zaxvenz'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
HEY GUYS! YOULL NEVER GUESS. Portugal already has such a platform! Even Romania has started using it!
Everyone and their cousins have their own platform. That’s the issue. No one wants to standardize on someone else’s alternative so the incumbents run supreme.
Is a federation of different platforms not possible? Warning: I know absolutely nothing about this.
It’s technically possible, guaranteed.
The problem is capitalism.
B-TR3EThis is more going into the direction of feudalism than just capitalism. A million tiny realms and every one keen of keeping their population locked in and uninformed about the outside world. I think there’s even a name for it: technofeudalism.
It was bound to happen eventually.
Visa Commercial - US Open - Tennis - Don't take American Express - Ed Grover - Navratilova (1993)
The crux is having credit and being able to put blocks on it - say for renting cars.
But I am all for a European alternative. Bring it
Are you talking about MBway? I want to have the possibility to do it also we a card. Sometimes I don’t take my phone everywhere
No. MBway is the Venmo equivalent, Multibanco is the Visa rival
I’m really confused. I thought multibanco was just what we called the atm! Even went to my wallet to check my banco ctt card. Can ELI5 it to me?
Well, it’s also the protocol! If your card has this symbol, it means it has that payment processor! Due to some weird language mixups it is both the atm and the protocol! Managed by SIBS, an interbank organisation
Thanks, this is news to me!
poVoqThe commonly shared software by all ATMs in Portugal is very cool too though. Lots of additional features like charging your prepaid sim or even paying your taxes too.
if it doesn’t do card, it’s not an alternative anyway
I was wrong. It’s another thing
Do it! Canada will come play too.
That’s a great idea. I’d welcome a new option!
We could add credit cards to the Interac system.
Alipay credit card is wild.
China ist not the answer.
your social credit score will pay for this!
Can it also pay for coffee?
This is the bitch went to poor countries to give debt
Avid AmoebaWould be spectacular if they make an alternative that does not rely on commercial banks so that having a for-profit bank account isn’t required to be able to pay for things electronically. Just like you don’t need that with cash. This is something central banks can provide to the citizens of their country. If commercial banks want people’s money, they better give an incentive. Currently they get it just so people can access the electronic payment systems.
But if course that’s unlikely because commercial banks won’t just let themselves be cut out of the sweet deal they got now.
alfredon996Digital euro is the solution
pipesAt least most European banks are happy to cut out the American middlemen (Visa and Mastercard) since they’re eating part of the cost, and we already have the infrastructure in place and working, it’s called “instant SEPA bank transfer”, most newer accounts offer it for free. The problem is the lack of political will to accelerate that indipendence and to stop hemorraging money (roughly 0.5% per transaction!)
Then as people learn to use it they’ll hopefully also stop using Paypal (another American company) when sending money to someone, or getting tracked in general every single time they use their debit card.
There’s also credit unions.
Knowing your nationality, some Canadian provinces do have a public bank too, like ATB in Alberta.
Yeah, I’m using Meridian in Ontario. While credit unions in Ontario are regulated as nonprofits, I’d still say it’s probably better if Bank of Canada provided a public chequing account and payment processing since it’ll still lower the base cost of participating in the payment system for everyone.
I think this is really low hanging fruit for fixing society - services (banking but also insurance (remember Obama’s failed public option) that everyone needs but are privately run should have competition run by the government that is publicly funded at break-even instead of for profit.
Let the for profit ones try to find reasons to exist then! But they shouldn’t just be able to enjoy monopoly for just existing and exploiting their customers.
Other candidates for a public option: ISPs, ride-sharing services, credit rating agencies, etc etc
WERO is coming all over Europe. Germany, France and Belgium are already connected and this year also in the Netherlands. It’s happening but ofcourse… much too slow for many of us :-)
I can already send money instantly, for free, through SEPA without a singular private company earning a cut or tracking me.
A bank account is needed, but there are thousands to choose from, and in the EU by law they cannot refuse to open a basic account for a private EU citizen.
Why should we use Wero/Revolut/Venmo/whatever instead? Intercompatibility within just one network means another network effect, that does not look like a long term solution to me. Just like Telegram, though very convenient to use with a nice UI, is no solution to Whatsapp.
Wero seems to be solving the problem of copy-pasting our IBAN. What if any bank app would just recognise a standardised QR code with that data? Who would then subscribe to Wero with a phone number and email and risk getting scammed or blocked for any random reason?
SEPA is not instant. It’s still one day as standard.
You can’t use SEPA to pay in the grocery store, because the cash register has no way to confirm your payment until tomorrow. That’s the thing cards and various apps like WERO solve currently.
Most of these apps are tied to a traditional card, but some are tied directly to the bank account and some can do both.
Anyway, the independence from American software is still far away, since most people will be using Android or iOS to use those apps…
The standard bank transfer takes at least a day as you said, but the instant one is regulated to take less than 10 seconds in total (in practice, it feels instant). Apparently introduced in 2017. I’ve had it on my home banking (app too) since then I think, but from my previous bank account they cost a whooping 7€, with my current bank the instant transfers are just as free as the normal ones so I use them all the time. I recently bought a used motorcycle within a morning thanks to this.
Wero itself is likely based on SEPA Instant Payments.
I was comparing them to the services used to send money to other people, but of course as you said the big thing we’re still missing is a unified point of sale payment network in all of the eurozone, maybe Wero will be the one, in that case I’ll be happy to use it, but IMHO we should have a standard public one based on SEPA Instant payments.
Wero is an added step on top, still much better than the competition, but they’re currently a convenient alternative to bank transfers (for people who didn’t discover the instant SEPA ones), and also as you noted unfortunately based on apps that run solely on American platforms. It’s mentioned on their wikipedia page too. I’ll keep an eye on them though, they could still work for me, we’ll see.
innovative
You spell “resume-based design” funny
CalaveraIn Portugal we have an app called MBWAY, it’s a national fast payment service. with that we can send money just with phone number, withdrawal from atms an pay using qr code. I’ve heard they are already interconnected with their counterpart in Italy and Spain
CyberEggIf they realy want to be innovative they should use blockchain
Lol
VitteliusWero is great for what it does (sending money to other people) and it’s going to gain the functionality needed for online commerce.
But that only covers half the functionality provided by Visa and MasterCard. You also need the functionality to pay at a restaurant or in the supermarket. You know, the card part of MasterCard?
Some European countries have their own debit card system (here in Germany for example giropay) but once you cross the border that stops working. Which is why those cards are usually co-badged with one of the big networks to act as a fallback. That’s where the EU should act to ensure that the fallback functionality isn’t necessary anymore, at least as long you’re in the Euro-zone.
You’re right, but they are working on it. You cannot build an alternative for VISA/Mastercard just in one day. Step-by-step we’ll get there. Every country has his own system, every bank has his own system. The only thing they have in common is VISA/Mastercard. It will take a few years, but the US has started something that is not gonna stop very soon. April 2, 2025 is the day that Europe started to disconnect from US dominance.
Innovation and blockchain do not go in one sentence. Blockchain is a near dead technology. It has its use cases but if you want a fast moving money transactions option, you should look into UPI by India.
We’ll see. I believe in the blockchain technology, but not in the way it is used as today. IMO it’s like the early days of the internet. Only for the nerds, until they started to build RWA. But again… we’ll see.
Oh, they can go in one sentence, if done right.
Nano offers fast transactions on a decentralized network while using very little energy.
Strictly speaking it’s not just one blockchain, but one per account, which only the account owner can update (add blocks to it).
This asynchronous design is what makes Nano so fast, because there’s no need to wait for others when updating one’s own blockchain.
What it doesn’t have (yet?) is a sufficiently large network effect, which it may never acquire.
But it is one example of an attempt at making digital money based on blockchain technology, which is not just a copycat, scam, rugpull or other malicious nonsense.
Monero comes to mind as well and maybe a handful others.
Sadly almost all around blockchain is not just not innovative, but outright evil.
Nano offers fast transactions on a decentralized network while using very little energy.
Strictly speaking it’s not just one blockchain, but one per account, which only the account owner can update (add blocks to it).
This asynchronous design is what makes Nano so fast, because there’s no need to wait for others when updating one’s own blockchain.
What it doesn’t have (yet?) is a sufficiently large network effect, which it may never acquire.
But it is one example of an attempt at making digital money based on blockchain technology, which is not just a copycat, scam, rugpull or other malicious nonsense.
Monero comes to mind as well and maybe a handful others.
Sadly almost all around blockchain is not just not innovative, but outright evil.
ClaidheamhWero would actually be a downgrade in service for people living in Portugal.
This is very slow many countries have done something similar a long time ago:
Mir (Russia)
China UnionPay (CUP)
RuPay (India)
Elo (Brazil)
Interac (Canada)
BKM (Turkey)
Verve (Nigeria)
JCB (Japan)
Mada (Saudi Arabia)
Zapper (South Africa)
Naps (National Payment System) (UAE)
BroBot9000lemonde.fr/…/does-the-european-central-bank-have-…
Christine Lagarde is not someone the world Should listen to. She is also the director of the IMF and all the homies hate the IMF:
schnapspraline
I have a friend who works on this project. Still years away, but they are at least thinking very hard of not having US dependencies since the last months. I don’t have much trust in some people involved though (exactly because for many this was not an issue until a few weeks ago).
Why? I don’t get it, how is it better than SEPA?
When you’re looking at your bank balance you’re seeing bank Euros, for which your bank has to hold a certain percentage of actual (central bank) Euros in reserve (that’s what fractional reserve banking is about: Not just the central bank, also ordinary banks can create money), when you transfer money to another bank the receiving bank will have to make sure that it has enough central bank Euros to back up the recipient’s balance. SEPA is a standard interface and procedure to negotiate such transfers.
The Digital Euro is central bank money, just as bank notes and coins. It’s a (possible) step towards a full-reserve banking system without having to actually keep actual notes and coins around. And the ECB is very aware of this which is why they’re talking so much about limiting how many digital Euros you can hold at one time so the current banking system doesn’t get completely up-ended over night.
…if that doesn’t really answer anything then that’s because money is fucking complex, and how our system works is completely unintuitive. But, essentially, Digital Euros are the same stuff as money under the mattress, just digitally.
I just thought we’ve had this forever, so maybe that’s why I’m confused.
I mean technically, yes, the accounts that banks have with the ECB are exactly this Digital Euro thing: Digital central bank money, it’s not like banks are storing banknotes in vaults nowadays. What’s new is that not just banks will have access to that kind of account.
What I missed before, another thing that this enables is a way for the ECB to do helicopter money. Back during the financial crisis the ECB was battling deflation, lowering interest rates didn’t help as banks were risk-averse and simply didn’t want to lend any more Euros from the ECB, and one dead-simple and ludicrously effective way to battle deflation is by increasing the monetary supply by just giving everyone money. The digital Euro would provide infrastructure for that. Another interesting idea would be to pay out the seigniorage (money the ECB makes by collecting interest from the banks) directly to the people, currently it’s (aside from financing the ECB itself) landing in the coffers of the central banks of the eurozone members, and from there in the general state budget. Wouldn’t be much, like 3-10 Euros a year per Eurozone resident (probably should be citizen but don’t make me look up that number), but at least it would nip certain conspiracy theories ("the state is indebting everyone with fiat money) in the bud.
But all of that is possible now. What exactly are we trying to change?
It’s possible in principle now. But not actually. There’s no button the ECB can press. Quite relatedly, the German government wanted to distribute its income from CO2 taxes to the people and had lots of trouble actually getting bank details for everyone.
I fear it will be horrible as long as it does not come close to something like Taler:
www.taler.net/en/index.html
www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/
All for it! The orange fucking idiot is fusing the EU.
Humm, this will probably mean that the EU will need to look into if we need to setup a European mainframe manufacturer.
I am talking AS400/iSeries type stuff.
MasterCard and VISA process a huge number of transactions per second, and there can’t be any risk of loosing a transaction in progress, so you need an extremely stable central processing node with very high redundancy.
At the moment I believe that only IBM and Fujistu makes mainframes these days, IBM is American which has now shown to not be an ideal long term trading partner, Fujistu is Japanese, with a strong presence in Europe, but they made the UK Post Office computer system, which makes me want to stay, far, far, far away from them.
Either one, whoever we pick will make it easy to get the system going, but to migrate away will be a nightmare.
I wonder if we could build something on open hardware like Risc-V, this make me wonder is Risc-V would even be suitable for this application
IllecorsMainframes have nothing to do with this.
RISCV is still just a computer - would work just fine on a logical level. Raw compute would be an issue with today’s hardware.
CPUs don’t make something a mainframe, the whole system design does. They’re transaction-based throughput monsters with all kinds of bells and whistles when it comes to reliability, seamless fallover, etc. The European CPU initiative currently focuses on supercomputing (weather simulations and such) which is a completely different beast when it comes to dataflow but certainly a good foundation for general compute.
Looking into my crystal ball, at some point SAP is going to enter the hardware business.
There has been massive progress in distributed computing and consensus algorithms (which is what you need for consistency in a distributed system). We don’t need 1970 style centralised systems anymore.
For normal tasks, absolutely, and if we can do it without a mainframe while maintaining the stability and redundancy of a mainframe system, then we should look into alternatives.
However, mainframes have been in continous development since they were created, there are absolutely tasks they still do better these days.