The EU says it will introduce a digital payments infrastructure to replace Visa/Mastercard & Apple/Google Pay. It will have zero fees and be 100% European-only.
"It didn’t go unnoticed in Frankfurt that Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia in March 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine……Thirteen of the 20 countries in the euro have no domestic card scheme. You use an international operator, or you pay in cash."
It hasn't gone unnoticed that the US is threatening to invade an EU country's (Denmark) territory, either. Would a future President Trump or President Vance threaten to shut down European financial infrastructure if it opposes an annexation of Greenland? Who knows, but better to take away that opportunity for leverage.
The plan is that you can link it to your bank account or open a special account at post offices throughout the EU. There will be phone apps for payments and digital Euro debit cards. Visa/Mastercard & Apple/Google Pay typically charge 3% fees; the digital Euro will have none. That will ensure it is speedily adopted by retailers and quickly supplants the US providers. Also worth noting its technology will be 100% European only, leaving zero vulnerability/leverage to non-Europeans.
Ah man, I was kind of excited until it said European-only.
I thought maybe I'd be able to build a till from scratch without purchasing a software suite from IBM written in the 80s.
Right now the best I can do is accept Crypto on such a machine.
I mean, it's gonna ultimately have to work everywhere
People don't like having cards they can't use when they travel
It's not gonna happen right away, but I don't see how it doesn't end up that way
Edit: although reading more it might not be equivalent to the existing kinds of cards as it seems to be a debit only provision (i.e. potentially lacking a lot of the protection you get from using a credit card as your main purchasing card). Will be interesting to see how this evolves
A lot of people don't even own credit cards here, so that isn't really a massive problem.
A credit card that only works domestically is not a deal breaker. Most of the time, people don't travel abroad. So, using a more advantageous card (more perks, less fees, etc.) domestically makes sense.
Domestic providers are a thing in several countries which are smaller than EU. Some of them don't operate internationally so this news isn't that weird
What makes you think this card will actually have more perks or that anybody but merchants get anything here? I get roughly 3-4% in rewards, a $100 travel voucher every year, free dash pass and Lyft memberships. My perks might not be for everyone but there are a ton of good cards out there and this seems to offer the end user few reasons to care.
Are you in the EU? My understanding is that those rewards are not available in the EU due to their much lower transaction fees. Admittedly, I'm not in the EU, so this is second hand knowledge.
No, of that's the case then it's less of a difference.
For what it's worth, the rewards they give are taken from merchants commissions. It might be great for the cc owner, but it's not very fair
Yes I understand. But fairness rarely changes consumers behavior.
It’s a public service for people in the EU and businesses operating in the EU paid for by EU taxpayers. So I doubt it will be rolled out outside of the EU. It still cost money to operate the service eventhough it is provided for free. If it ever gets to work outside the EU it will probably only be for people that have EU residency. No way they want to subsidize the transactions for people from outside of the EU with EU tax money.
If it works and grows, the service could be SOLD to foreign entities
It's DoA unless the EU mandates or coerces end users. There is absolutely zero incentive for anyone but the merchants as far as I can tell.
No fees is a great incentive
For merchants.
Yeah, for the merchants. If you were about to pay for €200 of groceries and had this card and a Visa card that gave 3% back, which would you choose to use.
Some people have preferences based on morality and values rather than a pittance of insultingly low rewards.
Yep, with you there but people are people. They will see those rewards and go for it. It is the same reason why the JC Penny campaign to remove flashy sales and discounts and just price items lower failed.
So merchants counter by the EU card getting a 4% discount over credit just like many do these days for cash. It’s easy to beat the rewards rate.
Merchants and banks, and you bank may very well incentivise you
Ironically it's EU rules that prevent merchants passing card fees onto customers
I mean, you absolutely could make a till but you still have to hook it up to a payment provider like Adyen, Stripe or a terminal that handles the payment.
Not in the EU. Visa and Mastercard have been capped to 0.5% for years.
Apple / Google pay take a small cut from the 0.5%
Diversity in payment methods would be no bad thing though. It’s amazing how Visa/Mastercard have managed to insert themselves into almost ever transaction, particularly since contactless became so prevalent.
Aren't there some other fees? Some smaller shops even outright ask if you don't have cash instead.
I am completely uninformed on card payment fees but l imagine some if this is because it's easier to underreport cash revenue to tax authorities
The merchant will often take a larger amount. For example Square charge 1.75% fees.
The 0.5% is the bit that goes to Mastercard/Visa iirc.
It's never an enormous amount, and if they don't have to let Mr Tax Man know then some small businesses won't.
I hope Americans are allowed to use it. I want to support hentai and to enjoy it without prudes getting in the way.
The technology is based on the existing Ideal system, which is already in use by the Netherlands. It works via apps from the banks themselves. Hence, you will need an account at an European bank.
Balls, guess Canada is stuck using the imperial processors. I'd have loved to use a European government system
You're confusing Wero with the Digital Euro. This article is about the latter.
It comes to America
A bunch of Americans start using it
The provider sees a growing market and likes money.
Some pastor from Iowa sees tits on the Internet and gets offended.
Religious network of nutnobs pays for boycott ad campaign.
Provider silently or not so silently bans everything that can possibly offend christian pastors from the US.
We still need a sane payment provider
Boycotting a service that has no fees doesn't do much.
It reminds me of when I worked in a call center. Asshole, screaming callers would demand to speak to someone else and expect me to be somehow upset that I got to get them off my line.
They still benefit from having volumes of money flowing through them, or at least can bendfit if we allow them to be a for profit business.
right? like oh you don’t want to use this service that only costs us money? so sad… NEXT!
Pastors from Iowa and like-minded censorship lovers from the US are probably not the target customers, so I doubt the efficacy of an eventual boycott.
Worked on Steam
Steam was pressured by the payment processors, this is supposed to be a solution to the censorship due to the Visa / Mastercard monopoly.
yes but the point OP is making is that, if it comes to America, this third payment processor will be corrupted by making more money and wind up in the same boat as MC and Visa
Steam is American, not European.
Why do you think some random religious person would have any influence on a payment system from the other side of the planet?
We aren't Americans, we can't just be bought.
Ahahah, yeah, and you're also immune to propaganda.
We've been hearing about the Digital Euro for years. Is it finally happening?
Trump really is the great unifyer, goddamn
Sorry to be an ass and english is a weird language but it's spelled as unifier, unify doesn't become unifyer. Why? Because it's a piece of shit language that's why.
Unifyer: Portmanteau of Groyper and Unifier. Invented at the end of 2025 CE, it came to represent the abhorrent character of Fascist leaders like Donald Trump uniting opposing political powers that would normally bicker.
I like that. It should be a thing.
I’ll be the enlightened centrist here: yes, let’s all try to spell words correctly, and no, do not unpromptedly correct other people’s spelling if you understood what they meant
if you understood what i was trying to communicate it was spelled correctly
Soo juu dunt tink deres a wright or rong whey too spel wrods?
This is how people write with each other in Switzerland 😃 completely phonetic
nope
Question: true or false?
Answer: yes
👍
Question: you don't believe in the flying spaghetti monster or that the moon landings were faked?
Perfectly acceptable answer grammatically: No.
That's not how spelling works.
Y u mad tho
Eh, it pretty much is. Language is fluid and constantly changing, there isn't really anything "right" or "wrong". What's "correct" in a language is essentially what people speak and write
Sure, you have dictionaries and grammar rules and such, but they're not prescriptive, they're descriptive
Soo juu dunt tink deres a wright or rong whey too spel wrods?
Depends on your definition, but so long as it's understandable, yeah
I mean, what are dialects, for example?
I'm familiar with the argument but I disagree with it. Every person learning a language disagrees with it. And every instructor I've had disagrees with it. The only people who seem to agree are the same people who misuse the language.
Do you always use literally literally, and are you careful not to talk about the enormity of perfectly innocent large things?
Language changes. People make mistakes. Neither is worth getting too upset about.
That's a very strong use of "every". English isn't my primarily language either, you know
And no, in fact, I've heard most people who have a degree en english, linguistics, whatever, to disagree with your position. Language is how it's used, not what it's supposed to be. Otherwise we would always have had one singular language, forever, and no dialects either
unless your a silly frenchmen, trying to impose order upon chaos
Can't resist correcting "you're"! Sorry sorry sorry.
The US-based financial sector fights it tooth-and-claw at every opportunity. I suspect this kind of legislation is an absolute cash-cow for lobbyists across the continent, in the same way the PPACA made a bunch of influential DC firms incredibly rich.
But can the ECB actually deliver on a useful and efficient method of continent-wide banking in practice? Fingers crossed, I guess. I just wouldn't hold my breath.
there’s a bunch of FOSS work happening. i believe GNU Taler is specifically this. it’s being funded by the EU
I hope it sees full implementation
and then wide scale adoption across the globe
I just bought something from a German online shop. I paid with a direct bank-to-bank transfer, zero fees (as far as I know).
The only problem of course is that this method of payment doesn't have any kind of insurance against fraud, so it works only with already reputable stores. And of course it's usable only in online shops.
For the love of dog, do not do this with Alibaba sellers if they ask you to. I've never gotten bit but I've heard horror stories.
Not a problem as I would never buy anything from Alibaba or Temu or any such place.
The potential for data breach there is much worse than credit/debit, you can't just get a new account number like you can a card if it's breached. You have to close your account or put it on total lockdown.
Payment by bank transfers doesn't at all work like credit card payments since you don't give them some kind of information which they can then use to get the money from you.
Instead THEY give you their bank details and you order your bank to transfer money to their account (a process made ever more easy over time and pretty straightforward now with smartphone bank apps which can read QR codes with their bank info).
At most they might get the number of the account the money was transferred from and no further information about it, the kind of information that, if leaked, is pretty much useless (can't be used to get info on who owns that account or how much money is there, much less to get money out from that account).
Maybe some countries have really bad security and secrecy laws around bank accounts, but in those countries in Europe I lived in, the only one where that is maybe the case is Britain, whilst in the rest knowing somebody's bank account number is useless.
The really risky stuff is Debit Cards which are directly linked to your bank account (for example VISA Electron) as those have none of the protections of Credit Cards and do have card data which can be used for distance purchases and hence if leaked would allow access to your accounts. Electronic bank transfers are something completely different from this.
As I understand it, and in the US at least, debit card protections have caught up with credit cards.
This is mostly true, with the caveat that the money is still missing from your bank account until customer service agrees with you about the fraud and issues you a refund, vs. a credit card where the money is missing from the card issuer’s bank account instead.
I'm not sure I understand what the risk in sharing ones bank account number is. You need to share it anyway to receive payments, and at least in my nook of Europe all online bank transfers are verified by two factor authentication.
Why not? Close the account, open another one
Yeah let me quickly inform my employer, mortgage issuer, and all the bills to quickly take/give money to another account like it wouldn't take days to get to them
That's about as good as e-mail address. Bank account number is somewhere you can send to.
Maybe, though I am not sure, someone could create a request for Direct Debit payment, but without authorization that's all it is, "please give money".
It'll be interesting to see how they'll handle steamy steam games. The whole steam and itch deplatforming saga was kicked off by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.
Won’t have any effect as long as they need to have Visa and Mastercard for other territories. In Europe you can already pay with European payment systems on Steam like iDeal (Dutch) and Trustly (Swedish) and those porn games still got removed in the territories that have those payment options.
Yes, but if that european payment provider is less strict, maybe other platforms can fill that gap.
Doesn't help us in AU unfortunately
Brazil has PIX and steam accepts it, no problems. (pix is a government created payment method that has 0 fees and is basically instant, you never wait for confirmation)
Considering the push for stuff like chat control and the increasingly global lock down on "obscenity":
They'll handle it according to plan.
Like, good. Hurt the US's soft power. But people really should be looking even a foot in front of their faces on this.
I never understood why countries allowed digital payments like this. It effectively is like giving up monetary soverenty. Of course later I realized its because debt has been used for currency creation now.
Wait until you find out about how banks all around the world report to the bloody US IRS...
Hey IRS, how about you fuck off. As the only country who taxes non-residents (the only major country. Just the US and Eritrea...), I don't think it's appropriate for your government to be requiring our banks to hand over personal information.
We need this for Canada too.
That was my first thought. I like every part of the article except the "European only" bit
You are welxome in the EU! Unless US annexes you first...
Canada is supposedly in talks with the EU for some kind of association so we might get it too
Nice typo
Wow, very cool! Absolute poggers.
Hmm, I should open a European bank account. It could help if I'm every visiting family out there, anyway.
Revolut should work, ask around friends because they give about 80$ bonus if you sign up via referral (to the person you referred, after 3 payments IIRC, but they can send half to you, or all of it).
Anything thay weaken visa mastercard is good.
I cannot wait for this to come to fruition. Let's hope that it isn't a privacy cess pit though.
credit cards already are
Holy shit, this is exactly what I was talking to my parents about over Christmas. A wallet in your phone, money lost when stolen, no tracking. This is potentially big.
The article explicitly states that that might be one option, to have a separate, offline fund that is tied directly to the phone, but it isn't the default and, again, optional. It would help during outages and also have a privacy element for those concerned.
Yes, that's what I'm hoping for. Fingers crossed!
That's not what this is. It's not a digital wallet: it's a transfer method. It's essentially the direct equivalent of the virtual debit cards most banks are offering these days.
It's a wallet, it literally said so in the article. A proposed max of 3000 Euros, with the explicit drawback of losing the money when you lose the phone.
That's for people who for whatever reason don't use a bank. If you have a bank, it's with your bank.
But I don't want my money to be lost when stolen. If I wanted that, I'd carry cash.
Then use the card for the anonymous account?
This is excellent. We should never have left the EU.
This article claims there are very initial signs that you might get your wish: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/process-trying-undo-brexit-begun-4106581
I personally can't get over the fact that a 50% majority was all that was needed for such a drastic change. The US despite all its flaws requires more than 50% for certain major things like amending the constitution. Hopefully you can one day rejoin and then make it so it would require a higher threshold like 2/3 majority before another brexit would be possible.
Thank you.
The UK has more of a set of conventions and principles than a constitution. We found out how weak that is when Boris Johnson broke the rules of Parliament to avoid losing a vote on Brexit, and made the Queen lie about it publicly in the formal announcement of the proroguement.
One of the principles is that no Parliament can bind its successor. For example, there was a fixed term parliaments law from 2010 or so that said that you need a two thirds majority to call an election before five years is up (rather than at whatever time suits the incumbent prime minister); when a new Parliament was elected in 2015, one of the first things they did was rescind that law, with a simple majority.
I worry that Farage, friend to trump and follower of Bannon, will become prime minister and lead us to such destruction that we will write an actual constitution, but that didn't do America any good once the supreme court was stuffed with Republicans loyal to trump.
I think the trick is to not elect tyrants, but Putin's propaganda reaches worldwide and the far right is rising everywhere. Perhaps it really will be global thermonuclear war this time.
let's f'in GOOOO! #YUROP
GNU taler has been working on this, I guess someone just needs to adopt it. https://www.taler.net/en/index.html
I've noticed a few retailers in Canada charging more for credit cards - debit, cash and cheque are all no extra fee's. The only reason I have a credit card is for the rewards and the necessity for things like hotels and car rentals.
If society could work in our favor and not try to force easy credit on us then we would all be better off.
If everyone wasn't trying to screw everyone else we'd be better off.
The CC merchant agreements used to prohibit charging the customer for the charges.
Friend of mine that worked at a bank had a furniture store try to do that, she got hold of some muckity-muck at the CC company while the salesperson watched (after warning them that this wasn't how any of that worked), the furniture store had their credit card machines suspended before she left the building. There was copious wailing and gnashing of teeth that she watched with a smile. She refused their offers of a heavy discount to make a phone call again and walked out.
They removed that part a couple years ago from many of the merchant agreements.
Why using archive link? Yeah well the archive site doesn't work atm...
I guess you meant to link this? https://www.independent.ie/business/digital-euro-what-it-is-and-how-we-will-use-the-new-form-of-cash/a165973061.html
Also official website is:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
Because the archive link gets around the paywall. Unless you don't see the paywall because it doesn't apply to your region, but I only see the requirement to subscribe.
However the archive link does work for me.
No I wasn't even aware of the paywall, uBlock+Bypass Paywall Clean sent me straight to the article. As someone else commented the archive link is blacklisted on some DNS, my ISP's ones too it appears.
Anyway the official link to the European Central Bank had all the relevant info.
Also I've seen the same link posted on reddit by at least 3 different users...
I've noticed that different mirrors of this service have been getting dns blocked. You should be able to swap out the hostname or use a different DNS provider to make it work.
Oh thank you! Tried that, indeed my ISP DNS weren't able to resolve the host
Pix neles
Suddenly caralho
If it was viable then I'd sign up asap.
The article didn't mention but I hope they decide to implement Brazil's Pix. It was featured in some international news recently, hope there is interest then we will march forward for a unified system outside the swift network and without duplicated efforts. And about not being 100% European, I don't know the details but inside Brazil it is mediated by the Brazilian central bank but a 5min Google indicated that a standard international solution is still in development but it will work like a network of central banks, so the EU or even each country in the EU own system keep its independence. And as a network/federated system it would also be more stable since no one unilaterally can mess with it.
Extremely unlikely. It should be wero, most likely.
why not share with australia :(
If Australia joins the EU…
I wish !
Because Australia is not in the EU
Because we already have this and have for 45 years with eftpos and debit cards?
We do not, eftpos does not go over the net
EFTPOS is a direct bank-to-bank transfer system, but online payments usually involve a payment gateway (like Stripe, PayPal) to process card details securely.
The only options we have to pay online are visa/mastercard/etc (eg. the same as Europe which is why they invented the Digital Euro) we don't have anything equivalent and as far as I know have no plans to replace this system
I have seen https://azupay.com.au/ using payid to pay for things over the net like flight tickets etc but 99% of online payments go through visa/mastercard
Europes version of EFTPOS is SEPA which is not what the digital euro is
More info on the digital euro here:
Goodbye Visa & Mastercard? The Digital Euro Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzkVBXDhTwY
Except for the surcharge on weekends and public holidays of course.
King shit. Wish our leaders gave anywhere near a shit to do this in the US.
And it will be app-only, forcing use of evilland corporation stores. Fuck that.
Read the article before spreading disinformation.
I don't think you know how a "digital-euro card" is going to be implemented. Are you really so naive to believe it will work without a non-free application running from either your phone or your computer?
And you do?
Improvements are incremental. Expecting perfect is stupid.
Besides, there's a card.
It's not an improvement. An improvement would be to offer EU-wide exactly what iDEAL was in the Netherlands. There was no need to change anything about the iDEAL system, no need for an extra app, no need for another card, just your regular bank account and any web browser + whatever transaction number solution you had.
This proposal is not an improvement, it's another step into a totalitarian regime where every single transaction is tracked by the war criminal and pedo-criminal monsters in our governments.
The wallet is supposed to be tracking free and offline, without an account at a bank. That's an improvement.
We already have offline and without a bank account, it's called cash. Also, offline & without a bank account can be stolen.
Yes, and cash online is famously difficult.
If you don't want to lose the digital cash, use the anonymous card they propose.
lmao back to square one with extra steps ?
well its still a win if visa and mastercard lose just a little money
From the article:
This lady is either completely shameless in lying to people's faces, or she is very, very stupid.
Seems everything these days are tied to a phone. Even when there is no need for it or convenient.The day we loose wide access to smartphones, society is fucked.
If that ever happened, I think the opposite would be true. We would have a chance to heal, and all those morons thriving on mobile applications would hopefully go bankrupt and become meaningless.
The world is changing incredibly fast. Change is scary but I'm loving the speed and intelligence the world's leaders are adapting to the US threats.