don't accept cards for less than 5€, so if I just want a baguette I need to have cash.

If you ignore supermarkets, basically no place sells stuff in that low of an amount. Using Stripe as an example, transaction fees are 1.5%+1.8kr. I’m hard pressed to find a place that sells items with a price below 20kr, and even cheap crap from china costs at least that when buying online. So unless your business has an unexpectedly large amount of low price transactions, it’s not a big issue.

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

#363
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK and I have friends who will tell you hand on heart that they have never handled a £50 note. They know they exist but they haven't had one.

Is that just because it's an unpopular bill? Most Americans have probably never used a $50 bill either.

Is that really true? I've had more than a few $50 bills (and I've never sought any out).

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

#364
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…

> Swedes practically don't use cash It is interesting how the European cash culture is so very different between the countries. In Austria I struggled to find places that would take any kind of digital payments. Germany wasn't as bad, but was pretty bad. My experience is about 3 years old.

[deleted]

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

#365
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…

Often this is indeed trust-based, but the trust isn't due to you having a card issued by a trusted bank (most airlines accept debit cards too), but rather due to passengers being extremely visible and well-identified:

In-flight credit card fraud is an incredibly bad idea, given that most countries check your ID at least at some point during getting on the plane, and seats are usually assigned as well. (Doesn't mean that nobody tries, of course [1]).

Sometimes airlines also use ACARS (basically airline-specific telex over VHF, HF, or satellite) to send the card number to their backoffice for authorizations of large amounts, such as business class upgrades.

These days, of course, Internet connectivity is getting more common, and with that the problem will likely go away.

[1] https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/pair-spared-jail-after-a...

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

#366
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So do you like always take split bills for everything? Like when eg. 4 coworkers go to eat together (ie. not a situation where one person pays everything)? Over here in the balkans/mitteleuropa you just put some approximate amount of cash on the table. Same for kids, you're not giving a kid your credit card when you send him to a bakery to get bread, you give him a couple of euros in cash.

[deleted]

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

#367
post #110
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.

Your suspicion is wrong.

what a fantastically useless comment.

No insight provided nor sources.

Just an opinion, a strong assertion, confidently stated with a tone of superiority.

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

#368
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…

> cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal

Sounds like GrapheneOS.

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

#369

> “In Sweden, we pay digitally to a large degree and the use of cash is low. The general public being able to pay by card for example for food and medicines even in the event of a serious breakdown in data communication, that is offline, is a milestone in our intensified efforts to strengthen emergency preparedness”, says Governor Erik Thedéen. I understand that it's very normal to use a CC in Sweden (and many places…

Riksbanken have been pushing for cash payments too. Personally I think its too little too late. The culture in Sweden has already changed to purely digital

https://www.riksbank.se/sv/press-och-publicerat/nyheter-och-...

Sweden has also done multiple pilots of a digital currency pressed by the state. This might be an interesting alternative to not give up control of our currency and privacy to banks and cc companies. Also supposed to work offline. https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/rapporter/e-krona...

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

#370
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EMV standard has long supported an offline transaction flow. AFAIK it was the default almost everywhere in Finland circa 2011, contactless there was almost always instantaneous. Digging into why that was compared to the invariable wait when using contactless in the UK revealed this flow. The card has a variety of risk counters on it that allow it to securely decide whether an offline transaction can proceed, at l…

Yes the EMV standard has offline card payments baked into it, and most banks in the EU and UK used to use offline transactions for contactless. Your experiences in the UK are almost certainly linked to the card issuer you were using (was it a Monzo card by any chance), and nothing to do with it being the UK. The vast majority of the legacy banks have always used offline transactions for contactless. However there has…

> However there has been a bit of shift towards online transactions

Not just a bit of a shift: Offline-preferred transactions are basically a thing of the past. EU rules have nothing to do with it (offline EMV is fully SCA compliant as well, as the chip can keep count, although it's a bit annoying to keep counters in sync if there's more than one); it's mostly for risk management and simplification reasons, I believe.

> The terminal has the transaction cryptographically signed using symmetric encryption with a private key

Offline transactions essentially always require card authentication as well, which requires asymmetric cryptography. (Otherwise, you could trivially forge valid-looking cards and offline terminals would be none the wise since they obviously don't hold the symmetric keys for every card issued; that would be way too risky).

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