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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Leif Samuelsson 1d ago

@harrysintonen

It will still be difficult to use payment systems from the US if they decide to put an embargo on us, like they threatened to do with Spain. We need EU based cards!

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Harry Sintonen 1d ago

@leffe Agreed. Currently only 37% of payments use national systems (and it's unclear how much dependencies on US systems those might have). https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr250228_1~7f0697af45.en.html

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

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Leif Samuelsson 1d ago

@harrysintonen

We have a national payment system in Sweden called Swish, but it requires the use of an operating system from Apple or Google, and it doesn't allow accessibility software to be present. So in either case, we are quite vulnerable.

#svpol #eupol #Swish #BankID #a11y