Now that the US sees the EU as a potential enemy, Europe has moved to ensure its financial system can never be sanctioned or shut down; something the US has done to Russia, Cuba, and Iran.
By late 2025, efforts centered on the Digital Euro, a nonprofit payment system run by the European Central Bank (like euro cash). Due by 2030, it would offer lower fees and quickly replace much Visa and Mastercard usage. While still in development, other solutions arrived sooner. Instant bank-to-bank payments, bypassing cards, are expanding rapidly. In February, 130 million users across 13 national systems were linked in a Europe-wide network aiming to cover all of Europe. Fees are a fraction of Visa/Mastercard, though unlike the Digital Euro, it’s not yet available as a debit card; only online and on phones.
The EU also wants to decouple from US software and is preparing its own alternative to Microsoft Office.
Europe Is Breaking Up With Visa and Mastercard — and It’s a $24 Trillion Problem
Europe builds Microsoft-alternative ‘Euro-Office’ to reclaim digital sovereignty
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Hopefully, Europe will offer these alternatives to Americans. I want to be free of MasterVisa’s yoke.
Oi!
We Aussies have been in Eurovision for over a decade.
Does that qualify us for this payment system?
Cheers
No, but only because you are technically a British prison colony and England left the EU.
Goddamit!
UK still fucking us over!
And somehow the dumb cunts won’t vote to Brexit Australia!
As an American, there’s a chain of instinctive thoughts that pass through my mind when I see another news article about the US losing another piece of world dominance:
Oh no, this could hurt me! Wait, I don’t make money from these companies.
My country will lose tax revenue! Wait, massive corporations pay minimal taxes anyway, this doesn’t affect the ability for my government to function.
The Visa/Mastercard employees working internationally will lose their jobs! Corporations have mass layoffs willy nilly anyway, this isn’t different.
The executives and corporate owners will lose revenue! Wait, they’re the ones who can afford to lose income the most out of anybody.
They’ve really done a good job dismantling any reason for me to give a shit about US corporations losing money.
“How will I pay for stuff if I go to europe??”
Oh wait, I cant afford to do that anyways
As an American, credit cards have been enshittified to the point of forcing me to use debit or cash. The best rewards credit cards have degraded into garbage and most restaurants and lots of stores have stopped eating the credit card fees and pass them to the customer. So instead of getting 5% back from credit card rewards, you’re getting 2-3% and you’re also paying that an extra fee when you use your card at establishments, so at best it’s usually a wash. There’s really no point anymore. It makes more sense than ever to pull your money from banks, put it in a local credit union and stop trying to game rewards credit cards from bigger banks.
It is high time that a European, cross-border payment service was established. This should have happened decades ago.
To me, a regulated payment standard like UPI in India seems to make the most sense. But I also find decentralized approaches, such as the GNU Taler, interesting.
Two thing are important, though: This can’t happen fast enough, and under no circumstances should we rely on private companies again.
We’re kind of there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
We just need to expand it to more countries.
Wero is owned by European big banks. That’s a slight improvement over US multinationals, but in an ideal world I would like my payment processor to be non-profit and owned by the people.
Bancomat, Bizum, Wero, MB Way, Vipps etc. all need to be interoperable
I already use wero. However, I wasn’t aware that this is already a cross-border initiative and could develop into a Europe-wide service.
Thank you very much for the info!
I have wero automatically in my bank app, France.
It’s far inferior to PayPal. Not all banks support it. Far less support by shops. No buyer protection.
It’s a start, though. If you are waiting for the perfect replacement to magically appear, it’s never going to happen. Widespread shop support takes time too.
Sure. Wero is just an alias to an IBAN. It doesn’t have any of the very useful features of PayPal or a credit card. It’s half assed and unattractive. An alternative that only has „we‘re European“ as a feature is not good enough. I don’t think it will succeed because of that.
I use Wero for basically everything and don’t have any problems with it. Maybe I don’t buy from companies that are dodgy enough? 🤔
This should have happened decades ago.
It never happened because governments are corrupted and don’t serve the public.
It didn’t happen in the past because all software companies were monopolies, i.e. google, microsoft. and the same applied to banking.
that’s changing now.
Alternatives to these monopolies have always been around, at the government they use special encrypted computers and phones to make sure their own communications and data is secure.
In Portugal we can choose in the terminals to use our local network for debit, Multibanco. This network exists since the early 80s and all banks are part of it.
Yeah but non nationals of Portugal cannot use it. So it doesnt help cross border payments like UPI from India does
The problem is that all EU countries have their own system, but the problem is that all work just inside of a country. You can’t use Multibanco in Spain, and someone with a German account can’t use a Girocard in Portugal, the same for international online shops.
If I recall correctly, the systems Portugal, Spain and Italy already have were having talks to integrate with each other, in hopes of then being able to integrate with the new German/European initiative with minimal effort.
I’ve not looked it up again in a long while, but apparently we now have interoperability with MB Way and Bancomat. Idk how well it works though. https://bizum.com/es/internacional/
If you use it to pay in stored however, the issue is not really that you can’t use MB Way in Spain, it’s that Bizum is not that deployed in physical stores yet. And by yet I mean this shit started deployment like 5 years ago and no store I know near me takes it. Edit: never fucking mind! Apparently they are launching something similar to google pay in May this year.
Yes, of course, but at least we can avoid using ‘murican’ payment systems inside the country. Can’t wait for Wero to be available here, will change my cards to it.
Pix from Brazil is also amazing, instantenous and free for individuals
It can’t come soon enough, the only problem I see is that at a global level every country is developing their own closed system that does not operate with others and when you are travelling visa/mastercard remain the only true cross border solution. I wish countries collaborated more on a system like matrix or lemmy where the backend is the same across the globe even if the end user experience is completely different.
that’s far too much power to entrust to people. I say break it up and be grateful for the inconvenience.
The private system, yes. But the digital euro will be a public unique system for all the Union.
Amex and Discover are good then? /s
Here in Sweden we have a service called Swish, it is the equivalent to the Norwegian service (with a far funnier name) Vipps, and similar to the US Cash App.
I don’t know what the backend is using, but it is a local service that you can use in many shops.
I lost my bank card for a week and while annoying, I mostly managed using Swish.
Yeah but swish and BankID are owned by the Swedish banks and thanks to that they are not interested in partaking in many of the cross border systems as they don’t want competition in Sweden.
Sweden may be progressive in some ways but we are completely backwater when we allow the banks - who constantly get caught in laundering schemes - to control vital infrastructure.
They are also refusing to integrate their apps with “competing” id apps such as Freja. If the authorities expect them to profit from infra there needs to be regulations for these things.
It’s curious how Denmark, Norway and Finland ended up with Vipps Mobilepay while Sweden was left out.
They banks wanted to keep their monopoly on the payment market and have no incentives to allow competitors.
AFAIK, Here in Qatar we have our own network called “NAPS”.(alongside Visa and Mastercard)
At the same time our smart EU leaders have made us critically dependent on their LNG and oil after they blew up Nordstream.
Much more important
