Chief of Dutch Central Bank: US influence on payment systems is concerning, working on alternatives for Visa and Mastercard.
Pinbetalingen kunnen gebruikt worden als drukmiddel omdat ze via Amerikaanse bedrijven lopen. "Onwenselijk", noemt DNB dit risico.
I heard that Norwegians managed to open the Apple Wallet, so the iPhone can have an app that does it without Apple's stuff :)
Yes it'd s called GNU-Taler, Chief
Try it, you might just like it ;-)
I really like the concept of Taler.And I hope it goes somewhere.
Cashless payment is fucked. Using a phone to pay with? Sorry, only google wallet or apple pay, and in most cases only visa or mastercard. It's only recently that that Danish "Dankortet" is getting support in those apps. Bit fucking late, but US led companies don't give a fuck.
Deny the money changer profit.
Take market share away from these parasites.
I would love to have an EU bank card. Hope we get one soon.
GNU Taler seems to be a good thing to look into. Not a crypto currency but a payment system which preserves anonymity of the buyer.
Yay GNU Taler is very promising, but I fear banks prefer proprietary systems.
It may become widely used if there's strong customer demand for GNU Taler, or regulation requiring an open electronic wallet. Most banks would probably be dragging their feet.
Money changer will always go this route hence why laws must be put in place to promote this.
Practically EU can't compete with US payment networks but I think going open source would permit them to actually compete. Not sure if there is sufficient political will to get it done.
EU governments wasted decades of spending on EU mega corps... Same way Germany wasted decades to fund Russia...
EU using all that tech spend on open source and actually using that open source could really fuck american corpos while giving us an out from dystopia they are building
It has been a while since this appeared; I wonder if it picks up steam. Now or never?
Too bad about crypto.
This is the exact kind of situation it was meant to deal with: finance independent of bad entities. But it’s such a dumpster fire…
I don’t think there’s a purer example of social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something neat so quick.
Doesn't work when the valuation goes up and down like a yo-yo. You need same currency.
Stablecoin is a thing. So is a system to control inflation.
The more pressing issue to me is the core premise: a totally anonymized but publicly recorded financial system makes no sense, especially when the user generally won’t grasp it. It’s just begging for thieves and scammers, and that’s what it got.
It really depends on the cryptocurrency in question. Some coins are much more credible than others. Lumping them all in together is like saying that the Japanese Yen and the Lebanese Pound are the same.
There is GNU Taler which is quite cool, but thats not really ready for use yet sadly.
Oh yeah, that seems really cool. The core premise is much more practical.
social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something
I mean, it still works for getting around Visa and Mastercard. For instance it can be used to make donations to various media piracy groups. It's just that it's so useful to scammers and many people see the technology as a whole as being one 'brand'.
It’s more than a perception problem now, it’s a culture one within the crypto community (as far as I can tell).
Even if you treat the most prominent crypto as a utility, the sea of hype and speculation will affect you.
If anything, I'm really glad how Europe has stepped up and started cooperating more as a consequence of US actions these past few months.
The Chinese jokingly call Trump "Comrade Jianguo", because of how his trade war has made China become more independent and stopped relying as much on American companies.
In the same way Trump's latest tantrum seems to be good for the Europe.
Look into Wero. Only a couple countries and people to people payments for now, but should take off quickly as a universal Euro payement method
It's about time.
There's Wero, a European alternative to VISA and Mastercard.
Is it? Doesn't look like they offer debit/credit cards.
Looks more like a PayPal alternative.
It’s based on iDEAL, which we use in the Netherlands since 2005. All the Dutch banks are connected to it and when you pay, you approve the payment in your banking app or website, after which it’s immediately deducted from your bank account and the webshop gets an instant payment confirmation. Variations of this are also used peer to peer, for example for splitting the bill or when buying second hand stuff. You send someone a payment request (url) or show a QR and payments arrive instantly on your bank account, without any fees.
So indeed, even though it’s immensely popular and widely used, it’s not a full replacement for physical debit cards and it doesn’t offer credit.
Yup that’s the current state of it. They say they’re planning to add in-store and online payment options though
It's a PayPal alternative, but developed in tandem with most European banks. That way, it will at some point also be used as backend for your normal debit and credit card payments, instead of VISA / MasterCard. If I remember correctly.
Please expand it to Canada too. We need a real alternative to Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
Canada shares a land border with Denmark and a maritime border with France.
I think that is sufficient to include them in any extended EU schemes.
(To the degree that they want it, of course)
We also administer Vimy Ridge in France. While it isn't Canadian territory, we have been granted permanent usage of it. It's a little bit like a land border. :)
The EU plans this for many year, but the problem is every country is doing its own thing with its own standard, that is not working anywhere else. In Germany for example we have Giropay as a solution, which doesn't work in other countries. As it turns out, people move though, that's why for a couple of years now every bank is switching to VISA debit cards...
As far as I know, Giropay is being replaced by Wero, which is already supported by some banks in different European countries.
It is so far one if the better PayPal/Visa/MasterCard alternatives I‘ve used, but adoption is still a problem.
Yeah I’ve got a notification about Wero in my Sparkasse App but haven’t bothered checking it out yet lol
I have a couple of friends that seem to like it tho, I just rarely send any money
Exactly. Austria has eps which works well within Austria and with Austrian companies online, but no further than that.
Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they're somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.
If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.
Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.
Portugal has it's own network, Multibanco, and I know our central bank is working on a system targeted to the SEPA+ area. We already can send money to each other usong our phone number and our fiscal number.
I'm Portuguese and also lived in other countries in Europe and Multibanco is a vastly superior system to everything else I've seen, but on the ATM side rather than the payments side (everybody seems to have their own payment solution or, like the UK, rely on the likes of Visa and MasterCard) - already back in the 90s in Portuguese ATMs, in addition to withdrawing money, you could check your bank account balance, get a statement with the last transactions on your account and even pay your bills all this well before widespread internet access and online banking: that stuff was way ahead of its time back then.
Right now they've added stuff like touchless mobile payments and transfers, but the rest has caught up with them so you'll find such solutions in most countries plus that whole system is entirely local as it's the product of ages ago (before neoliberalism) the government forcing the banks to get together and create a company - SIBS - under shared ownership of the banks, responsible for setting up and managing a national interbank payment systems.
I wouod even say that the Multibanco system probably helps Portuguese banks maintain market lock-in against external competitors, which does get translated to Portugal having pretty high banking fees compared to the rest of Europe, especially for one of the poorest countries in the EU.
We're so capable, it's crazy we needed to be threatened to realize it.
fuck YES!
ALSO: fuck plastic bank money, cash is king
Cash is king