Mastodawn

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

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Dr. Christopher Kunz 1d ago

@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.

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Harry Sintonen

@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