The governor of the Central Bank of Sweden comments our payment systems.
Here’s an AI translation of the text into English:
“Given the geopolitical situation, it is important to create European systems in a number of areas. This is according to Riksbank Governor Erik Thedéen in an interview with Ekot’s Saturday program, where he emphasizes that Sweden’s payment systems should not be as dependent on the USA as they have been. As an example, he points out that the two dominant credit card issuers, Mastercard and Visa, are American. ‘It is probably wise to consider that we should also have European or Swedish systems that function in case the American ones do not,’ he says. According to the central bank governor, Swish is ‘a certain complement.’ He also highlights that other countries, such as Denmark, have their own national credit cards.”
It exists, it is called Wero. Check with your European bank if they support it. Many do.
Haven’t seen any shops supporting no Wero though, whereas you can visa and MasterCard in virtually any shop in the world.
A LOT of catching up to do, before it could actually be used realistically by people. Maybe banks can use it internally.
It hasn’t been rolled out to brick and mortar yet. This is planned in Q4 2026. ( And yes: they have planned much lower fees than visa/MasterCard and simpler P.O.S setups where existing hardware could be used).
The EPI (European Payment Initiative , a grouping of 16 European banks and financial institutions) is deliberately doing a slow launch though the tech behind it is all set up.
They don’t want to F-up with people’s money.
Fair point, however, it is happening. They already outline the payment process and it seems simple enough to implement, at least for payment by smartphone.
Scan QR code with your banking app, confirm payment, done.
The scanning of the QR code is unfortunately a bigger issue than one can imagine. Takes slightly longer and is slightly more complicated than just blipping your credit card. Enough so to dissuade most people to use it.
With the credit cards, you still need to get android wallet, Apple pay, authenticate, do the NFC dance…
Many European countries already have local parallel systems already for pin and chip cards, Visa/MasterCard is already a secondary system if the card is used within the country’s border despite the huge logos.
It exists, it is called GNU Taler
I see Taler brought up, and it always intrigues me.
What is the current state of it? With the app it looks like I can add a bank potentially but there are no payment service providers populated.
Does it currently function in a way I could transfer money between myself and a friend?
Here is another readme about the state: https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
Some banks, mainly cooperative banks, already work with it. But it’s again one of those systems that doesn’t make them money, so I suspect it will die a slow death.
It should work. The stable release was, I think, a few months ago? And it has been operating in Switzerland since the stable release: https://taler-ops.ch/
Lol
I missed the joke here
Does anyone… actually… use it? I installed it some time ago and got stuck at not knowing what to do next
You need a bank that supports it, we use it in the family for money gifts to the kids. Haven’t seen a commercial application so far.
Wero is not widely supported yet, it’s not even finished yet, it doesn’t have feature parity with existing solutions. Compared to its predecessor, Giropay, it’s also rather intransparent, in a “just trust our app, bro” kind of way, with little in the way of open standards.
It needs support from every single bank to work (in stark contrast to PayPal, btw), and that support requires quite a lot of development and maintenance effort on the part of the bank. Parent poster (BarHocker) said many European banks already support it, but the practical reality is most of them don’t, and largely didn’t have any plans to, either. The number of supporting banks is artificially inflated by the fact that the German Volksbanken/Raiffeisenbanken and the Sparkassen, respectively are technically hundreds of small regional banks.
This requirement to have direct support from the individual banks is, the way I see it, the main reason why Giropay failed. If Wero has the exact same problem, I don’t see why it would succeed where Giropay did not.
I do still hope for it, though.
I’m afraid you’re wrong. We’ve had something very similar to Wero in Sweden since 2012 - it’s called Swish. It helps, but it unfortunately doesn’t get rid of the need for visa and mastercard.
Wero has a specific functionality. He is not talking necessarily about consumer-facing systems here. For european banks there are other systems and infrastructure that need to be thought about.