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.”
Funny how when Visa and MasterCard cut off cross-border payments in Russia — by their own initiative, without any laws forcing them to do that — Westerners all cheered. Then three years later it finally hit them as to what that means.
Meanwhile Russia was building their own payment system since 2014, and it was already working nationwide before '22, so people just got a new card if they wanted, and the system currently dominates the country’s market.