Harry Sintonen22h ago

Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Estonia are soon enabling offline debit card payments for at least seven days without network connectivity. The change covers payments for essential goods in physical trade, such as food, medicine, and fuel. Each country has made - or is in the process of making - the required changes to their related regulations to enable it.

The motivation for this change is to enable payments even in exceptional situations such as network disruptions due to sabotage or conflict. TL;DR: You can pay for essentials even if Russia cuts the cables.

Plans for this change were announced in May 2025: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nordics-estonia-plan-offline-card-payment-back-up-if-internet-cut-2025-05-07/

#resilience #preparedness #infrastructure #payments #banking

Show threadHarry Sintonen22h ago

Denmark has implemented this change now: https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/news-and-knowledge/publications-and-speeches/other-publications/2026/status-of-the-card-payment-contingency-measure-in-denmark

Sweden should be done with the implementation by 1 July 2026: https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payment-preparedness/offline-payments/

Status of the card payment contingency measure in Denmark

In the event of an outage in the card payment infrastructure, or if the internet is down, all adults in Denmark with a Danish-issued payment card from Dankort, Mastercard or Visa can now make offline payments in most nationwide supermarket chains for at least a week. This applies both to their physical payment cards and to card-based wallets on their mobile phones, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. The same will be the case at 40 per cent of pharmacies in June, and the remaining pharmacies during the third quarter of 2026. This means that the Danish Payments Council will have achieved its objective of establishing a nationwide card payment contingency measure. The resilience of payments in Denmark is further supported by the fact that 80 per cent of Danes have at least one payment card that can be used offline in most stores not covered by the contingency measure.

Nationalbanken
Show threadjandi

@harrysintonen Sorry to ask before reading, but, are there links to the technical implementations in any of the articles?

If not, do you have any links?

If there are, I'd appreciate if you tell me (a "like" is enough). Sorry for the laziness 😶‍🌫️

Apr 13 at 1:26pmWeb
Show threadslotos21h ago
@jandi @harrysintonen Reqlly interested in this too. Not even the tech of it—I don’t expect any surprises there—but rather the organizational decisions behind them all.
Show threadHarry Sintonen21h ago

@jandi My understanding is that this is all based on the existing EMV technology and doesn't require new hardware. Basically it's just enabling existing features. Sorry, but I don't have technical specs for this.

@slotos
As for the regulation, each country has a slightly different process and bodies doing it. Usually it's the national central bank with some kind of payment council (that has participants from various stakeholders running the payment systems, for example https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/what-we-do/safe-and-efficient-payments/the-danish-payments-council).

The Danish Payments Council

The Danish Payments Council brings together some of the most important players in the payments area in Denmark. They exchange knowledge and views on developments in retail payments in the Danish payment market. This promotes insight and transparency in the market, so citizens and companies can trust that payments are made quickly and safely. Danmarks Nationalbank chairs and provides secretariat services for the Danish Payments Council.

Nationalbanken
Show threadjandi21h ago

@harrysintonen @slotos Thank you. The nationalbanken.de is the link with more info IMO.

Interesting stuff, thank you for posting, and @skinnylatte for boosting.