Hey guys!
Visa and Mastercard are the 8th and 15th biggest companies in the world, worth more than 1.1T USD (!!!).
For any purchase made with a credit or debit cards and you give them 2-3% of your money.
That’s one the biggest waste of money from EU you can imagine.
I’m trying to find viable alternatives but except paying cash it seem there is no real alternative. Even in where I live there is an alternate payment service but they take the money from my mastercard, duh…
And the idea would be to have something even my grandma can use, not some nerdy solution, any thoughts?
Edit: Bitcoin would be a solution if widely adopted, but more realistic would be something accepted by every cashier machine, and if possible using the NFC of your phone, a kind of “Apple/Google” Pay, that goes directly from your bank to the bank’s shop. Where I live all debit cards are either visa or mastercard…
Edit2: There is an EU initiative that seem to be starting with WERO, never heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
Edit3: It seem that Paysafecard and Skrill are EU solutions and sometimes proposed in the payment method, but not with STRIPE payment solutions
Finland is also probably not in scope of this project. It’s pretty much a project of private banks (and semi-private banks) that’ll only cover Germany, France and BENELUX. OP’s claim of it being a “EU initiative”.
For the other things:
But yeah, such stuff happens occasionally. But usually you should get some exceptions in such situations.
I deeply dislike the rules about “marmalade”, because it’s slowly impacting how these words are used in the German language. Marmelade is any kind of jam (strawberry was always the most popular flavor). I think we got an exception, but it’s still shifting.