Harry Sintonen1d 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 threadDr. Christopher Kunz
@harrysintonen In addition to Russia cutting the cables, my concern is for VISA and other US credit card providers cutting service to specific, targeted individuals or even whole countries. We've already seen precedent for both.
Apr 13 at 3:07pmWeb
Show threadLed By Gilded Fools1d ago
@christopherkunz @harrysintonen This was my question also: Could having this have prevented that French Judge from having all bank access denied by the USA, or not?
Show threadDr. Christopher Kunz1d ago
@MHowell @harrysintonen I'm neither a lawyer nor a banking expert, but I don't think that the offline emergency payment option would have helped said judge. They were subject to US sanctions, so their credit cards were cancelled/invalidated, not temporarily blocked. The second part of the Reuters article - internationally federated payment processing that is independent of Mastercard, VISA and arbitrary political sanctions would really go a long way.
Show threadHarry Sintonen1d ago
@christopherkunz A solution that mitigates this risk would be preferable, indeed. As reported in https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr250228_1~7f0697af45.en.html in 2022 only 37% of payments used national systems. Even those likely have many dependencies to systems outside of EU.
Most EU countries rely on international card schemes for card payments, ECB report shows

The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the European Union countries which have adopted the euro. Our main task is to maintain price stability in the euro area and so preserve the purchasing power of the single currency.

European Central Bank