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
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.
Lol
I missed the joke here