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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Led By Gilded Fools 1d 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?

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Dr. Christopher Kunz

@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.