The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.
I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.
Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".
The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.
Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
> Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The main reason why infrastructure of any kind (water, sewage, etc) is a public infrastructure - even in largely privatized economies - is that infrastructure is essentially a natural monopoly. Food on the other hand isn't and it can largely be traded as a commodity (which is, at least in my opinion, a major reason why our food system is so broken).
Food from multiple suppliers is easy to put on trucks going to multiple shops using same roads. Road are workable shared access medium. Water really is not. Unless you deliver it in tanker trucks using roads.
Electricity itself is fungible in moment, so electricity can used shared access medium of grid. But similarly it makes little sense to have multiple roads in densely build areas. So both roads and water pipes end up as natural monopolies in build up areas.
You should share your answer instead of posing a rhetorical question because the answer isn’t obvious at all and ranges across a large variety of options including food should be infrastructure.
>Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The water pipes are public infra. They pump it into your house.
The more people that use the same system, the cheaper it can get. Drawing competing systems of water pipes to houses to let companies compete would simply drive up the cost for everyone.
Same with electricity, gas lines, sewage...
Water itself is not publicly owned. You can buy water in the store like food.
Medicine should count too. And a lot of other things that we often realize to be essential only in a crisis situation. But I'm sure GP didn't intend their list to be exclusive.
Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.
Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.
- The EU is not a state, it's a governance body composed of representatives from individual member states. Every state is responsible for implementing their take on the directive.
- "EU poor track record on fostering innovation" - many things you use online have been researched and conceptualised in the EU. Even if they go elsewhere for funding, don't mistake where "innovation" happens and where it gets packaged by VC money for sale and enschitification.
- compliance costs: I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
In an age where card payments are ubiquitous, being suddenly cut off from VISA/MasterCard networks can severely disrupt a country's economy. Especially if it heavily relies on tourism.
When it comes to tourism, this problem will always happen if the tourists are coming from the side that's cutting off the other. Without an interface between European and American payment systems, Americans won't be able to pay in Europe.
Payments aren't but issuing currency is. State doesn't monopolize the payments. State creates a regulation and common standard across the EU. It's the banks who would do the payments, not the state, and for that banks would receive a standard fee so you as a consumer always know how much you pay for the service.
There is already. Almost every country on earth has single state controlled currency.
Fiat currency is already a natural monopoly on payments.
Imagine if every time you wanted to pay for a train ride you had to put your money into an envelope, mail it to the United States, and wait for it to come back. That's VISA.
I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.
The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.
Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.
For everyone comparing an EU-wide initiative to country-specific ones keep in mind that EU is composed of 28 sovereign states. Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
It's not equivalent to India, or the US.
It'd be more comparable to ASEAN (11) or the Arab league (22).
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.
> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”
But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.
That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.
Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.
If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.
Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.
While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.
The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.
In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.
Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.
Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.
Last I checked, the application they were working on relied on google services. So at the end of the day it's still an american company that could decide to not let you run it if they want to.
The application requires remote attestation, like any serious financial application handling money probably should, and unfortunately there are no alternatives to Apple or Google on this front at the moment.
However, this payment system also comes with physical dedicated bank cards that can be used with the new system. There is no need to run an app.
I can't use my banking app. Because of some apps I installed from f-droid, and because I modified my open source keyboard and built my own. Therefore I am the only person in the world running this specific application, since I tailored it for myself. No other system has ever seen that application, so attestation fails on my device. It's not even rooted.
Meanwhile, on my linux PC with full root access, because I am the admin, this somehow isn't an issue. No, attestation is not needed. It never was before, and it still isn't, especially because it is NOT required on systems that have way more chance of being set up insecurely. There's nothing stopping me from viewing the source code of the page. There is nothing stopping me from taking a screenshot. There is nothing stopping me from doing anything. I am root on my machine, and that's ok there. Why is remote attestation required? Why the hell would I even want google to "vouch for me" as a european?
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
PromptPay use is different from SEPA.
My comment was meant that QR payments are already possible with SEPA in EU it's just there exist different systems built on top of SEPA which are not cross compatible and available across the member states.
EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.
That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.
Credit cards often can, though European banks I've used don't do them as willy-nilly as American banks.
With debit cards, charge backs are practically impossible unless payments were done in a very specific way that does not directly prove your authorization.
Credit cards often have them, but subject to stricter terms than their American counterparts.
I don't think I've seen a European debit card that offers charge back. You can often get your money back in case of fraud or timely-reported theft of your bank cards, but it's not easy.
I wish the UK won't be stupid and joins the initiative. I also do understand that the US will exert a lot of pressure on Brits to prevent this from happening.
The EU very purposefully made this all about the Euro. While I'm sure the UK could join in theoretically, there's no political will on the EU's side to support non-Euro currencies in this new system. Countries like Denmark and Hungary may be able to force the EU to work with their currencies, but the end goal of the ECB is to get every EU country to use the Euro eventually.
As much as I'd like to pay in Euros in the UK, I don't think it'll happen.
Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.
As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.
And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.
A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.
According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.
And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.
Traditional banks have already been severely disrupted by financial start-ups that only charge low fees. People will switch if they feel the cost pressure.
Will I be able to use this to make purchases the government doesn't approve of? No? Then it is little different. Although all the stuff I want to buy that the government doesn't approve of comes from Japan and I doubt they'd accept it.
Right now it's a bit opposite - you can't purchase using Visa/MC some services that are legal in your country but considered illegal in US. Visa/MC just won't allow that.
> Every part of the digital euro will be built by Europeans. Every company hired to work on it must be European owned. If the ownership changes, if it falls into non-European hands, that company is dropped from the project. A substitute takes its place.
... but you need your Apple or Android phone to use it at all?
Android is open source, except for specifically the bits that anyone who cares about being sovereign in the face of US interests would want to replace anyway.
Also, last I checked the phones themselves are either made by Foxconn, BYD, or a few Taiwanese-owned factories, so while yes Europe has a problem with the physical devices, it's the same problem the US already has.
These apps require remote attestation which is almost always implemented through Google Play. In theory, if you get on the US' annoyance list (i.e. if you're involved in investigating Israel's genocide), Google could be made to kill your phone's ability to use the EU's app.
That's what the bank cards are for, of course; they don't need a phone.
You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime
There is massive incentive for all banks to get onboard with this as soon as it's available. Paying a few percent vs nothing at all is the easiest sales argument ever.
This sets a bad precedent. I'm a software contractor from EU, but I don't usually work for EU clients, and I don't want to see the trade wars spill into contracting/dev work - but fully expect it given current trends.
Digital euro aka digital currency total surveillance and control
"Digital euro" sounds cute and modern though doesn't it. It'll fool many
If you criticise it you're obviously pro America and pro Visa/MasterCard or pro Russia because you obviously want the EU to fail!! It's clever to bundle it all up in one initiative
The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.
It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.
We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.
Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.
But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)
I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
Me too, so I know that the country entered the EEC without any desire to disappear into a superstate but that's what's happening very insidiously, including because the country has had very weak leadership for decades.
That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.
Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedomism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.
Doesn't strike me as bad, the alternative is for Europe to continue its slide into irrelevance (nobody cares about any of the small country individually, only united does it have some leverage against US/China/Russia)
There is a huge gap between an united front on key issues when deemed in mutual interest and this great bulldozing of national sovereignty and identities. I also think that using "keeping up with the US/China" to justify it is a fallacious argument: The integration policy comes first and everything else are a posteriori arguments to justify it.
Can you tell me when was it better than nowadays ? The EU is far from perfect, but still I'm glad to be born after its creation than before. Because my grandparents were born before and they know what it was to be at war.
I still fail to see the regulation inflation. It is not like there was an absence of regulation before the EU. But now once you comply with EU regulation, you have access to a significantly larger market than before, where you had to comply with national regulations.
So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.
It's still simpler to deal with EU regulations instead of dealing with the national regulations of each member country. The weaknesses of the EU are where the member countries are not aligned yet.
Yeah I'm not willingly giving eu anything, and certainly not (more of) my money. They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.
Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?
Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.
We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.
I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.
You misread this comment. Thai payment system works across the Asian countries (they are not in a UNION are they?). You can use that payment system if you have a bank in Singapore,Korea,Indonesia etc.
SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.
>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.
The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.
It's not surprising at all that a single country could do this, especially since it's such a relatively affluent one and none of their neighbors had anything similar.
Additionally you need to understand that to be a true VISA/MC alternative like JCB that card needs to work abroad with the POS terminals just needing a SW update. And it needs to rolled out NOW.
Because whatever the HN crowd thinks of the EU, the EU is capitalist first. The EU mostly lets the markets figure stuff out, and only steps in when markets fail miserably.
Literally nothing prevented EU banks (or any other banks) from getting together and implementing this.
The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.
I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.
[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25639977.icc-judge-says-us... [2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".
The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.
Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
I welcome sovereign digital payments initiatives.
I would argue that physical currency transfer is already public infrastructure, in the terms of coins and notes that are physically given.
So it only makes sense that digital currency is too.
> Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
I think you fail to understand why these are public infrastructure.
Why should water be public infra but food is not?
> Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The main reason why infrastructure of any kind (water, sewage, etc) is a public infrastructure - even in largely privatized economies - is that infrastructure is essentially a natural monopoly. Food on the other hand isn't and it can largely be traded as a commodity (which is, at least in my opinion, a major reason why our food system is so broken).
The food system in Europe works pretty well.
Food from multiple suppliers is easy to put on trucks going to multiple shops using same roads. Road are workable shared access medium. Water really is not. Unless you deliver it in tanker trucks using roads.
Electricity itself is fungible in moment, so electricity can used shared access medium of grid. But similarly it makes little sense to have multiple roads in densely build areas. So both roads and water pipes end up as natural monopolies in build up areas.
You should share your answer instead of posing a rhetorical question because the answer isn’t obvious at all and ranges across a large variety of options including food should be infrastructure.
>Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The water pipes are public infra. They pump it into your house.
The more people that use the same system, the cheaper it can get. Drawing competing systems of water pipes to houses to let companies compete would simply drive up the cost for everyone.
Same with electricity, gas lines, sewage...
Water itself is not publicly owned. You can buy water in the store like food.
Medicine should count too. And a lot of other things that we often realize to be essential only in a crisis situation. But I'm sure GP didn't intend their list to be exclusive.
...because food is not infrastructure.
X, Y, Z are not public infrastructure, why should payments be any different?
Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.
Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.
Some corrections:
- The EU is not a state, it's a governance body composed of representatives from individual member states. Every state is responsible for implementing their take on the directive.
- "EU poor track record on fostering innovation" - many things you use online have been researched and conceptualised in the EU. Even if they go elsewhere for funding, don't mistake where "innovation" happens and where it gets packaged by VC money for sale and enschitification.
- compliance costs: I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
In an age where card payments are ubiquitous, being suddenly cut off from VISA/MasterCard networks can severely disrupt a country's economy. Especially if it heavily relies on tourism.
When it comes to tourism, this problem will always happen if the tourists are coming from the side that's cutting off the other. Without an interface between European and American payment systems, Americans won't be able to pay in Europe.
It's way more severe than that since Americans are not the only ones using VISA/MasterCard.
Payments aren't but issuing currency is. State doesn't monopolize the payments. State creates a regulation and common standard across the EU. It's the banks who would do the payments, not the state, and for that banks would receive a standard fee so you as a consumer always know how much you pay for the service.
There is already. Almost every country on earth has single state controlled currency.
Fiat currency is already a natural monopoly on payments.
Imagine if every time you wanted to pay for a train ride you had to put your money into an envelope, mail it to the United States, and wait for it to come back. That's VISA.
> there is no reason for the State to monopolize it
except relying on a foreign actor for the economy is a security risk?
We don’t need to speculate how this will work.
India, with a population 3 times the size of the EU already did this more than half a decade ago.
And it works brilliantly.
I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.
The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.
Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.
https://archive.is/2025.12.29-103247/https://m.independent.i...
For everyone comparing an EU-wide initiative to country-specific ones keep in mind that EU is composed of 28 sovereign states. Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
It's not equivalent to India, or the US.
It'd be more comparable to ASEAN (11) or the Arab league (22).
> Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
Yes, but also Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a thing already (1). SEPA instant has been live in some places since 2017 (2).
1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.htm...
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.
> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”
But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.
That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.
Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.
If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.
Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.
While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.
The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.
In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.
Let me guess, this will only run on "certified" devices and not on Linux or FOSS Android phones...
Mixed feelings about the digital aspect of it (and thus tracking), but it is certainly time to derisk on US system dependency.
Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.
Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.
Last I checked, the application they were working on relied on google services. So at the end of the day it's still an american company that could decide to not let you run it if they want to.
The application requires remote attestation, like any serious financial application handling money probably should, and unfortunately there are no alternatives to Apple or Google on this front at the moment.
However, this payment system also comes with physical dedicated bank cards that can be used with the new system. There is no need to run an app.
I can't use my banking app. Because of some apps I installed from f-droid, and because I modified my open source keyboard and built my own. Therefore I am the only person in the world running this specific application, since I tailored it for myself. No other system has ever seen that application, so attestation fails on my device. It's not even rooted.
Meanwhile, on my linux PC with full root access, because I am the admin, this somehow isn't an issue. No, attestation is not needed. It never was before, and it still isn't, especially because it is NOT required on systems that have way more chance of being set up insecurely. There's nothing stopping me from viewing the source code of the page. There is nothing stopping me from taking a screenshot. There is nothing stopping me from doing anything. I am root on my machine, and that's ok there. Why is remote attestation required? Why the hell would I even want google to "vouch for me" as a european?
Aside of the fees, another important goal is political freedom against any US sanction on our citizen.
We saw recently that ICC judges were excluded of Visa/Mastercard/... payment system
source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
Many countries in EU will have a similar QR code payment system like Thailand based on SEPA. Slovakia is rolling out its own in 2026.
The problem is to standardize all these things built on top of SEPA to work across the UNION.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
There is already a QR payment standard. You can pay a Thai-QR with a Malaysian Wallet.
PromptPay use is different from SEPA. My comment was meant that QR payments are already possible with SEPA in EU it's just there exist different systems built on top of SEPA which are not cross compatible and available across the member states.
> I dont understand why it took so long.
EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.
That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
This is about the 'Digital Euro', which seems to be both:
- a central bank digital currency, and
- a system for transferring this currency between people and businesses
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.
European cards typically cannot do chargeback.
Credit cards often can, though European banks I've used don't do them as willy-nilly as American banks. With debit cards, charge backs are practically impossible unless payments were done in a very specific way that does not directly prove your authorization.
Do you mean Europe-based issuers of Visa- and Mastercard-branded credit and debit cards do not have chargeback processes?
Credit cards often have them, but subject to stricter terms than their American counterparts.
I don't think I've seen a European debit card that offers charge back. You can often get your money back in case of fraud or timely-reported theft of your bank cards, but it's not easy.
I wish the UK won't be stupid and joins the initiative. I also do understand that the US will exert a lot of pressure on Brits to prevent this from happening.
The EU very purposefully made this all about the Euro. While I'm sure the UK could join in theoretically, there's no political will on the EU's side to support non-Euro currencies in this new system. Countries like Denmark and Hungary may be able to force the EU to work with their currencies, but the end goal of the ECB is to get every EU country to use the Euro eventually.
As much as I'd like to pay in Euros in the UK, I don't think it'll happen.
This would be awesome. However, EU declaring this is a bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.
I hope they will learn from the success of the Brazilian PIX system.
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.
As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.
And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.
A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.
Don't do tax fraud.
Finally.
With the hability to see and track every payment?
bank fees will still be an issue. This thing in the works for years and years.
Better to just connect the myriad of instant bank payment systems that already exist all over europe than to invent another standard.
According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.
And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.
Future goal of the "digital euro" is to get rid of the banks.
most people will use it through bank accounts , so not much difference
Traditional banks have already been severely disrupted by financial start-ups that only charge low fees. People will switch if they feel the cost pressure.
I don't k now about the mainland but in the UK most fintech startups ultimately try to get a bank license and become fully fledged banks.
Will I be able to use this to make purchases the government doesn't approve of? No? Then it is little different. Although all the stuff I want to buy that the government doesn't approve of comes from Japan and I doubt they'd accept it.
Right now it's a bit opposite - you can't purchase using Visa/MC some services that are legal in your country but considered illegal in US. Visa/MC just won't allow that.
> Every part of the digital euro will be built by Europeans. Every company hired to work on it must be European owned. If the ownership changes, if it falls into non-European hands, that company is dropped from the project. A substitute takes its place.
... but you need your Apple or Android phone to use it at all?
For now.
Android is open source, except for specifically the bits that anyone who cares about being sovereign in the face of US interests would want to replace anyway.
Also, last I checked the phones themselves are either made by Foxconn, BYD, or a few Taiwanese-owned factories, so while yes Europe has a problem with the physical devices, it's the same problem the US already has.
These apps require remote attestation which is almost always implemented through Google Play. In theory, if you get on the US' annoyance list (i.e. if you're involved in investigating Israel's genocide), Google could be made to kill your phone's ability to use the EU's app.
That's what the bank cards are for, of course; they don't need a phone.
You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime
We already have Sailfish OS but no one is using it.
I have a Jolla phone preorder. I'll become a user next year (probably)
There is massive incentive for all banks to get onboard with this as soon as it's available. Paying a few percent vs nothing at all is the easiest sales argument ever.
This sets a bad precedent. I'm a software contractor from EU, but I don't usually work for EU clients, and I don't want to see the trade wars spill into contracting/dev work - but fully expect it given current trends.
That's a different dependency that can be cut at a later point, if necessary. They don't represent the same systemic risk as payment platforms.
Those china built products you mean?
Baby steps.
Digital euro aka digital currency total surveillance and control
"Digital euro" sounds cute and modern though doesn't it. It'll fool many
If you criticise it you're obviously pro America and pro Visa/MasterCard or pro Russia because you obviously want the EU to fail!! It's clever to bundle it all up in one initiative
The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.
It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.
We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.
Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.
But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)
I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
What has any of that to do with my comments?
> I'm french
Me too, so I know that the country entered the EEC without any desire to disappear into a superstate but that's what's happening very insidiously, including because the country has had very weak leadership for decades.
That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.
Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedomism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.
Doesn't strike me as bad, the alternative is for Europe to continue its slide into irrelevance (nobody cares about any of the small country individually, only united does it have some leverage against US/China/Russia)
There is a huge gap between an united front on key issues when deemed in mutual interest and this great bulldozing of national sovereignty and identities. I also think that using "keeping up with the US/China" to justify it is a fallacious argument: The integration policy comes first and everything else are a posteriori arguments to justify it.
Can you tell me when was it better than nowadays ? The EU is far from perfect, but still I'm glad to be born after its creation than before. Because my grandparents were born before and they know what it was to be at war.
as opposed to having 28 different implementations? give me a break.
The EU was supposed to "simplify" things, yet regulation inflation is real and there has never been so many compliance requirements decided by the EU.
I still fail to see the regulation inflation. It is not like there was an absence of regulation before the EU. But now once you comply with EU regulation, you have access to a significantly larger market than before, where you had to comply with national regulations.
So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.
> The EU was supposed to "simplify" things
No. That's false. The EU was supposed to bring peace. The EU "single market" is a mean to achieve peace, not a goal in itself.
It's still simpler to deal with EU regulations instead of dealing with the national regulations of each member country. The weaknesses of the EU are where the member countries are not aligned yet.
Yeah I'm not willingly giving eu anything, and certainly not (more of) my money. They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
> They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
Care to give a couple of examples?
Political and forbidden.
This is only in the interest of the EU tyrants and absolutely no one else. And it'll cost another few billions
I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.
Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?
Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.
We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.
I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.
You have lost faith in the EU because they want to do exactly what you want ...?
Does the Thai payment system work in a German restaurant? Then why should the EU one work in Malaysia?
Can you pay with WeChat in France? Can you pay with CashApp in Ireland?
This is a very silly comment. I for one more than welcome this new payment system.
In very touristy places it is not uncommon for merchants to allow Chinese payment networks to be used.
You misread this comment. Thai payment system works across the Asian countries (they are not in a UNION are they?). You can use that payment system if you have a bank in Singapore,Korea,Indonesia etc.
Instant no fee payments.
SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK. This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.
>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.
The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.
It's not surprising at all that a single country could do this, especially since it's such a relatively affluent one and none of their neighbors had anything similar.
Additionally you need to understand that to be a true VISA/MC alternative like JCB that card needs to work abroad with the POS terminals just needing a SW update. And it needs to rolled out NOW.
Because whatever the HN crowd thinks of the EU, the EU is capitalist first. The EU mostly lets the markets figure stuff out, and only steps in when markets fail miserably.
Literally nothing prevented EU banks (or any other banks) from getting together and implementing this.
Exactly. I dont understand how many europeans dont see this at all.