Visa and Mastercard handle nearly half of Europe's card payments. The digital euro aims to change that | Fortune
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25 replies
47% only? I thought it was much worse. But yeah if I go to my local grocery store that is 300 meters from where I live, and anything I buy we send 1-2% of the value to a company that is thousands of miles away, it makes no sense. Surely there should be a better way
I do not claim to know the big/whole picture of their business model, but to minimize your contribution to their profit I think you could pay with cash.
If you pay with cash, how do you get your kickback?
If these are small operations, they really appreciate you paying cash, as they will keep more. If you do that consistently and build a good rapport they will genuinely become friendly with you, which can have unexpected benefits that are not very tangible.
i may know a bit more since i used to work for a bank, i think you're right on the money
I wonder what the global reach is for those two companies, much of the online world appears to ultimately be powered by them.
We need alternatives for everyone.
Well maybe the transactions themselves aren't ripped through USA, but since the introduction of SWIFT they get a copy of every single transaction even if you use a national debit/credit card. I've honestly no idea why that makes any sense.
Canada should move to the Euro for international trade.
lol someone down voted you for that
Must be an American.
US Americans we call ‘em these days.
Like the Latinos, "We're all Americans. You mean 'United States Citizen'".
They're taking their damn sweet time with this digital euro
There are already GNU Taler and Wero, both with half assed EU support.
I've been waiting for taler for so long. I even have the app installed and I've played with their kudos.
But support is absolutely non existant, both in europe and the rest of the world. I wish govts pushed a lot more for it, and gave it all the money and resources it needed.
Wero is very rapidly taking over europe, with a lot of important banks now supporting it. It's mostly businesses that need to start accepting it, at this point.
Yes, exactly, unless EU forces them with proper backing like with legislation or some other measure, they won't take off. Also Wero is still very limited "Wero is currently available in France, Germany, and Belgium, with more countries joining soon."
There is zero support for Taler in the EU. They are currently raising money for creating an institution with the license to handle real money in the EU. The GLS bank in Germany was supposed to work on it, but reportedly they stopped their pilot project because of unspecified concerns. Taler is only actually running with real money in Switzerland.
Oh, even worse then. I vaguely remember that Taler was indeed backed up by EU but perhaps "backed up" is not correct phrasing.
They do have a grant that is still active https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135475
But that doesn't give them the legal ability to exchange Euro...
There are pros and cons with fast solutions, but also with slow solutions.
Does this mean that we will also move away from using the USD as the universal exchange currency? Because so long as that stays America still has us by the balls.
Not straight away but it has been slowly happening fir a decade.
Bad news though, the USD gets replaced with the yuan not the euro as the global exchange unit.
It's driven by tradeflows plus geopolitical power. Europe is losing there to China (although the US is getting destroyed).
The end of fossil fuel dependence worldwide will be the inflection point.
I'm really appreciating watching Europe going through its decoupling revolution from anything trash yank. It'll be good for everyone.
Wie really need some european sovereignity law: If you are providing critical infrastructure like such a payment system, you need to decouple your business from geopolitical risks. If Visa and Mastercard want to provide payment solutions, they need to restructure so that no US president can sanction EU individuals or shut down everything.
@CAVOK good.