'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
-
This post did not contain any content.
-
The EU is not a country.
Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than the in US.
Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.
In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US' method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, with consumers having way more rights than they have in the US, all across the EU (in the US it massively depends on the State) and stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.
I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it's very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it's Social Democrat when it comes to consumer protection, especially for things like food. I suspect this is a lot to do with what different countries care the most about and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific subject getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level.
That said, Nordic countries (notoriously Finland) and France and Spain and Baltics have pretty right-wing national identities, not even speaking about Poland, and Italy, eh, has seemingly harmless morons on top. Greece too, but frankly neighboring with Turkey it's normal to be nationalist, having an example of a really inferior culture. Can't blame even Armenians for that (while in other regards their pride for a mountain village with crooks and thugs on top seems kinda too big.)
-
Oh no, not the fucking cloud.
Didn't we just talk about taking the data back?
Let's run our own servers and not a needless third party...
Dude. They are technologies
You can make your own damn cloud if you want to. I think you missed the point entirely
-
What?
Mainframes are not slow?
You do know that VISA handles a their transactions on mainframes?
I do
I mean slow in terms of innovation, which they stagnate on
But also performance actually
Their TCP\IP stack is one such consequence. It doesn't have any of the massive changes that happened in the last few decades
Open source stacks picked those up immediately. Windows, and other older platforms still use a much slower and more poorly designed stack
That's one such example. Plenty of others
It's not that they can't solve problems. They can.
Steam engines can solve everything too. But they are not the best at every task and these days it's hard to find anything that couldn't be beaten otherwise
Mostly these systems ONLY exist because of legacy
It is why none of the big compute players have touched any of that in decades. Because it is dead technology and a dead end
-
Tech guy here. There’s no way in hell a new system would be mainframe-based. A distributed queue with delivery receipt and many nodes to process messages along with many distributed read-only DBs is the way to scale this thing. And you can be isolated form local power and connectivity issues. Tech isn’t the problem in this situation, market penetration is.
I know right!
I think this is another case where even the engineers got sold into the marketing
Because they heard three decades ago that this was the fastest best technology, and IBM sold it to them
... The reality is, these technologies nobody uses for anything new and there's a reason why. They are just too ancient and stagnating
Plus, other technologies are open and you can see how much more innovation happens when you allow that. Mainframe never had that and that's why it sat around
-
I hate that there is not much societal change going on other then moving business around and rebranding.
-
I hate that there is not much societal change going on other then moving business around and rebranding.
It's at least a start. We cannot expect our governments to do more, the rest is on society at large.
A good start for more change would be the expulsion of any US nationals from EU countries. -
Most card transactions in Norway go through a local system called BankAxept, and have for decades. A lot of Norwegians don't even know, because the same cards also support VISA, and they think that's what they're using.
Same thing in France with CB. I’ve only recently understood why I was asked to choose between "CB" and "Visa" when paying by card online, when both were written on my card. Actually, when I got my first card as a teenager, I was a bit nervous about that, I was scared of “making the wrong choice” when paying online; I rememberd asking adults around me what that was about and how to choose which one to select, and not one of them could give me an explanation, they told me that there was no difference and that I should just pick one at random. Now I feel kinda bad about all the times that I chose Visa, because from what I understand their fees are generally higher for the seller.
-
SEPA is not instant. It's still one day as standard.
You can't use SEPA to pay in the grocery store, because the cash register has no way to confirm your payment until tomorrow.
That's the thing cards and various apps like WERO solve currently.Most of these apps are tied to a traditional card, but some are tied directly to the bank account and some can do both.
Anyway, the independence from American software is still far away, since most people will be using Android or iOS to use those apps..
The standard bank transfer takes at least a day as you said, but the instant one is regulated to take less than 10 seconds in total (in practice, it feels instant). Apparently introduced in 2017. I've had it on my home banking (app too) since then I think, but from my previous bank account they cost a whooping 7€, with my current bank the instant transfers are just as free as the normal ones so I use them all the time. I recently bought a used motorcycle within a morning thanks to this.
Wero itself is likely based on SEPA Instant Payments.
I was comparing them to the services used to send money to other people, but of course as you said the big thing we're still missing is a unified point of sale payment network in all of the eurozone, maybe Wero will be the one, in that case I'll be happy to use it, but IMHO we should have a standard public one based on SEPA Instant payments.
Wero is an added step on top, still much better than the competition, but they're currently a convenient alternative to bank transfers (for people who didn't discover the instant SEPA ones), and also as you noted unfortunately based on apps that run solely on American platforms. It's mentioned on their wikipedia page too. I'll keep an eye on them though, they could still work for me, we'll see.
-
It's not in the incumbent oligopoly's interest to innovate.
I think this is more that American exceptionalism makes them incapable of getting inspiration from other countries, so they end up doing something entirely different. If it's better, the rest of the world adopts it as well, and if it's inferior, the rest of the world points and laughs.
E-check is definitely in the point and laugh category, while payment apps based on phone number or email like Venmo are getting copied by various other countries. Granted, I don't think the US was first with phone-based payments, various developing countries in Africa have had it for ages. But I do think they came up with it independently, because they habitually ignore innovation done anywhere else.
-
System shared this topic
