alt Hacker NewsEurope's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
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I'm guessing US will be fuming about this.
One not-so-fun fact is that when the US sanctions anyone, their ability to transfer and use money via Visa etc. is taken away. In the modern world, being cut away from even using your debit card is a huge, massive hassle.
It is one of the many different ways being sanctioned makes life more difficult. I can't imagine the US being too keen on giving up those powers.
I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated.
No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect.
Time to do away with these foreign entities.
I'm surprised that Canada doesn't seem to be talking about doing this.
We've already got a strong payment processing brand with Interac, it's used daily for millions of debit transactions, and supports all the features you'd expect (in Canada) from a payment card (tap, chip&pin). There's also the MasterCard Debit and Visa Debit branding which seem to bridge debit transactions to the MasterCard and Visa networks. And there's already Interac-capable terminals basically everywhere that Visa and MC are accepted.
My thought is that Interac should launch a credit card brand called "Interac Credit". The actual credit would be via the banks, just like it is with Visa and MC. Interac already has the relationships with merchants and banks to make this happen, and it has the mindshare with consumers to make it successful.
Even putting aside issue of geopolitics, it's quite baffling to me that every country besides China and Russia are paying ~0.2% "sales tax" to corporate America.
Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.
Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...
When India moved to UPI in the last few years something very interesting happened. The same devices that accept UPI (usually some android based POS) also accepted a plethora of cards. Previously merchants would be hesitant to take anything other than cash or charge 2% for visa/mastercard. But with wide adoption of digital payments they now just accept any payment with the goal that they don't want bad reviews and/or lose customers.
Point being that with a cheap alternative, it's actually much more convenient now to use a Visa or Mastercard especially with tap to pay because with competition being so high, the diversity means people allow all payments.
This is the fourth attempt in two decades. Here is the short history of earlier attempts:
https://x.com/moo9000/status/2006304163404128289
The difference this time is that Digital Euro is forced by ECB and control (and deposits) are taken away from banks.
Can I use it without installing their software on my smartphone? Question is rhetorical - of course not, and your smartphone also needs to pass Google's or Apple's remote attestation schemes. Good riddance.
Is it really just PayPal left offering a sane online payment service?
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From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...:
> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.
Most, if not all countries have their own domestic payment systems. This is about cross-border payments within the EU.
“Breakup” seems a bit exaggerated considering the % of payment volume which might switch to the new system.
Would be nice of the EU to provide a digital payment service quasi free of charge - without commercial provider's typical predatory fees and other costs. And don't counter with "privacy" .. it's not like all the American companies already have to provide backend access to their data to the NSA and other 3 letter agencies.
Crypto gets a lot of hate... but this really puts its utility into perspective: No counterparty risk with random banks or foreign companies, near-instant settlement, vastly lower fees, immediate fx conversion.
A major win would be if this would be adopted at some point in the future outside of the EU.
In Asia you can pay with Alipay in most countries. In South America you can pay QR codes via Mercado Pago (for example).
Or at least make this new system interoperable with the more established players worldwide without the need for a Visa/Mastercard.
People here don’t understand that Visa and Mastercard get only a small part of the fee. Most of it goes to the issuer and the acquiring banks.
I wonder if this will draw tariff threats?
Last August US threatened tariffs on Brazil over their Pix system. One of the reasons given was that people using Pix instead of credit cards deprived Visa and Mastercard of fees.
If you have the cash its super easy. Need to have at least 300k euro frozen in the account, go through the process of getting EMI (european money institute) licensed and start fiddling with GNU Taler.
Many comments here assume this is about some hypothetical future project. Just to be clear: Wero is already live and in use.
Nothing in France takes Discover, and my bank decided to go with Discover about 6 months ago. "Great" decision, thanks.
Wero is fun to use, but there so many features missing. The terminals, for example.
Or, an easy way for vendors or car rental agencies to block a set amount when you rent a car.
However, all of these things can be built and I hope Wero gets the time to grow into a full alternative to US-based payment systems.
Not because I want them to fail, but because this market can use a bit of competition and new ideas.
Like the article mentioned many EU countries have their own payment systems. The challenge is not to build something from the scratch but rather to make existing solutions interoperable. The first talks about cross-border integrations started many years ago but they went very slowly. However, some work is being done, just a week ago a first transfer was done from Spanish Bizum to Polish Blik.
I use ING DIBA bank. I enabled WERO in the app, as that’s the only way for me to use it.
I can send money ONLY to my contacts. It doesn’t allow to type in phone number, one needs to create a contact.
I feel like Europe is just doomed. The stupidity is endless here.
Europe had a payment processor in Europay, the E in EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa), but stupidly allowed MasterCard to acquire it.
So Wero is not a credit card, but something more like Venmo? How is it supposed to replace Visa and Mastercard?
GO BLIK! Go! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik
I m wondering why they are trying to build a competing product rather than a successor product?
The digital euro could be a good candidate here and it also aspires to have cash-like privacy features. It's also mentioned in the article as separate and hopefully non overlapping product.
In Poland we have quite popular and handy BLIK system: https://www.blik.com
Card terminals here in Poland usually accept BLIK payments
It is also very popular payment method in e-commerce
Once European banks realize how horrible EU is to do business with they will reunite with Visa
I didn't care at all about Wero until Trump indirectly declared us Europeans as enemies. Now I really hope that it manages to replace Visa/Mastercard.
Though at least in Germany we have "girocards/EC-cards" that are not owned by Visa/Mastercard. Some banks are phasing them out in favor of a Visa/Mastercard debit card.
So maybe this is just an attempt to make Wero a bit stronger in comparison to PayPal. AFAIK Wero does not replace a credit card.
Sigh
The fact that EU sees dependence on American tech in the same way as Russian oil now is saddening and telling.
Americans and American companies had it really good - our tech extracted money from the world, and they were mostly willing to pay for it. And it was an incredible advantage to the US.
But now, it seems that we are happily throwing all that away, for what benefit I do not yet see. Regardless of whether this effort succeeds, why stoke this fire at all?
I would say I hope Americans realize what they’ve done by making their own companies enemies of the world at large, but I’m not holding my breath for any sort of self reflection.
What changed between then and now is that plastic cards stopped being the objectively best way to pay. Most countries already have online payment systems that are safer and easier to use than plastic cards - Wero is about putting them under one brand one network. Once this is done and people are familiar with the brand, you need to update terminals to accept Wero, then you roll out a software update that makes bank apps use virtual Wero cards or something like that.
It's not as much about replacing Visa/Mastercard, as it is about plastic card technology becoming obsolete, and the duopoly failing to react to the market because of corporate inertia. Had they created a modern online payment system, Wero would never take off.
logbuch netzpolitik did an episode last year about this wero and honestly… i got the impression it doesn’t bode well for wero
In the end we will need to thanks Trump if we actually get a more federated and less centralized Internet (well, or layers on top of the Internet)
I for one enjoy my cash back points with American Express. This is not a commercial.
If only they'd moved so quickly with Russian natural gas in 2008 when Georgia was invaded.
That's 2-3,5% extra growth for the EU.
Lots of skepticism on how Europe could possibly handle something like that on their own.
NASDAQ (NYC) currently runs on software/systems built and maintained by Stockholm-based developers. NASDAQ merged with Swedish OMX in 2008, founded as Optionsmäklarna OM AB in the 80s.
China successfully did this with UnionPay; no reason why the EU can't do the same.
"Wero lets users send money using just a phone number — no IBAN, no card, no intermediary."
As long as all the other cards still get acceptance, this seems like a great system.
> National pride and competing banking interests repeatedly sabotaged attempts at unification.
That's exactly the problem. Several actors have won the market of their country, but only of their country.
Will Trump be enough to make the europeans realize that they need to work together, and that an italian win is just as good as a german win?
> Wero lets users send money using just a phone number
Of course, what could go wrong!!
Unbelievable, a chance to make a whole new standard, new system, new everything, but yet we still have the need to tie it to ancient protocols, only to find later it’s broken by design and we start adding all sort of duct tape solutions to make it “secure”..
This is either a completely and entirely stupid move by some boomers living in the 80s, or maybe, it’s intentional to enforce something insecure like a phone number/GSM as a “national ID” to easily track citizens and force them to have a phone number linked to their real life, and I think it’s the second one, the same reason why many “secure” chatting apps still require a phone number.
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(Almost?) all these EU efforts to be independent from the USA are born with a fatal flaw. They require you need to be an Apple user or a Google user.
Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.
Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from there, only if your bank allows you to use Bizum via web. And it's not very practical or convenient to do that when you're in a store and want to pay, in contrast to swiping your credit card.
So while I see very convenient gaining some sovereignty from American companies for these payments, I think we're losing it when we will need devices controlled by other American companies in order to use the new system.