I hate that there is not much societal change going on other then moving business around and rebranding.
It’s at least a start. We cannot expect our governments to do more, the rest is on society at large. A good start for more change would be the expulsion of any US nationals from EU countries.
We can imagine the end of the world. We can imagine the collapse of society, but we can no longer imagine the end of capitalism.
If you wonder why all the bureaucrats suddenly turned anti-globalist (while 20 years ago it wasn’t so), that’s because they saw how powerful a domestic centralized system makes their kind.
And 20 years ago it wasn’t so, because they really had to kill all sprouts of such domestic systems.
It’s the old Chinese\Roman\whatever game, where bureaucrats and troops were, for different events, moved further from their home provinces and old assignments or closer. Only what’s happening is the opposite of the best course of action in that game, we have a weak emperor, no emperor in fact.
So - 20 years ago choosing American companies made European bureaucrats more powerful. Now they are powerful enough to prefer domestic suppliers of all these services, now they can control those new suppliers and become even more powerful.
The world is always in change.
Finally!
Yes please
I would like this. I enjoy playing hentai games, but MasterVisa bans or alters the games by denying their services to creators and stores alike. This is an affront to free speech.
Let’s not forget, they Almost forced Onlyfans to shut down because they were going to cut them off from their payment system.
??? relevance to parent comment?
Overruled.
For real? What the f that’s absurd
Yup. For example, the game “Seeds of Chaos” had to change their introduction on account of demons trying to corrupt the protagonists through blackmail, and the removal of the minotaur scenes.
Visa and MasterCard are why we have never had a blockbuster minotaur movie
Yeah they can exert a lot of influence
California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii would also like to request EU status and new non facist payment methods
The Cali data companies will be in for a shock when they suddenly have to comply with any regulation, let alone the GDPR
They got CCPA
What I imagine that to contain:
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USA! USA! USA!
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Communism bad!
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See 1 and 2
Except if you’ve done any privacy work you’d know that GDPR and CCPA are accounted for simultaneously in almost every case, so they end up being equivalent in reality.
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You forgot New Jersey.
Do it! Canada will come play too.
We could add credit cards to the Interac system.
That’s a great idea. I’d welcome a new option!
Would be spectacular if they make an alternative that does not rely on commercial banks so that having a for-profit bank account isn’t required to be able to pay for things electronically. Just like you don’t need that with cash. This is something central banks can provide to the citizens of their country. If commercial banks want people’s money, they better give an incentive. Currently they get it just so people can access the electronic payment systems.
But if course that’s unlikely because commercial banks won’t just let themselves be cut out of the sweet deal they got now.
At least most European banks are happy to cut out the American middlemen (Visa and Mastercard) since they’re eating part of the cost, and we already have the infrastructure in place and working, it’s called “instant SEPA bank transfer”, most newer accounts offer it for free. The problem is the lack of political will to accelerate that indipendence and to stop hemorraging money (roughly 0.5% per transaction!)
Then as people learn to use it they’ll hopefully also stop using Paypal (another American company) when sending money to someone, or getting tracked in general every single time they use their debit card.
agreed, this is really low hanging fruit for fixing society in general- services (banking but also insurance (remember Obama’s failed public option)) that everyone needs but are privately run should have competition run by the government that is publicly funded and run with the goal of break-even instead of for profit.
Let the for profit ones try to find reasons to exist then!
Other candidates for a public option: ISPs, ride-sharing services, credit rating agencies, etc etc
There’s also credit unions.
Knowing your nationality, some Canadian provinces do have a public bank too, like ATB in Alberta.
Yeah, I’m using Meridian in Ontario. While credit unions in Ontario are regulated as nonprofits, I’d still say it’s probably better if Bank of Canada provided a public chequing account and payment processing since it’ll still lower the base cost of participating in the payment system for everyone.
Digital euro is the solution
This is a CBDC that she wants, something they have been talking about for years. Likely they want this because many European countries wont be able to survive higher interest rates caused by aging demographics, as the US high interest rates suck up global liquidity making rolling over debt more expensive.
They will be able to slow inflation using the programmability of the money to prevent you from surpassing your allotted climate credits, as they are already forcing companies to measure their c02 usage in a system called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). They will also be able to increase inflation via issuing expiring stimulus, which would allow them to issue stimulus without worrying about the 18 month lag.
What Europe also wanted was a global climate change system, where they collect tax revenue from carbon credits, which would be charged to foreign emitters. Trump recently front run this with his own tariff system, following project 2025’s idea of eliminating all international tariffs. Though countries like Canada are talking about joining Europes climate plan instead, I think all countries will have to decide where to hand the keys to their domestic economic policy.
I hope Canada and Mexico can join. It’s time to start bankrupting murican companies.
Does using Google wallet give any fee to Google?
No but I stopped using apple/Google pay to stop giving them data. It’s a choose your poison though they stop the stores from collecting data as your card keeps changing.
They don’t get paid directly, just with your data.
Most card transactions in Norway go through a local system called BankAxept, and have for decades. A lot of Norwegians don’t even know, because the same cards also support VISA, and they think that’s what they’re using.
Same thing in France with CB. I’ve only recently understood why I was asked to choose between “CB” and “Visa” when paying by card online, when both were written on my card. Actually, when I got my first card as a teenager, I was a bit nervous about that, I was scared of “making the wrong choice” when paying online; I rememberd asking adults around me what that was about and how to choose which one to select, and not one of them could give me an explanation, they told me that there was no difference and that I should just pick one at random. Now I feel kinda bad about all the times that I chose Visa, because from what I understand their fees are generally higher for the seller.
Same in Germany with the girocard system. Key feature is that there’s no real intermediary, it’s a standard the banking sector came up with to easily authorise ordinary bank transfers. Online shopping was never an issue in Germany push come to shove you just wire them the money.
And I have no fucking idea why the EPI is launching a whole phone-based system instead/before standardising debit card infrastructure. That app offers literally nothing that I can’t already do with my card and bank app on my phone short of a wallet and why the hell would I want that I already have a giro account. And why would I want to send money to a telephone number instead of an IBAN. What kind of stuff are those people on that they think that’s a feature.
But at least the general structure of the EPI is similar to how girocard came about: A consortium of banks, public, cooperative, private, coming up with interoperability standards. Germany has like 1400 banks (and that’s after a lot of mergers), most of them only serving a district or larger town and surrounding villages for those there was never an alternative to working with each other and the over-regional banks jumped on to not be left out.
Sometimes, all you need is some marketing. E.g. it’s been possible to print out a QR code with your account info so you can receive transactions at a flea market for ages (in lieu of having your phone display it and people scanning from there), and ever since SEPA instant payment it’s basically cash, as far as the seller is concerned.
My main takeaway from the comments on this post is that basically all of Europe solved this a long time ago at the domestic level, but that international interoperability is lacking.
That’s the state of literally everything in Europe.
Hey now, we were able to standardize the curvature of cucumbers.
Maybe there was a more important need for it. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Standardise*
European spelling is superior to US spelling!
No, not all of Europe solved this. The payment systems they made are for internet payments with instant confirmation. Many European nations are still on the Visa Debit or Debit Mastercard systems for card payments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)
https://www.docs.pay.sibs.com/payment-methods/
Ideal, bizum, bancontact, cartes bancaires, Mbway are all euro based. I wonder why they are not interoperable.
I get the phone based system. People remember their phone number and email address, they do not remember their bank account details. It’s a lot easier to initiate the transfer in the moment if it’s based on something the recipient can just tell you. QR codes are an acceptable workaround for a small vendor, but not really ideal for paying back the friend who paid for lunch.
Pretty much every country has something like that ready or in the works. Venmo is huge in the US, Vipps (which uses the aforementioned BankAxept in the backend) is emerging as the de-facto standard for small transfers in Norway.
It was a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere due to how hard it is to do bank transfers there, but the rest of the world is also very keen on the concept.
It was a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere due to how hard it is to do bank transfers there,
Is it? Now I’m curious. Care to elaborate?
Except for apps like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and Google Wallet, all of which allow you to transfer money to an email address or phone number, there is no convenient electronic way to transfer money from individual to individual in the US. The only other real alternative is handing over cash or writing a check. You can technically do a wire transfer, but those are really designed for stuff like buying a house or something, and usually either cost money, take days to settle, or usually both.
I can’t speak for every other country, but in Norway we’ve at least for a couple of decades taken for granted the ability to just initiate a transfer of money to someone else’s bank account. You just enter the number and amount in your Internet Bank, and it gets transferred free of charge either overnight or instantly. It’s how we’ve done everything my whole adult life.
In the US, the prevalent way to pay rent is still to either write out a physical check or enter the numbers from a check into some web interface which is then somehow able to suck money out of your account. Sometimes a bank will offer to mail the check on your behalf, but it’s still very much a check.
I did not know that and I think it’s wild that the largest economy in the world still operates on such prehistoric methods.
It’s not in the incumbent oligopoly’s interest to innovate.
I think this is more that American exceptionalism makes them incapable of getting inspiration from other countries, so they end up doing something entirely different. If it’s better, the rest of the world adopts it as well, and if it’s inferior, the rest of the world points and laughs.
E-check is definitely in the point and laugh category, while payment apps based on phone number or email like Venmo are getting copied by various other countries. Granted, I don’t think the US was first with phone-based payments, various developing countries in Africa have had it for ages. But I do think they came up with it independently, because they habitually ignore innovation done anywhere else.
I know that both Portugal and The Netherlands also have their own local systems, but you can’t really use the system of one country in another country.
The only country in Europe which I know for sure doesn’t have its own local payments system is the UK, though it would not surprise me if there are others.
What’s really needed is some sort of pan-european payments system, ideally one which also gets accepted in the rest of the World. The closest we have to it at the moment in the EU is that you can do normal (so called SEPA, if I remember it correctly) bank transfers to any account at any bank in the EU, all for the same cost (generally free) independently of it being in the same country or across borders, and quite a number of retailers all over Europe do accept payment via bank transfer, but that’s not an actual payment system, it’s a bank transfer system that you sometimes can use to pay an online order from a retailer.
As things stand now, if for example from my Portuguese bank account I want to buy something from an online store in Germany, the payment has to go via Visa (Mastercard isn’t really common in Portugal)
with all the transactions all around the world can you imagine the money they’re making by doing literally nothing and if this move is successful how much money they stand to lose? I would be surprised if they were not literally talking to hitmen right now.
I can recommend the Aquired Podcast Episode. A 3h long Story of how VISA became the world leader and how much profit they make year over year. It is craaaaazy. We need to get rid of Visa and other US bases payment providers ASAP!
Back before crypto because a speculation vehicle we very nearly got rid of all this bullshit. Unfortunately it just wasn’t convenient and widespread enough before people decided holding on to hashes forever was gonna make them rich.
HEY GUYS! YOULL NEVER GUESS. Portugal already has such a platform! Even Romania has started using it!
Everyone and their cousins have their own platform. That’s the issue. No one wants to standardize on someone else’s alternative so the incumbents reign supreme.
Is a federation of different platforms not possible? Warning: I know absolutely nothing about this.
It’s technically possible, guaranteed.
The problem is capitalism. Every company is too selfish, and every government too neoliberal, to build some at cost publicly-owned globally interoperable payment system.
Even now, the buy EU movement is largely just replacing US-oligarchy-owned services with EU-oligarchy-owned services. It’s better than funding the American nazi party, but it’s not a long term solution.
This is more going into the direction of feudalism than just capitalism. A million tiny realms and every one keen of keeping their population locked in and uninformed about the outside world. I think there’s even a name for it: technofeudalism.
It was bound to happen eventually.
Maybe the @[email protected] is in a good place to enforce a cross-border payment system.
The crux is having credit and being able to put blocks on it - say for renting cars.
But I am all for a European alternative. Bring it
Are you talking about MBway? I want to have the possibility to do it also we a card. Sometimes I don’t take my phone everywhere
No. MBway is the Venmo equivalent, Multibanco is the Visa rival
I’m really confused. I thought multibanco was just what we called the atm! Even went to my wallet to check my banco ctt card. Can ELI5 it to me?
The commonly shared software by all ATMs in Portugal is very cool too though. Lots of additional features like charging your prepaid sim or even paying your taxes too.
Well, it’s also the protocol! If your card has this symbol, it means it has that payment processor! Due to some weird language mixups it is both the atm and the protocol! Managed by SIBS, an interbank organisation
Thanks, this is news to me!
All for it! The orange fucking idiot is fusing the EU.
