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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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
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.
The private system, yes. But the digital euro will be a public unique system for all the Union.
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.
This should have happened decades ago.
It never happened because governments are corrupted and don’t serve the public.
We’re kind of there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
We just need to expand it to more countries.
Bancomat, Bizum, Wero, MB Way, Vipps etc. all need to be interoperable
I have wero automatically in my bank app, France.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
Russia still has ‘Visa’ and ‘Mastercard’ branded cards, they just use local payment rails instead. Even before 2022 this was the case for local transactions albeit less so.
VISA/MC have advantage that you can use them for foreign transactions, it’s widely accepted provided your country isn’t sanctioned. So a hybrid approach like what Russia did between 2014-2022 may be good for Europe. Worst case, US sanctions you and you lose ability to do some foreign currency transactions, but Euro and similar transactions work just fine.
But I know its legally and politically difficult in Europe. Even the CBDC plan listed in the article has banks pissed about losing deposits from their balance sheet to the Central Bank (since Digital Euros are central bank liabilities) and fees.
That’s why
Despite the substantial progress, two major issues remain: ‘holding limits’ and ‘compensation’. Holding limits determine the maximum amount users can keep in a digital euro wallet, while compensation mechanisms concern the fee models for commercial banks that provide digital euro services.
to prevent too much deposit flight, and btw you won’t get paid ECB interest rate with CBDC unlike the banks who hold reserves.
and VISA/MC cards still have two other advantages. i. it’s widely accepted worldwide, you can use it for foreign exchange. ii. chargebacks are possible. The latter can be fixed with locally branded cards (eg Russia has Mir) or I suppose CBDC can be made to support it, but does the EU want to?
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)
