alt Hacker NewsCan someone tell me why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay?
Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share.
They also integrate seamlessly to UPI.
Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currencies? Is that it? Something else?
[0]: Data rules came in 2017/18, RuPay was developed in 2012 iirc. But it got unprecedented push after the rule.
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This is literally what the article is about - Digital Euro and Wero are two competing solutions that are debated right now.
It's simple: banks don't want the people they've fleeced to realise that they no longer have a role in the present age. If you let legal tender be exchanged directly via a central bank (which is semi-public by nature), banks lose a huge amount of liquidity that fuels fractional-reserve banking through loans made to generate massive amounts of cash, and without these, the banks are bust.
They are, it’s called Wero. It is a stopgap, and sits on top of SEPA.
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments)
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)
Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/
It took some time but RuPay branded CCs are also available. I have been using them for the last 2-3 years at least. They work, mostly, with UPI.
Some merchants disable RuPay CC payments even when they don't get charged merchant fees till the payment crosses the INR 2K threshold.
Strangest thing is when I can pay the guy pushing a handcart around selling vegetables using a RuPay CC while a medical store refuses to accept it.