Now that the US sees the EU as a potential enemy, Europe has moved to ensure its financial system can never be sanctioned or shut down; something the US has done to Russia, Cuba, and Iran.
By late 2025, efforts centered on the Digital Euro, a nonprofit payment system run by the European Central Bank (like euro cash). Due by 2030, it would offer lower fees and quickly replace much Visa and Mastercard usage. While still in development, other solutions arrived sooner. Instant bank-to-bank payments, bypassing cards, are expanding rapidly. In February, 130 million users across 13 national systems were linked in a Europe-wide network aiming to cover all of Europe. Fees are a fraction of Visa/Mastercard, though unlike the Digital Euro, it’s not yet available as a debit card; only online and on phones.
The EU also wants to decouple from US software and is preparing its own alternative to Microsoft Office.
Europe Is Breaking Up With Visa and Mastercard — and It’s a $24 Trillion Problem
Europe builds Microsoft-alternative ‘Euro-Office’ to reclaim digital sovereignty
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We’re kind of there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
We just need to expand it to more countries.
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I have wero automatically in my bank app, France.
This should have happened decades ago.
It never happened because governments are corrupted and don’t serve the public.
It didn’t happen in the past because all software companies were monopolies, i.e. google, microsoft. and the same applied to banking.
that’s changing now.
Alternatives to these monopolies have always been around, at the government they use special encrypted computers and phones to make sure their own communications and data is secure.
Hopefully, Europe will offer these alternatives to Americans. I want to be free of MasterVisa’s yoke.
Oi!
We Aussies have been in Eurovision for over a decade.
Does that qualify us for this payment system?
Cheers
No, but only because you are technically a British prison colony and England left the EU.
Goddamit!
UK still fucking us over!
And somehow the dumb cunts won’t vote to Brexit Australia!
Here in Sweden we have a service called Swish, it is the equivalent to the Norwegian service (with a far funnier name) Vipps, and similar to the US Cash App.
I don’t know what the backend is using, but it is a local service that you can use in many shops.
I lost my bank card for a week and while annoying, I mostly managed using Swish.
Yeah but swish and BankID are owned by the Swedish banks and thanks to that they are not interested in partaking in many of the cross border systems as they don’t want competition in Sweden.
Sweden may be progressive in some ways but we are completely backwater when we allow the banks - who constantly get caught in laundering schemes - to control vital infrastructure.
They are also refusing to integrate their apps with “competing” id apps such as Freja. If the authorities expect them to profit from infra there needs to be regulations for these things.
It’s curious how Denmark, Norway and Finland ended up with Vipps Mobilepay while Sweden was left out.
They banks wanted to keep their monopoly on the payment market and have no incentives to allow competitors.
It can’t come soon enough, the only problem I see is that at a global level every country is developing their own closed system that does not operate with others and when you are travelling visa/mastercard remain the only true cross border solution. I wish countries collaborated more on a system like matrix or lemmy where the backend is the same across the globe even if the end user experience is completely different.
The private system, yes. But the digital euro will be a public unique system for all the Union.
AFAIK, Here in Qatar we have our own network called “NAPS”.(alongside Visa and Mastercard)
Amex and Discover are good then? /s
