Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a former Sanders supporter, it became clear that even though Bernie was likely acting in good faith, the establishment used all of their levers politically and in capital-controlled media to limit him to the role of controlled opposition. Emphasis on "controlled." > ethical capitalists That is not a coherent concept, especially in late stage capitalism.
Thinking there’s no such thing as ethical capitalism is laughable. Your purity test is counter productive and ultimately just doomer signaling. Sure I get it billionaires are fuckkng us over but that has more to do with the failure of US democracy than capitalism.
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
721–730 of 811 posts
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry. In EU. When 2 countries from you, there is a FCKIN' war happening. That shouldn't be happening. French banks on Czech soil should operate under Czech, not French laws. Otherwise the Czech banking authorities should go after them. Something is fishy about that. Also, which banks do French citizens working in…
Yes this is very bizarre. But this is official story, contractors and employees who worked for Czech arms manufacturer got their personal! accounts disabled. They had mortgages in these accounts and bank notify them to move mortgage elsewhere. Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Goodbye. https://militarnyi.com/en/news/czech-banks-discriminate-agai...
[1]https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/ekonomika/ceska-ekonomika/na-hypo...
[2]https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus...
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the Czech branch of the French bank operates under Czech not French laws. French rules don't have jurisdiction in Czechia.
That has nothing to do with why this is happening.
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#724Wero is not and will not be a card network will all its features so not a real competitor.
Also, currently the perfect alternative for european is instant transferts (and openbanking) that was imposed by EU to banks. That is the working quite well and the equivalent to Pix in my opinion.
But, especially for OpenBanking, european banks have done everything to block open systems like that, that gives more control to consumers.
So, here comes Wero, the goal is for the most awful legacy Europeans banks to create a new monopoly under their control. They use the "instant transfer" network, they sugar coat that with a proprietary stack to match phone number/emails with iban accounts and to give each other a few exemptions of 2 factors confirmations and so. But access to the network and protocols will be secret and kept for themselves to prevent fintech and competitors to disrupt their grip on consumer money spendings.
If you look at it, Wero is not an innovative stack, it is the usual java shit that you find in the old banks. The kind that make your bank app a real pain in the ass with stupid limitations.
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#725Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment. SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.
> SEPA Instant Payments also solves that. Even more than now there is a QR code format for SEPA Instant Payments. Some invoice have a QR code and when it is scanned with a bank app, the fields for a bank transfer are prefilled. IBAN, amount, etc... We just need an app to generate this QR code for the amount one wants to request.
The stupid problem here is that as EU was pushing SEPA countries themselves came up with the QR payload formats. And since it was first introduced and popular in more eastern europe countries... the western countries can't just follow the already popular codes but have to change the payload format for pointless reason (human readability). There is huge NIH syndrome with German/French/Netherlands tech.
So now you have one format that uses new lines as deliminator, other format uses : as deliminator and another that's not human readable at all and it's binary.
Of course all of them are using same SEPA and essentially just prefill the information into the bank app. I wouldn't be surprised if banks just gave up and parsed the data in all the formats, picking the most reasonable automatically.
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then use a service that offers escrow. I don't need my groceries to use insurance for the eventuality that the store goes belly-up in the 2 days until I can check that the products arrived in good order Base payment products should just do payment at operating margins rivaling a non-profit. It's public infrastructure
I'm quite happy with the status quo that I don't need to negotiate escrow with every random online service or store.
I saw your reply earlier but came back to it because I'm ordering from a new store and they actually offer a discount if you pay with SEPA instead of one of the 11 other options that are various forms of "pay in installments" (take up a credit basically), "pay with insurance", or "pay with your favorite american payment provider". I have no problem paying slightly less than the advertised product price! :) It's a well-known store so imma trust their customer support in case of issues, and the product price is such that insurance makes absolutely no sense (I could bear the loss nearly 100 times over and still make rent this month)
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know ;)
I can't imagine in what world it sounds like a good idea to attach an extra insurance product as a mandatory step to use cash online. Feel free to take out insurance for every 5€ product you buy online but I don't want to pay an extra % of my income to the finance industry just to use the money I've earned
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#729This 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…
Now, even transfers in the tens of thousands move instantly. This was also a response to apps like Venmo potentially entering the market - now you can just pay to a phone number or email, as long as it’s been explicitly linked to a bank account. This is by far the preferred way to send money here and third party apps are not common.
They’ve also now introduced PayTo which manages debits and payments online with no fee. You simply approve the transaction in your bank’s app.
Australia also has widespread Visa and Mastercard use, but Eftpos has always existed - which is a fee free alternative around since the 1980s. It supports contactless, but that isn’t widespread due to weak international support and can only be used with debit cards.
The downside is that new features need to be implemented by each bank app, but it’s been interesting to see some of the smaller credit unions collaborating for example.
Re: Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
> should redirect me to my bank Eugh. The problem with that is that people don't verify they've actually been sent to their bank. An attacker will set up fake merchant sites, pay for Google ads to get your traffic, then have you log into your bank to pay for things. The more we normalise this, the quicker people will fall for it.
If they haven't been redirected to their bank, verifying with their mobile banking app using a QR code will not work.
Does the entire transaction take place on the phone? I don't think that's a good option.