Holy shit, this is exactly what I was talking to my parents about over Christmas. A wallet in your phone, money lost when stolen, no tracking. This is potentially big.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Visa/Mastercard & Apple/Google Pay typically charge 3% fees
Not in the EU. Visa and Mastercard have been capped to 0.5% for years.
Apple / Google pay take a small cut from the 0.5%
Diversity in payment methods would be no bad thing though. It’s amazing how Visa/Mastercard have managed to insert themselves into almost ever transaction, particularly since contactless became so prevalent.
If it was viable then I'd sign up asap.
And it will be app-only, forcing use of evilland corporation stores. Fuck that.
Improvements are incremental. Expecting perfect is stupid.
Besides, there's a card.
Seems everything these days are tied to a phone. Even when there is no need for it or convenient.The day we loose wide access to smartphones, society is fucked.
lmao back to square one with extra steps ?
well its still a win if visa and mastercard lose just a little money
From the article:
“We have to see off the naysayers who tell people this is about government control, or monitoring, or trying to replace cash,” says Regina Doherty. “None of these things are true. We have to prove that to people.”
This lady is either completely shameless in lying to people's faces, or she is very, very stupid.
Ah man, I was kind of excited until it said European-only.
I thought maybe I'd be able to build a till from scratch without purchasing a software suite from IBM written in the 80s.
Right now the best I can do is accept Crypto on such a machine.
I mean, it's gonna ultimately have to work everywhere
People don't like having cards they can't use when they travel
It's not gonna happen right away, but I don't see how it doesn't end up that way
Edit: although reading more it might not be equivalent to the existing kinds of cards as it seems to be a debit only provision (i.e. potentially lacking a lot of the protection you get from using a credit card as your main purchasing card). Will be interesting to see how this evolves
It’s a public service for people in the EU and businesses operating in the EU paid for by EU taxpayers. So I doubt it will be rolled out outside of the EU. It still cost money to operate the service eventhough it is provided for free. If it ever gets to work outside the EU it will probably only be for people that have EU residency. No way they want to subsidize the transactions for people from outside of the EU with EU tax money.
A lot of people don't even own credit cards here, so that isn't really a massive problem.
A credit card that only works domestically is not a deal breaker. Most of the time, people don't travel abroad. So, using a more advantageous card (more perks, less fees, etc.) domestically makes sense.
Domestic providers are a thing in several countries which are smaller than EU. Some of them don't operate internationally so this news isn't that weird
What makes you think this card will actually have more perks or that anybody but merchants get anything here? I get roughly 3-4% in rewards, a $100 travel voucher every year, free dash pass and Lyft memberships. My perks might not be for everyone but there are a ton of good cards out there and this seems to offer the end user few reasons to care.
For what it's worth, the rewards they give are taken from merchants commissions. It might be great for the cc owner, but it's not very fair
It's DoA unless the EU mandates or coerces end users. There is absolutely zero incentive for anyone but the merchants as far as I can tell.
I cannot wait for this to come to fruition. Let's hope that it isn't a privacy cess pit though.
credit cards already are
It'll be interesting to see how they'll handle steamy steam games. The whole steam and itch deplatforming saga was kicked off by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.
Won’t have any effect as long as they need to have Visa and Mastercard for other territories. In Europe you can already pay with European payment systems on Steam like iDeal (Dutch) and Trustly (Swedish) and those porn games still got removed in the territories that have those payment options.
Doesn't help us in AU unfortunately
why not share with australia :(
Because Australia is not in the EU
If Australia joins the EU…
I wish !
Because we already have this and have for 45 years with eftpos and debit cards?
We do not, eftpos does not go over the net
EFTPOS is a direct bank-to-bank transfer system, but online payments usually involve a payment gateway (like Stripe, PayPal) to process card details securely.
The only options we have to pay online are visa/mastercard/etc (eg. the same as Europe which is why they invented the Digital Euro) we don't have anything equivalent and as far as I know have no plans to replace this system
I have seen https://azupay.com.au/ using payid to pay for things over the net like flight tickets etc but 99% of online payments go through visa/mastercard
Europes version of EFTPOS is SEPA which is not what the digital euro is
More info on the digital euro here:
Goodbye Visa & Mastercard? The Digital Euro Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzkVBXDhTwY
Except for the surcharge on weekends and public holidays of course.