Hey guys!
Visa and Mastercard are the 8th and 15th biggest companies in the world, worth more than 1.1T USD (!!!).
For any purchase made with a credit or debit cards and you give them 2-3% of your money.
That’s one the biggest waste of money from EU you can imagine.
I’m trying to find viable alternatives but except paying cash it seem there is no real alternative. Even in where I live there is an alternate payment service but they take the money from my mastercard, duh…
And the idea would be to have something even my grandma can use, not some nerdy solution, any thoughts?
Edit: Bitcoin would be a solution if widely adopted, but more realistic would be something accepted by every cashier machine, and if possible using the NFC of your phone, a kind of “Apple/Google” Pay, that goes directly from your bank to the bank’s shop. Where I live all debit cards are either visa or mastercard…
Edit2: There is an EU initiative that seem to be starting with WERO, never heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
Edit3: It seem that Paysafecard and Skrill are EU solutions and sometimes proposed in the payment method, but not with STRIPE payment solutions
Easy: iDEAL (which is a shitty system, but still…)
Doest that only work in NL?
iDEAL has been acquired by WERO which is an EU initiative for pan-European payment system. Wero is being rolled out by banks in France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
I’d like to know who got the idea to name the system with a word meaning “tax” in Finnish, one of the official languages of EU… Both are related to money, so there is a possibility for confusion.
(We used to always use w, and had a reform some ~century ago to allow using v instead. Therefore, w is considered another form of v in Finnish, and thereby wero equals vero)
It’s supposedly going to become EU-wide: https://nltimes.nl/2023/04/25/dutch-payment-processor-ideal-become-european-standard
Looking forward to that.