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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Leeloo 22h ago

@harrysintonen
It works for debit cards? How?

The one reason that I have accepted having a debit card is the absolute guarantee that it cannot be used to spend money I don't have. Otherwise, that's a credit card, and I will not accept a credit card contract.

Without access to my bank, how does this guarantee work?

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Nirro

@leeloo incidentally, that's not a guarantee at all in any debit card I have used. In Spain at least some debit cards let you spend up to a certain point in the red, and if you sanitize the debt in less than, I think, 24 hours, you aren't even charged interests for the negative balance.

So I'd guess it's probably something like that. You are able to pay offline, when the bank hears about the payment it gets deducted and if you overspent you pay **heavy** interests while your account is red.

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Leeloo 17h ago

@nirro
That is not a thing I have ever consented to, and allowing that would make my bank guilty of fraud.

Also, if it were the case, what would be the point of making me wait for the check whether there is money in my account before allowing me to fuel my car?

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Nirro 17h ago

@leeloo well, in Europe some banks do it like that. It's clearly detailed on their terms and conditions as well so it is not fraud, it's the contract they offer.

I didn't get the second part of your message. What I said is in the event of a loss of connection payments default to being accepted so you... get your gasoline immediately regarless of your balance. Payments are processed later. I'd assume that if your bank THEN detects that you had a negative balance, it'd proceed to charge interest.