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

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

riksbank.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 581 posts

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

#481

Post by majkinetor »

avianlyric wrote: post #465
majkinetor wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered how come that some online merchants where I record the card do not ask for auth or 2 factor and some other does. For example, I have recorded my card info in a webapp that I use to pay the bills, and it never asks for anything, which is good, as I have many bills to pay, and I wouldn't want spam of 2FAs. Can you provide some technical terminology on this behavior or links, since you seem to be in th…

Ultimately all this stuff comes down to risk and risk management. The card networks themselves don’t provide any technical enforcement of most of their rules, beyond low level technical rules around message format and structure (and even that enforcement is pretty small). Instead they effectively make all the parties that connect to the network responsible for rule enforcement. If a merchant follows all the rules cor…

Kudos for this great explanation, everything is now clear.

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

#482

Post by SiempreViernes »

noduerme wrote: post #315
renhanxue wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We usually use an app for that (Swish, it's kind of like Venmo I guess, developed in collaboration between the six largest banks). We don't really do transaction reversals in the same way or as commonly as in the US. Paying for a used car in cash would actually be difficult because handling an amount greater than the equivalent of around USD $1k immediately starts tripping KYC/AML flags at any bank if you try to depo…

Wow... depositing more than $1k would trigger AML. That's incredible. In the US it's not uncommon for contractors to pull $10k cash at the end of a week to pay their workers. Some of that may be due to tax evasion or, just as likely, the workers being in the country illegally. I suppose this is another major reason cash is still "tolerated" in the US, because the casual labor market depends so heavily on undocumented…

Not every time, very certainly less than on 5% of all normal transactions, and the actual fraction will depend more on whether you count currency conversion fees and how frequently the person you are asking is buying from outside the EES.

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

#483

Post by ricardobeat »

tempay wrote: post #448
andrewshadura wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the Netherlands, no. The card can be a bank card, and you can be billed at the end of the month automatically through direct debit. It also wouldn't work as you describe, as the terminal at the point of entry doesn't know how much to charge you since it doesn't know where your journey ends.

Some transit systems work by putting a hold on your card for a nominal amount. When you finish your journey it then only claims the cost of your journey

Thankfully that’s not the system GVB uses, it’s incredibly annoying to have these transactions and reversals when trying to do your own accounting.

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

#484

Post by xigoi »

tossandthrow wrote: post #338
blurrybird wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I am Australian and we have a similar adoption rate of cashless payments. If a merchant tries to promote cash options I immediately think they’re doing it for tax evasion reasons - not because of the touted reason that “card payments cost more to process” (they don’t once you factor in the cost of handling cash).

Here is likely not that much handling cost for an independent hairdresser just earning their own (quite meager) salary. In the EU you can not charge a card fee on consumer transactions, so the merchant has the eat the cost. If your revenue is - 2-3000 Eur a month, payment fees (and terminal subscription fees) can have a big impact.

0.2% of 3000€ is 6€. I’m not sure how big of an impact that is, considering the non-negligible costs of handling this much money in cash. If a business earns more money after accepting cash, it’s probably because they don’t pay taxes.

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

#485

Post by lstodd »

lxgr wrote: post #395
messe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US domestic? I've found it's somewhat rare to see here in the EU, but there are a few airlines that offer it.

That said, just because there is no passenger connectivity doesn't mean the airline doesn't have some, for operational reasons. Even if that's just a narrowband satellite or VHF (ACARS) link, credit card transactions take very little data (POS terminals are 80s technology, after all). That said, I still don't think that that's too common – building out cabin Wi-Fi for card authorizations only is probably not worth it…

Well while seats do have a passenger name to them, people end up in interesting places on underbooked long flights like over the Atlantic. Cabin crew sometimes gets excited if people move too much. But this is rare.

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

#486

Post by al_borland »

lxgr wrote: post #413
Daniel_sk wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case of debit cards in Europe. Debit cards are tied to bank accounts. Most people only have a debit card or don’t even know what a credit card is (or what the difference is). We just call them “cards”.

You can buy debit (or more accurately prepaid) cards in supermarkets in Europe too (which is a big and relatively diverse place, so just because that is/was not a thing in the countries you're familiar with doesn't mean it didn't exist).

Prepaid cards are a separate category of cards to debit cards.

Plenty of places allow debit cards that don’t allow prepaid cards.

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

#487

Post by hashmush »

noduerme wrote: post #315
renhanxue wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We usually use an app for that (Swish, it's kind of like Venmo I guess, developed in collaboration between the six largest banks). We don't really do transaction reversals in the same way or as commonly as in the US. Paying for a used car in cash would actually be difficult because handling an amount greater than the equivalent of around USD $1k immediately starts tripping KYC/AML flags at any bank if you try to depo…

Wow... depositing more than $1k would trigger AML. That's incredible. In the US it's not uncommon for contractors to pull $10k cash at the end of a week to pay their workers. Some of that may be due to tax evasion or, just as likely, the workers being in the country illegally. I suppose this is another major reason cash is still "tolerated" in the US, because the casual labor market depends so heavily on undocumented…

> But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?

No, not at all. The Swish rails are free to users. But I've never had to pay any transfer fees for domestic transfers anyway. They are just much slower than using Swish (instant transfers) and much more clunky (bank account number etc. vs. phone number/QR-code).

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

#488

Post by madaxe_again »

avianlyric wrote: post #219
g-mork wrote: 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…

The tech is fundamentally fine - where the problem arises is human behaviour.

When offline contactless payments first emerged in the U.K., there was a significant spike in unplanned overdraft usage and disputed transactions, as people rapidly realised it essentially worked as a free line of credit, up to £100 or £250 depending on your issuer.

This quite quickly caused issuers to push up prices on offline transactions, which made them less appealing to merchants - add to that that people were talking about them being a hotbed of fraud, and merchants err away from offering them, PCNs start dropping the capability due to lack of demand, and here we are today.

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

#490

Post by 101008 »

noduerme wrote: post #289
101008 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here in Argentina

It's been 10 years since I lived in Argentina, but at that point having a credit card (not a debit card) was still reserved mostly for the folks in Barrio Norte. Has that changed now, or is it still mostly debit?

It's mostly debit and digital wallets such as MercadoPago. MercadoPago will launch a credit card though, so that may change things.
Post reply on HN