Same in Germany with the girocard system. Key feature is that there's no real intermediary, it's a standard the banking sector came up with to easily authorise ordinary bank transfers. Online shopping was never an issue in Germany push come to shove you just wire them the money.

And I have no fucking idea why the EPI is launching a whole phone-based system instead/before standardising debit card infrastructure. That app offers literally nothing that I can't already do with my card and bank app on my phone short of a wallet and why the hell would I want that I already have a giro account. And why would I want to send money to a telephone number instead of an IBAN. What kind of stuff are those people on that they think that's a feature.

But at least the general structure of the EPI is similar to how girocard came about: A consortium of banks, public, cooperative, private, coming up with interoperability standards. Germany has like 1400 banks (and that's after a lot of mergers), most of them only serving a district or larger town and surrounding villages for those there was never an alternative to working with each other and the over-regional banks jumped on to not be left out.

Sometimes, all you need is some marketing. E.g. it's been possible to print out a QR code with your account info so you can receive transactions at a flea market for ages (in lieu of having your phone display it and people scanning from there), and ever since SEPA instant payment it's basically cash, as far as the seller is concerned.

WERO is coming all over Europe. Germany, France and Belgium are already connected and this year also in the Netherlands. It's happening but ofcourse.... much too slow for many of us

My main takeaway from the comments on this post is that basically all of Europe solved this a long time ago at the domestic level, but that international interoperability is lacking.

California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii would also like to request EU status and new non facist payment methods

Humm, this will probably mean that the EU will need to look into if we need to setup a European mainframe manufacturer.

I am talking AS400/iSeries type stuff.

MasterCard and VISA process a huge number of transactions per second, and there can't be any risk of loosing a transaction in progress, so you need an extremely stable central processing node with very high redundancy.

At the moment I believe that only IBM and Fujistu makes mainframes these days, IBM is American which has now shown to not be an ideal long term trading partner, Fujistu is Japanese, with a strong presence in Europe, but they made the UK Post Office computer system, which makes me want to stay, far, far, far away from them.

Either one, whoever we pick will make it easy to get the system going, but to migrate away will be a nightmare.

I wonder if we could build something on open hardware like Risc-V, this make me wonder is Risc-V would even be suitable for this application

Would be spectacular if they make an alternative that does not rely on commercial banks so that having a for-profit bank account isn't required to be able to pay for things electronically. Just like you don't need that with cash. This is something central banks can provide to the citizens of their country. If commercial banks want people's money, they better give an incentive. Currently they get it just so people can access the electronic payment systems.

There has been massive progress in the last 40 years in distributed computing and consensus algorithms (which is what you need for consistency in a distributed system). We don't need 1970 style centralised systems anymore.

That's the state of literally everything in Europe.

I get the phone based system. People remember their phone number and email address, they do not remember their bank account details. It's a lot easier to initiate the transfer in the moment if it's based on something the recipient can just tell you. QR codes are an acceptable workaround for a small vendor, but not really ideal for paying back the friend who paid for lunch.

Pretty much every country has something like that ready or in the works. Venmo is huge in the US, Vipps (which uses the aforementioned BankAxept in the backend) is emerging as the de-facto standard for small transfers in Norway.

It was a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere due to how hard it is to do bank transfers there, but the rest of the world is also very keen on the concept.

For normal tasks, absolutely, and if we can do it without a mainframe while maintaining the stability and redundancy of a mainframe system, then we should look into alternatives.

However, mainframes have been in continous development since they were created, there are absolutely tasks they still do better these days.

with all the transactions all around the world can you imagine the money they're making by doing literally nothing and if this move is successful how much money they stand to lose? I would be surprised if they were not literally talking to hitmen right now.

The Cali data companies will be in for a shock when they suddenly have to comply with any regulation, let alone the GDPR

Wero is great for what it does (sending money to other people) and it's going to gain the functionality needed for online commerce.

But that only covers half the functionality provided by Visa and MasterCard. You also need the functionality to pay at a restaurant or in the supermarket. You know, the card part of MasterCard?

Some European countries have their own debit card system (here in Germany for example giropay) but once you cross the border that stops working. Which is why those cards are usually co-badged with one of the big networks to act as a fallback. That's where the EU should act to ensure that the fallback functionality isn't necessary anymore, at least as long you're in the Euro-zone.

Innovation and blockchain do not go in one sentence. Blockchain is a near dead technology. It has its use cases but if you want a fast moving money transactions option, you should look into UPI by India.

It was a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere due to how hard it is to do bank transfers there,

Is it? Now I'm curious. Care to elaborate?

Except for apps like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and Google Wallet, all of which allow you to transfer money to an email address or phone number, there is no convenient electronic way to transfer money from individual to individual in the US. The only other real alternative is handing over cash or writing a check. You can technically do a wire transfer, but those are really designed for stuff like buying a house or something, and usually either cost money, take days to settle, or usually both.

I can't speak for every other country, but in Norway we've at least for a couple of decades taken for granted the ability to just initiate a transfer of money to someone else's bank account. You just enter the number and amount in your Internet Bank, and it gets transferred free of charge either overnight or instantly. It's how we've done everything my whole adult life.

In the US, the prevalent way to pay rent is still to either write out a physical check or enter the numbers from a check into some web interface which is then somehow able to suck money out of your account. Sometimes a bank will offer to mail the check on your behalf, but it's still very much a check.

Hey now, we were able to standardize the curvature of cucumbers.

For real? What the f that's absurd

Yup. For example, the game "Seeds of Chaos" had to change their introduction on account of demons trying to corrupt the protagonists through blackmail, and the removal of the minotaur scenes.

I can recommend the Aquired Podcast Episode. A 3h long Story of how VISA became the world leader and how much profit they make year over year. It is craaaaazy. We need to get rid of Visa and other US bases payment providers ASAP!