The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.
I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.
Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".
The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.
I think the friction really comes from their "partners" like MasterCard who are so averse to adult related services. Paying for adult entertainment is not tabu in most of Europe, being able to transact cashless... would be a very welcome improvement and even lift some of that business out of the grey zone.
Because their card providers are Visa/MasterCard who are known to have these limitations. Having a way to operate without them in the loop will certainly lift such limitations
Yes, it's a similar situation here in Belgium. Even though they've gained labour status and protections by law, some banks are still being difficult for various reasons including risk due to historical associations with criminal activities. I'm not saying all will be well... but a major obstacle (payment processors imposing their own views on the topic) will be removed.
Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
Absolutely agree. The idea that private corporation manage our digital payments is crazy if you ever imagine that happening to physical payments. Imagine if bank of america got to decide if the dollar bill your trying to use is too damaged. That should be between me, the recipient, and a public body
> Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The main reason why infrastructure of any kind (water, sewage, etc) is a public infrastructure - even in largely privatized economies - is that infrastructure is essentially a natural monopoly. Food on the other hand isn't and it can largely be traded as a commodity (which is, at least in my opinion, a major reason why our food system is so broken).
If your only expectation is that it provides enough calories for your population, you are absolutely right. If you have a look at the bigger picture, the issues are plentiful. On the producer side, farmers are operating at relatively thin margins which encourages consolidation and unsustainable farming practices. This in turn leads to extensive soil degradation and fertilizer use, which is unsustainable - both financially and ecologically.
On the consumer side, people are becoming more overweight (which cannot be exclusively be attributed to the food system, but diet of course plays a significant role). Food is becoming more expensive and lower quality. Food waste also still is a major problem.
Many issues are shared between the US and the European food system, although they may not be as extreme as in the US. However, it does not feel like there is actual political will to steer the ship in a different direction.
I think most governments do recognise food as both "strategic infrastructure" and absolutely vital to their re-election chances.
European governments govern food supply with cash subsidies to farmers, land use rules helping farmers, special immigration rules for agricultural labourers, special extra-low inheritance taxes for farmers, special subsidies for things like having hedges between fields, special low-tax fuel for farm equipment, different tax rates for different foodstuffs (bread vs cake vs wine vs beer), provision of super cheap water for irrigation, minimum price guarantees with governments buying up over-produced products, special border controls for fresh goods that can't be held up, special border controls for live animals, entire government departments for things like monitoring and controlling the spread of animal disease, rules on precisely what chemicals can be used, rules about things like chemical run-off into waterways, rules about animal welfare, rules about slaughterhouse conditions, rules about package materials, package sizes, package labels, rules about how much pork must be in a sausage for it to be called a pork sausage, rules about who can call their product 'champagne' or 'parmesan'.
If the payments industry was regulated like the food industry, it would be more regulated, not less.
Food should be public infrastructure, and the subsidies every country gives to farmers are a good indication of that.
Not all food but produce, bread, milk, infant foods, flour, rice and other cereals being sorta price controlled the way water/electricity is on most places would benefit mostly everyone
You should share your answer instead of posing a rhetorical question because the answer isn’t obvious at all and ranges across a large variety of options including food should be infrastructure.
Food from multiple suppliers is easy to put on trucks going to multiple shops using same roads. Road are workable shared access medium. Water really is not. Unless you deliver it in tanker trucks using roads.
Electricity itself is fungible in moment, so electricity can used shared access medium of grid. But similarly it makes little sense to have multiple roads in densely build areas. So both roads and water pipes end up as natural monopolies in build up areas.
>Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The water pipes are public infra. They pump it into your house.
The more people that use the same system, the cheaper it can get. Drawing competing systems of water pipes to houses to let companies compete would simply drive up the cost for everyone.
Same with electricity, gas lines, sewage...
Water itself is not publicly owned. You can buy water in the store like food.
Medicine should count too. And a lot of other things that we often realize to be essential only in a crisis situation. But I'm sure GP didn't intend their list to be exclusive.
Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.
Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.
In an age where card payments are ubiquitous, being suddenly cut off from VISA/MasterCard networks can severely disrupt a country's economy. Especially if it heavily relies on tourism.
The EU prevents sellers to surcharge depending on the type of card used (PSD2 Directive (EU) 2015/2366), Art. 62(4)). It in effect opened the door to a Visa/Mastercard duopoly, as no local competitor could emerge and compete on price.
When it comes to tourism, this problem will always happen if the tourists are coming from the side that's cutting off the other. Without an interface between European and American payment systems, Americans won't be able to pay in Europe.
It's way more severe than that since Americans are not the only ones relying on VISA/MasterCard for payments abroad. The presence of other payment systems would make it easier for any non-USA country to still do payments.
- The EU is not a state, it's a governance body composed of representatives from individual member states. Every state is responsible for implementing their take on the directive.
- "EU poor track record on fostering innovation" - many things you use online have been researched and conceptualised in the EU. Even if they go elsewhere for funding, don't mistake where "innovation" happens and where it gets packaged by VC money for sale and enschitification.
- compliance costs: I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
It's a supranational institution that dictates laws to States, with a budget and coercive powers against States. It just lacks an army of its own. Whether it's a proper state or not doesn't matter.
> conceptualised in the EU
No, in Europe. No EU bureaucrat conceptualizes things. EU =\= Europe.
> I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
A lot of businesses need consumer data to improve their offerings and be competitive against the big boys. And RGPD lawyers ain't cheap, so even if you keep the minimal amount of data, you have to fork €10k+ to review everything, etc. The requirements for AI are even worse. All of those compliance jobs are unproductive and a burden on EU companies.
Same for the tax compliance obligations, which are ever increasing and now require you to record and document everything, especially if you do cross-border operations, as you are considered guilty by default if you don't.
We could also talk about the requirements to audit your sourcing chain for "human rights abuses", which ends in compliance hell for industrial companies with 2k+ suppliers, while of course Chinese companies don't have this problem.
The EU doesn't do any cost/benefit analysis on this, and just suppose that companies will magically find ressources to deal with their new regulatory "innovations".
Ok, I think you're reading a lot of tabloids as none of the above are actually true.
Regarding
> Institution that dictates laws to States
again no, because the laws are created and voted by elected representatives of said states, so the EU is not some 3rd party that exists on the side, the EU is the countries within it. Member states create their own laws.
Please point what is false. Does the EU, as an institution, produces technology? No Europeans do, did it before the EU, and don't need the EU to do it. WWW was created in Switzerland by an English scientist. Not in a ugly "bureaucrat-grey" building in Brussels.
What you are saying here is false: EU regulations are directly applicable, and don't need to be transposed into local laws.
It's the case for directives, which are required to be incorporated within 2 years. If the State doesn't comply, it faces an infringement procedure (Article 258 TFEU:), sanctions and fines (Article 260 TFEU).
The EU itself is not a real democracy, given that at every step obscurity and backroom-dealing is preferred to transparency. Chat Control is an excellent example of it: it was recommended by officials whose names were redacted. Even when the European Parliament said no in the past, they try to push it again - those fools can't anyway vote a law preventing the EC to do it!
More formally, the only directly elected institution (the parliament) doesn't have initiative power, doesn't hold the pen during trilogue negociations, is highly corruptible[0] given the proportional election, and can just "accept" the head of the European Commission. The EC is the only permanent body and can arbitrage rotating presidencies, pressure parties, and do screening on MPs to get what they want.
The lack of judicial consequences regarding Van Der Leyen after the sms affair is quite appalling for a commission that yells about "compliance" every day of the year.
Payments aren't but issuing currency is. State doesn't monopolize the payments. State creates a regulation and common standard across the EU. It's the banks who would do the payments, not the state, and for that banks would receive a standard fee so you as a consumer always know how much you pay for the service.
How many non-government physical currencies are there in your country? I'm guessing if there is a legitimate government electronic currency most alternatives will fade away which will be the best rebuttal to your argument.
The public can hold government rules for surveillance in check, whereas they don't have that option for private payment systems.
The alternative could be to foster competition to allow private local actors to emerge. Why do we need the State for this? The EU prevents sellers from surcharging depending on the type of credit card used, which led to the Visa/Mc duopoly and prevented local alternatives to compete on costs.
There is already. Almost every country on earth has single state controlled currency.
Fiat currency is already a natural monopoly on payments.
Imagine if every time you wanted to pay for a train ride you had to put your money into an envelope, mail it to the United States, and wait for it to come back. That's VISA.
Apparently Norway's Vipps is free for small amounts, but charges 1% for large.
Too tempting for the EU not to play, but that will replace a duopoly with a monopoly, which will end up doing what monopolies have always done. "For the greater good" here is to incentivize competition.
I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.
The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.
Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.
Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.
Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.
Last I checked, the application they were working on relied on google services. So at the end of the day it's still an american company that could decide to not let you run it if they want to.
The application requires remote attestation, like any serious financial application handling money probably should, and unfortunately there are no alternatives to Apple or Google on this front at the moment.
However, this payment system also comes with physical dedicated bank cards that can be used with the new system. There is no need to run an app.
I can't use my banking app. Because of some apps I installed from f-droid, and because I modified my open source keyboard and built my own. Therefore I am the only person in the world running this specific application, since I tailored it for myself. No other system has ever seen that application, so attestation fails on my device. It's not even rooted.
Meanwhile, on my linux PC with full root access, because I am the admin, this somehow isn't an issue. No, attestation is not needed. It never was before, and it still isn't, especially because it is NOT required on systems that have way more chance of being set up insecurely. There's nothing stopping me from viewing the source code of the page. There is nothing stopping me from taking a screenshot. There is nothing stopping me from doing anything. I am root on my machine, and that's ok there. Why is remote attestation required? Why the hell would I even want google to "vouch for me" as a european?
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.
> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”
But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.
That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.
Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.
If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.
Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.
While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.
The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.
In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.
Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.
As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.
And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.
A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.
That's not what I imply. I'm saying that it eases the creation of new taxes, which are ever-increasing in the EU due to the social welfare costs that increase with immigration and aging populations.
Or new compliance obligations, such as recently the new need to provide a source of fund if you buy a watch worth more than 10k€. The watch seller has to then pay a specialized company to analyze it, the customer loses time on trying to get the documents, you leak private data to unknown parties and compliance agents will know everything about you. So much for the "privacy".
I moved from Germany to Norway and it would be awesome if they could integrate with each other. I have yet to find a way to transfer money between my Norwegian bank account and my Revolut account without substantial fees (on top of currency conversion fees).
For everyone comparing an EU-wide initiative to country-specific ones keep in mind that EU is composed of 28 sovereign states. Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
It's not equivalent to India, or the US.
It'd be more comparable to ASEAN (11) or the Arab league (22).
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
PromptPay use is different from SEPA.
My comment was meant that QR payments are already possible with SEPA in EU it's just there exist different systems built on top of SEPA which are not cross compatible and available across the member states.
My point is, there is a standard for QR payments (I think it's ISO 5201 but it was a long time since I dealt with that). Cross-border support will depend on the country/bank support; but theoretically if everyone adopt it, you'll be able to scan any country QR and then use your wallet to transfer funds (assuming your bank support cross-border payments).
I think ASEAN largely adhere to the standard though the cross-border part is limited to ASEAN.
EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.
It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.
Credit cards often can, though European banks I've used don't do them as willy-nilly as American banks.
With debit cards, charge backs are practically impossible unless payments were done in a very specific way that does not directly prove your authorization.
Credit cards often have them, but subject to stricter terms than their American counterparts.
I don't think I've seen a European debit card that offers charge back. You can often get your money back in case of fraud or timely-reported theft of your bank cards, but it's not easy.
That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
Honestly this is a bit wierd. There already is payment network - SEPA. Many countries have instant bank transfers and i believe instant SEPA should be mandatory from 1. 1. 2026. There already are countries where it's extremely common to use QR payments (basically prefilled bank transfer). It's pushing VISA/Mastercard out.
In typical european nature the first standard was SPAYD (short payment descriptor) from Austria/Czechia/Slovakia but yeah two years later Germany/Netherlands had to come up with their different format EPC QR. But who cares the differences are trivial - just different structure of the QR string. My bank app supports both. The only thing this system needs is mandatory notification system / api so the sellers can get fast confirmation of the payment. Then again some banks already do that so you just pick right bank as seller.
Taking QR codes aside there is also Wero that is already running in many of the countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France). I am not sure what the hell is digital euro? Will they rename Wero to digital euro or whats going on?
I wish the UK won't be stupid and joins the initiative. I also do understand that the US will exert a lot of pressure on Brits to prevent this from happening.
The EU very purposefully made this all about the Euro. While I'm sure the UK could join in theoretically, there's no political will on the EU's side to support non-Euro currencies in this new system. Countries like Denmark and Hungary may be able to force the EU to work with their currencies, but the end goal of the ECB is to get every EU country to use the Euro eventually.
As much as I'd like to pay in Euros in the UK, I don't think it'll happen.
The UK rejected the Euro to retain sovereignty on monetary policy, and then left the EU altogether. In that respect it would be a bad move to join this even if they could.
Will I be able to use this to make purchases the government doesn't approve of? No? Then it is little different. Although all the stuff I want to buy that the government doesn't approve of comes from Japan and I doubt they'd accept it.
Right now it's a bit opposite - you can't purchase using Visa/MC some services that are legal in your country but considered illegal in US. Visa/MC just won't allow that.
According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.
And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.
Traditional banks have already been severely disrupted by financial start-ups that only charge low fees. People will switch if they feel the cost pressure.
> Every part of the digital euro will be built by Europeans. Every company hired to work on it must be European owned. If the ownership changes, if it falls into non-European hands, that company is dropped from the project. A substitute takes its place.
... but you need your Apple or Android phone to use it at all?
Android is open source, except for specifically the bits that anyone who cares about being sovereign in the face of US interests would want to replace anyway.
Also, last I checked the phones themselves are either made by Foxconn, BYD, or a few Taiwanese-owned factories, so while yes Europe has a problem with the physical devices, it's the same problem the US already has.
These apps require remote attestation which is almost always implemented through Google Play. In theory, if you get on the US' annoyance list (i.e. if you're involved in investigating Israel's genocide), Google could be made to kill your phone's ability to use the EU's app.
That's what the bank cards are for, of course; they don't need a phone.
I think the EU (both as a union and as member states) are at risk of the USA doing shenanigans here, particularly due to Project 2025 cutting out the checks and balances that ought to slow down the Executive branch, where the USA moving as slowly as it normally would, would give the EU time to move.
But also, I do also think the various European governments are taking the threat of the US doing nonsense things seriously, and are doing the things to mitigate those risks as best as possible.
It means a few US companies have the power to just turn off European payment systems, and frankly China probably as well, before and after this effort and there's nothing the ECB can do about it. And that means, they can't stop Trump from doing it.
What was the sole purpose of introducing this again? Preventing that. This doesn't help.
And EU countries have already demonstrated ... they had a near-monopoly on everything really. On chips, interconnects, cell phones, cars, optics, planes, satellite internet, ... but they traded it for a bit of money. If they want it back, it's of course going to cost EU states a lot of money, which they're not willing to do.
So why do they say they're going to do this? They, as in the rest of the EU organization, is not willing to put in the effort. In the short term it's slightly cheaper to have Google and Apple do this, and the ECB will have to live with the fact that if Trump decides all EU payments stop ... they stop. Funny how the US has never done that unilaterally, always through the UN, and the ECB has done that, without asking anyone (to Greece, and to Italy, and if we're brutally honest, to a bunch of African states too).
So I don't feel particularly sorry for the ECB here.
But I must ask: given that this doesn't make 1 mm progress towards their stated goal ... qui bono?
> What was the sole purpose of introducing this again? Preventing that. This doesn't help.
False.
Aside from the way the announced new payment system works with cards and doesn't actually need, merely also supports, apps…
Consider the MVP of a house: walls, door, roof.
Walls without a roof, without a door but simply a hole where a door might go, will let animals (or thieves) wander in, and be cold at night and not keep the sun off you in the day.
A door without walls or a roof is, what, an art installation?
A roof, supported by pillars without any walls or door, will keep you dry and will keep the sun off, but not keep the wind out, nor animals, nor thieves.
What the EU has done here is like any one of those three: necessary, not sufficient.
(Probably most like the roof given cards work without apps, but this was just the first analogy that came to mind, roll with it).
If the institutions of the EU ordered the creation of handsets (it doesn't have the power to do so, it's much closer to being a glorified free trade agreement with a light sprinkle of democratic self-updating to the rules of that FTA, than to being a federal government), but forgot to make a payment system, this would also still fail.
Collectively we also have to make office software and email systems, as demonstrated by the result of USA sanctions against ICC judges.
> And EU countries have already demonstrated ... they had a near-monopoly on everything really. On chips, interconnects, cell phones, cars, optics, planes, satellite internet, ... but they traded it for a bit of money.
Oh god no. We never had anything like a monopoly on most of those things, and still have one on some others.
We had — still have — decent players in aerospace; for space specifically it's more that SpaceX has outcompeted everyone worldwide including other USA companies than like the EU being behind. The EU's planes are still going fine, but Europe was never a monopoly there in the first place. Pre-Starlink satellite internet was always a joke (or emergency fallback), but the players were never monopolists. ASML and Zeiss are still even now major supply-chain players, but that's the closest the EU has ever been to a monopoly on this stuff (Zeiss more than ASML).
You could say we had and lost leads in interconnects though. Perhaps, though it's borderline, early mobile phones.
> In the short term it's slightly cheaper to have Google and Apple do this, and the ECB will have to live with the fact that if Trump decides all EU payments stop ... they stop.
Or this is one of several independent steps, it only works when all are ready, and they are willing to spend the money.
> Funny how the US has never done that unilaterally, always through the UN,
You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime
There is massive incentive for all banks to get onboard with this as soon as it's available. Paying a few percent vs nothing at all is the easiest sales argument ever.
This sets a bad precedent. I'm a software contractor from EU, but I don't usually work for EU clients, and I don't want to see the trade wars spill into contracting/dev work - but fully expect it given current trends.
Digital euro aka digital currency total surveillance and control
"Digital euro" sounds cute and modern though doesn't it. It'll fool many
If you criticise it you're obviously pro America and pro Visa/MasterCard or pro Russia because you obviously want the EU to fail!! It's clever to bundle it all up in one initiative
Yeah I'm not willingly giving eu anything, and certainly not (more of) my money. They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.
It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.
We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.
Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.
But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)
I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
Me too, so I know that the country entered the EEC without any desire to disappear into a superstate but that's what's happening very insidiously, including because the country has had very weak leadership for decades.
That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.
Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedonism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.
Doesn't strike me as bad, the alternative is for Europe to continue its slide into irrelevance (nobody cares about any of the small country individually, only united does it have some leverage against US/China/Russia)
There is a huge gap between an united front on key issues when deemed in mutual interest and this great bulldozing of national sovereignty and identities. I also think that using "keeping up with the US/China" to justify it is a fallacious argument: The integration policy comes first and everything else are a posteriori arguments to justify it.
Can you tell me when was it better than nowadays ? The EU is far from perfect, but still I'm glad to be born after its creation than before. Because my grandparents were born before and they know what it was to be at war.
I still fail to see the regulation inflation. It is not like there was an absence of regulation before the EU. But now once you comply with EU regulation, you have access to a significantly larger market than before, where you had to comply with national regulations.
So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.
AI, RGPD/DSA/etc, yearly money laundering regs are a good example. They come on top of local regulations, they don't replace them. Each country still has its own special laws.
The EU started with the coal and steel initiative, which created a common market for those commodities. It was indeed "peace through trade", but mainly trade.
And the goalpost has since moved very far, I don't see really how preventing countries from sending back illegal immigrants or making same-sex marriage has anything to do with European peace.
The point made is still valid since the EEC was created in 1957 and, before it, the Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Of course it is also unclear what they had in mind with that phrasing, and perhaps it even varied depending on whom you asked: The UK government under Thatcher signed it but I think we can all agree that she wasn't aiming for a federal EU (her famous "No, no, no" speech in 1990 makes it beyond doubt). I think the people at large did not want nation states to disappear within a federal EU, either (and probably still don't).
The original EEC was to help maintain peace through economic interdependency. Now the EU is very different with ultimate goal of full integration, i.e. a federal state. The single market is a step, the single currency is another step, EU Parliament, tax rules, now possibly defence matters, etc. Step by step but always in the same direction.
It's still simpler to deal with EU regulations instead of dealing with the national regulations of each member country. The weaknesses of the EU are where the member countries are not aligned yet.
The problem is that it also prevents countries from reducing the regulations in order to foster local innovation, avoid disadvantageous rules (there are more lobbyists than bureaucrats in Brussels, for a reason) or adapt to a new reality (AI being a good case). Moreover, each country still have their own specific laws, the EU regs come on top, and don't decrease the amount of laws. And the EU votes a lot of laws, since its the main power it has, on average 7 per day.
I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.
Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?
Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.
We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.
I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.
SEPA payments are now instant in almost every country. I understand the rollout is gradual but in some of the countries QR payments through SEPA is has been highly popular for few years now.
I have merchants/restaurants asking me if i can pay with QR instead of card because they get more money. And in local eCommerce all the online stores give it as option and often have it as prefered default.
I think the problem is that many countries have huge lag in adoption and often lie about it. Electronic crossborder prescriptions (ePrescription) was pushed and countries claimed to adopt it so they got some EU money yet when you are in Greece (one of the countries claiming support) nobody has ever really heard about ePrescription.
The other problem is constant Not invented here syndrom of Germany that never wants to adopt anything already running and instead invents their own variation.
Because whatever the HN crowd thinks of the EU, the EU is capitalist first. The EU mostly lets the markets figure stuff out, and only steps in when markets fail miserably.
Literally nothing prevented EU banks (or any other banks) from getting together and implementing this.
You misread this comment. Thai payment system works across the Asian countries (they are not in a UNION are they?). You can use that payment system if you have a bank in Singapore,Korea,Indonesia etc.
SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.
>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.
The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.
Those services you mentioned along with some others (like German Giropay) have been connected under one umbrela of Wero in 2024.
That's whats so confusing about this Digital euro. Why not just push Wero? It already is cooperation of many banks that have presence all around europe. I guess difference is that Digital euro will be going through european central bank? That could be huge fail because by 2029 (when digital euro should start) SEPA instant payments with QR codes and initiatives like Wero will be super established.
It's not surprising at all that a single country could do this, especially since it's such a relatively affluent one and none of their neighbors had anything similar.
Additionally you need to understand that to be a true VISA/MC alternative like JCB that card needs to work abroad with the POS terminals just needing a SW update. And it needs to rolled out NOW.
The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.
I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.
[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25639977.icc-judge-says-us... [2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".
The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.
I think the friction really comes from their "partners" like MasterCard who are so averse to adult related services. Paying for adult entertainment is not tabu in most of Europe, being able to transact cashless... would be a very welcome improvement and even lift some of that business out of the grey zone.
Not really, in the Netherlands prostitution is legal but sexworkers have a hard time getting bank accounts.
The banks are wary of the connection to human trafficking and the obvious 99% cash transactions.
Because their card providers are Visa/MasterCard who are known to have these limitations. Having a way to operate without them in the loop will certainly lift such limitations
No it's mostly about anti-fraud and anti-money laundering obligations. It's a risk thing.
I don’t think so, banks would love for these transactions to move from cash to cards
The Dutch Labour Union for Sexworkers says otherwise. They've been complaining about this for years: https://www.nu.nl/economie/6356783/sekswerkers-krijgen-lasti...
Yes, it's a similar situation here in Belgium. Even though they've gained labour status and protections by law, some banks are still being difficult for various reasons including risk due to historical associations with criminal activities. I'm not saying all will be well... but a major obstacle (payment processors imposing their own views on the topic) will be removed.
Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
I welcome sovereign digital payments initiatives.
I would argue that physical currency transfer is already public infrastructure, in the terms of coins and notes that are physically given.
So it only makes sense that digital currency is too.
Absolutely agree. The idea that private corporation manage our digital payments is crazy if you ever imagine that happening to physical payments. Imagine if bank of america got to decide if the dollar bill your trying to use is too damaged. That should be between me, the recipient, and a public body
> Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
I think you fail to understand why these are public infrastructure.
Why should water be public infra but food is not?
> Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The main reason why infrastructure of any kind (water, sewage, etc) is a public infrastructure - even in largely privatized economies - is that infrastructure is essentially a natural monopoly. Food on the other hand isn't and it can largely be traded as a commodity (which is, at least in my opinion, a major reason why our food system is so broken).
The food system in Europe works pretty well.
Define "works pretty well".
If your only expectation is that it provides enough calories for your population, you are absolutely right. If you have a look at the bigger picture, the issues are plentiful. On the producer side, farmers are operating at relatively thin margins which encourages consolidation and unsustainable farming practices. This in turn leads to extensive soil degradation and fertilizer use, which is unsustainable - both financially and ecologically.
On the consumer side, people are becoming more overweight (which cannot be exclusively be attributed to the food system, but diet of course plays a significant role). Food is becoming more expensive and lower quality. Food waste also still is a major problem.
Many issues are shared between the US and the European food system, although they may not be as extreme as in the US. However, it does not feel like there is actual political will to steer the ship in a different direction.
I think most governments do recognise food as both "strategic infrastructure" and absolutely vital to their re-election chances.
European governments govern food supply with cash subsidies to farmers, land use rules helping farmers, special immigration rules for agricultural labourers, special extra-low inheritance taxes for farmers, special subsidies for things like having hedges between fields, special low-tax fuel for farm equipment, different tax rates for different foodstuffs (bread vs cake vs wine vs beer), provision of super cheap water for irrigation, minimum price guarantees with governments buying up over-produced products, special border controls for fresh goods that can't be held up, special border controls for live animals, entire government departments for things like monitoring and controlling the spread of animal disease, rules on precisely what chemicals can be used, rules about things like chemical run-off into waterways, rules about animal welfare, rules about slaughterhouse conditions, rules about package materials, package sizes, package labels, rules about how much pork must be in a sausage for it to be called a pork sausage, rules about who can call their product 'champagne' or 'parmesan'.
If the payments industry was regulated like the food industry, it would be more regulated, not less.
Food should be public infrastructure, and the subsidies every country gives to farmers are a good indication of that.
Not all food but produce, bread, milk, infant foods, flour, rice and other cereals being sorta price controlled the way water/electricity is on most places would benefit mostly everyone
You should share your answer instead of posing a rhetorical question because the answer isn’t obvious at all and ranges across a large variety of options including food should be infrastructure.
Food from multiple suppliers is easy to put on trucks going to multiple shops using same roads. Road are workable shared access medium. Water really is not. Unless you deliver it in tanker trucks using roads.
Electricity itself is fungible in moment, so electricity can used shared access medium of grid. But similarly it makes little sense to have multiple roads in densely build areas. So both roads and water pipes end up as natural monopolies in build up areas.
>Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The water pipes are public infra. They pump it into your house.
The more people that use the same system, the cheaper it can get. Drawing competing systems of water pipes to houses to let companies compete would simply drive up the cost for everyone.
Same with electricity, gas lines, sewage...
Water itself is not publicly owned. You can buy water in the store like food.
Medicine should count too. And a lot of other things that we often realize to be essential only in a crisis situation. But I'm sure GP didn't intend their list to be exclusive.
...because food is not infrastructure.
Neither is water, they obviously meant food production and distribution infrastructure
Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.
Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.
In an age where card payments are ubiquitous, being suddenly cut off from VISA/MasterCard networks can severely disrupt a country's economy. Especially if it heavily relies on tourism.
The EU prevents sellers to surcharge depending on the type of card used (PSD2 Directive (EU) 2015/2366), Art. 62(4)). It in effect opened the door to a Visa/Mastercard duopoly, as no local competitor could emerge and compete on price.
When it comes to tourism, this problem will always happen if the tourists are coming from the side that's cutting off the other. Without an interface between European and American payment systems, Americans won't be able to pay in Europe.
It's way more severe than that since Americans are not the only ones relying on VISA/MasterCard for payments abroad. The presence of other payment systems would make it easier for any non-USA country to still do payments.
Some corrections:
- The EU is not a state, it's a governance body composed of representatives from individual member states. Every state is responsible for implementing their take on the directive.
- "EU poor track record on fostering innovation" - many things you use online have been researched and conceptualised in the EU. Even if they go elsewhere for funding, don't mistake where "innovation" happens and where it gets packaged by VC money for sale and enschitification.
- compliance costs: I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
> "The EU is not a state"
It's a supranational institution that dictates laws to States, with a budget and coercive powers against States. It just lacks an army of its own. Whether it's a proper state or not doesn't matter.
> conceptualised in the EU
No, in Europe. No EU bureaucrat conceptualizes things. EU =\= Europe.
> I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
A lot of businesses need consumer data to improve their offerings and be competitive against the big boys. And RGPD lawyers ain't cheap, so even if you keep the minimal amount of data, you have to fork €10k+ to review everything, etc. The requirements for AI are even worse. All of those compliance jobs are unproductive and a burden on EU companies.
Same for the tax compliance obligations, which are ever increasing and now require you to record and document everything, especially if you do cross-border operations, as you are considered guilty by default if you don't.
We could also talk about the requirements to audit your sourcing chain for "human rights abuses", which ends in compliance hell for industrial companies with 2k+ suppliers, while of course Chinese companies don't have this problem.
The EU doesn't do any cost/benefit analysis on this, and just suppose that companies will magically find ressources to deal with their new regulatory "innovations".
Ok, I think you're reading a lot of tabloids as none of the above are actually true.
Regarding > Institution that dictates laws to States
again no, because the laws are created and voted by elected representatives of said states, so the EU is not some 3rd party that exists on the side, the EU is the countries within it. Member states create their own laws.
Please point what is false. Does the EU, as an institution, produces technology? No Europeans do, did it before the EU, and don't need the EU to do it. WWW was created in Switzerland by an English scientist. Not in a ugly "bureaucrat-grey" building in Brussels.
What you are saying here is false: EU regulations are directly applicable, and don't need to be transposed into local laws.
It's the case for directives, which are required to be incorporated within 2 years. If the State doesn't comply, it faces an infringement procedure (Article 258 TFEU:), sanctions and fines (Article 260 TFEU).
The EU itself is not a real democracy, given that at every step obscurity and backroom-dealing is preferred to transparency. Chat Control is an excellent example of it: it was recommended by officials whose names were redacted. Even when the European Parliament said no in the past, they try to push it again - those fools can't anyway vote a law preventing the EC to do it!
More formally, the only directly elected institution (the parliament) doesn't have initiative power, doesn't hold the pen during trilogue negociations, is highly corruptible[0] given the proportional election, and can just "accept" the head of the European Commission. The EC is the only permanent body and can arbitrage rotating presidencies, pressure parties, and do screening on MPs to get what they want.
The lack of judicial consequences regarding Van Der Leyen after the sms affair is quite appalling for a commission that yells about "compliance" every day of the year.
[0] https://www.ftm.eu/articles/european-parliamentarians-involv...
Payments aren't but issuing currency is. State doesn't monopolize the payments. State creates a regulation and common standard across the EU. It's the banks who would do the payments, not the state, and for that banks would receive a standard fee so you as a consumer always know how much you pay for the service.
How many non-government physical currencies are there in your country? I'm guessing if there is a legitimate government electronic currency most alternatives will fade away which will be the best rebuttal to your argument.
The public can hold government rules for surveillance in check, whereas they don't have that option for private payment systems.
> there is no reason for the State to monopolize it
except relying on a foreign actor for the economy is a security risk?
The alternative could be to foster competition to allow private local actors to emerge. Why do we need the State for this? The EU prevents sellers from surcharging depending on the type of credit card used, which led to the Visa/Mc duopoly and prevented local alternatives to compete on costs.
There is already. Almost every country on earth has single state controlled currency.
Fiat currency is already a natural monopoly on payments.
Imagine if every time you wanted to pay for a train ride you had to put your money into an envelope, mail it to the United States, and wait for it to come back. That's VISA.
X, Y, Z are not public infrastructure, why should payments be any different?
We don’t need to speculate how this will work.
India, with a population 3 times the size of the EU already did this more than half a decade ago.
And it works brilliantly.
Sweden, a counntry in the EU, did this in 2012.
Then they introduced a (small) fee.
Apparently Norway's Vipps is free for small amounts, but charges 1% for large.
Too tempting for the EU not to play, but that will replace a duopoly with a monopoly, which will end up doing what monopolies have always done. "For the greater good" here is to incentivize competition.
I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.
The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.
Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.
...And where does it indicate that this "digital euro" will be based on cryptocurrency? Nothing in the article appears to suggest that.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
They explicitly differentiate themselves from crypto assets, and the only party issuing them seems to be European Central Bank.
Doesn't sound like crypto to me either
https://archive.is/2025.12.29-103247/https://m.independent.i...
Let me guess, this will only run on "certified" devices and not on Linux or FOSS Android phones...
Mixed feelings about the digital aspect of it (and thus tracking), but it is certainly time to derisk on US system dependency.
Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.
Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.
Rather being tracked by EU than being tracked by America (100% guaranteed that US govt as access to all Mastercard/visa transactions).
Last I checked, the application they were working on relied on google services. So at the end of the day it's still an american company that could decide to not let you run it if they want to.
The application requires remote attestation, like any serious financial application handling money probably should, and unfortunately there are no alternatives to Apple or Google on this front at the moment.
However, this payment system also comes with physical dedicated bank cards that can be used with the new system. There is no need to run an app.
I can't use my banking app. Because of some apps I installed from f-droid, and because I modified my open source keyboard and built my own. Therefore I am the only person in the world running this specific application, since I tailored it for myself. No other system has ever seen that application, so attestation fails on my device. It's not even rooted.
Meanwhile, on my linux PC with full root access, because I am the admin, this somehow isn't an issue. No, attestation is not needed. It never was before, and it still isn't, especially because it is NOT required on systems that have way more chance of being set up insecurely. There's nothing stopping me from viewing the source code of the page. There is nothing stopping me from taking a screenshot. There is nothing stopping me from doing anything. I am root on my machine, and that's ok there. Why is remote attestation required? Why the hell would I even want google to "vouch for me" as a european?
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.
> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”
But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.
That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.
Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.
If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.
Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.
While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.
The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.
In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.
Aside of the fees, another important goal is political freedom against any US sanction on our citizen.
We saw recently that ICC judges were excluded of Visa/Mastercard/... payment system
source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.
I hope they will learn from the success of the Brazilian PIX system.
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.
As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.
And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.
A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.
Don't do tax fraud.
That's not what I imply. I'm saying that it eases the creation of new taxes, which are ever-increasing in the EU due to the social welfare costs that increase with immigration and aging populations.
Or new compliance obligations, such as recently the new need to provide a source of fund if you buy a watch worth more than 10k€. The watch seller has to then pay a specialized company to analyze it, the customer loses time on trying to get the documents, you leak private data to unknown parties and compliance agents will know everything about you. So much for the "privacy".
I moved from Germany to Norway and it would be awesome if they could integrate with each other. I have yet to find a way to transfer money between my Norwegian bank account and my Revolut account without substantial fees (on top of currency conversion fees).
For everyone comparing an EU-wide initiative to country-specific ones keep in mind that EU is composed of 28 sovereign states. Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
It's not equivalent to India, or the US.
It'd be more comparable to ASEAN (11) or the Arab league (22).
> Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
Yes, but also Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a thing already (1). SEPA instant has been live in some places since 2017 (2).
1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.htm...
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...
This would be awesome. However, EU declaring this is a bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
Many countries in EU will have a similar QR code payment system like Thailand based on SEPA. Slovakia is rolling out its own in 2026.
The problem is to standardize all these things built on top of SEPA to work across the UNION.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
There is already a QR payment standard. You can pay a Thai-QR with a Malaysian Wallet.
PromptPay use is different from SEPA. My comment was meant that QR payments are already possible with SEPA in EU it's just there exist different systems built on top of SEPA which are not cross compatible and available across the member states.
My point is, there is a standard for QR payments (I think it's ISO 5201 but it was a long time since I dealt with that). Cross-border support will depend on the country/bank support; but theoretically if everyone adopt it, you'll be able to scan any country QR and then use your wallet to transfer funds (assuming your bank support cross-border payments).
I think ASEAN largely adhere to the standard though the cross-border part is limited to ASEAN.
> I dont understand why it took so long.
EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.
This is about the 'Digital Euro', which seems to be both:
- a central bank digital currency, and
- a system for transferring this currency between people and businesses
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.
European cards typically cannot do chargeback.
Credit cards often can, though European banks I've used don't do them as willy-nilly as American banks. With debit cards, charge backs are practically impossible unless payments were done in a very specific way that does not directly prove your authorization.
Credit cards do. At least in Sweden it is part of the law that you as a consumer has the right to chargeback.
Do you mean Europe-based issuers of Visa- and Mastercard-branded credit and debit cards do not have chargeback processes?
Credit cards often have them, but subject to stricter terms than their American counterparts.
I don't think I've seen a European debit card that offers charge back. You can often get your money back in case of fraud or timely-reported theft of your bank cards, but it's not easy.
Poorly worded on my part. Europeans typically get debit cards and not credit cards anyway
That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
Honestly this is a bit wierd. There already is payment network - SEPA. Many countries have instant bank transfers and i believe instant SEPA should be mandatory from 1. 1. 2026. There already are countries where it's extremely common to use QR payments (basically prefilled bank transfer). It's pushing VISA/Mastercard out.
In typical european nature the first standard was SPAYD (short payment descriptor) from Austria/Czechia/Slovakia but yeah two years later Germany/Netherlands had to come up with their different format EPC QR. But who cares the differences are trivial - just different structure of the QR string. My bank app supports both. The only thing this system needs is mandatory notification system / api so the sellers can get fast confirmation of the payment. Then again some banks already do that so you just pick right bank as seller.
Taking QR codes aside there is also Wero that is already running in many of the countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France). I am not sure what the hell is digital euro? Will they rename Wero to digital euro or whats going on?
I wish the UK won't be stupid and joins the initiative. I also do understand that the US will exert a lot of pressure on Brits to prevent this from happening.
The EU very purposefully made this all about the Euro. While I'm sure the UK could join in theoretically, there's no political will on the EU's side to support non-Euro currencies in this new system. Countries like Denmark and Hungary may be able to force the EU to work with their currencies, but the end goal of the ECB is to get every EU country to use the Euro eventually.
As much as I'd like to pay in Euros in the UK, I don't think it'll happen.
True, but not all EU countries use Euro, such as Poland, Czechia, Sweden and others. There is no way that they will be excluded from this initiative.
I mean, they’re excluded from SEPA (except for euro-denominated bank accounts).
The UK rejected the Euro to retain sovereignty on monetary policy, and then left the EU altogether. In that respect it would be a bad move to join this even if they could.
With the hability to see and track every payment?
Will I be able to use this to make purchases the government doesn't approve of? No? Then it is little different. Although all the stuff I want to buy that the government doesn't approve of comes from Japan and I doubt they'd accept it.
Right now it's a bit opposite - you can't purchase using Visa/MC some services that are legal in your country but considered illegal in US. Visa/MC just won't allow that.
And fixing it with a government monopoly doesn't sound like a good plan to me.
bank fees will still be an issue. This thing in the works for years and years.
Better to just connect the myriad of instant bank payment systems that already exist all over europe than to invent another standard.
According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.
And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.
Future goal of the "digital euro" is to get rid of the banks.
The EU is planning on getting rid of banks ???
Not so much ‘get rid of’, but you won’t need a bank account to use the digital euro.
most people will use it through bank accounts , so not much difference
Traditional banks have already been severely disrupted by financial start-ups that only charge low fees. People will switch if they feel the cost pressure.
I don't know about the mainland but in the UK most fintech startups ultimately try to get a bank license and become fully fledged banks.
That's just the legal red tape to further encroach on the turf of traditional banks. They are still significantly cheaper.
Finally.
> Every part of the digital euro will be built by Europeans. Every company hired to work on it must be European owned. If the ownership changes, if it falls into non-European hands, that company is dropped from the project. A substitute takes its place.
... but you need your Apple or Android phone to use it at all?
For now.
Android is open source, except for specifically the bits that anyone who cares about being sovereign in the face of US interests would want to replace anyway.
Also, last I checked the phones themselves are either made by Foxconn, BYD, or a few Taiwanese-owned factories, so while yes Europe has a problem with the physical devices, it's the same problem the US already has.
These apps require remote attestation which is almost always implemented through Google Play. In theory, if you get on the US' annoyance list (i.e. if you're involved in investigating Israel's genocide), Google could be made to kill your phone's ability to use the EU's app.
That's what the bank cards are for, of course; they don't need a phone.
The cards help, certainly.
I think the EU (both as a union and as member states) are at risk of the USA doing shenanigans here, particularly due to Project 2025 cutting out the checks and balances that ought to slow down the Executive branch, where the USA moving as slowly as it normally would, would give the EU time to move.
But also, I do also think the various European governments are taking the threat of the US doing nonsense things seriously, and are doing the things to mitigate those risks as best as possible.
It means a few US companies have the power to just turn off European payment systems, and frankly China probably as well, before and after this effort and there's nothing the ECB can do about it. And that means, they can't stop Trump from doing it.
What was the sole purpose of introducing this again? Preventing that. This doesn't help.
And EU countries have already demonstrated ... they had a near-monopoly on everything really. On chips, interconnects, cell phones, cars, optics, planes, satellite internet, ... but they traded it for a bit of money. If they want it back, it's of course going to cost EU states a lot of money, which they're not willing to do.
So why do they say they're going to do this? They, as in the rest of the EU organization, is not willing to put in the effort. In the short term it's slightly cheaper to have Google and Apple do this, and the ECB will have to live with the fact that if Trump decides all EU payments stop ... they stop. Funny how the US has never done that unilaterally, always through the UN, and the ECB has done that, without asking anyone (to Greece, and to Italy, and if we're brutally honest, to a bunch of African states too).
So I don't feel particularly sorry for the ECB here.
But I must ask: given that this doesn't make 1 mm progress towards their stated goal ... qui bono?
> What was the sole purpose of introducing this again? Preventing that. This doesn't help.
False.
Aside from the way the announced new payment system works with cards and doesn't actually need, merely also supports, apps…
Consider the MVP of a house: walls, door, roof.
Walls without a roof, without a door but simply a hole where a door might go, will let animals (or thieves) wander in, and be cold at night and not keep the sun off you in the day.
A door without walls or a roof is, what, an art installation?
A roof, supported by pillars without any walls or door, will keep you dry and will keep the sun off, but not keep the wind out, nor animals, nor thieves.
What the EU has done here is like any one of those three: necessary, not sufficient.
(Probably most like the roof given cards work without apps, but this was just the first analogy that came to mind, roll with it).
If the institutions of the EU ordered the creation of handsets (it doesn't have the power to do so, it's much closer to being a glorified free trade agreement with a light sprinkle of democratic self-updating to the rules of that FTA, than to being a federal government), but forgot to make a payment system, this would also still fail.
Collectively we also have to make office software and email systems, as demonstrated by the result of USA sanctions against ICC judges.
> And EU countries have already demonstrated ... they had a near-monopoly on everything really. On chips, interconnects, cell phones, cars, optics, planes, satellite internet, ... but they traded it for a bit of money.
Oh god no. We never had anything like a monopoly on most of those things, and still have one on some others.
We had — still have — decent players in aerospace; for space specifically it's more that SpaceX has outcompeted everyone worldwide including other USA companies than like the EU being behind. The EU's planes are still going fine, but Europe was never a monopoly there in the first place. Pre-Starlink satellite internet was always a joke (or emergency fallback), but the players were never monopolists. ASML and Zeiss are still even now major supply-chain players, but that's the closest the EU has ever been to a monopoly on this stuff (Zeiss more than ASML).
You could say we had and lost leads in interconnects though. Perhaps, though it's borderline, early mobile phones.
> In the short term it's slightly cheaper to have Google and Apple do this, and the ECB will have to live with the fact that if Trump decides all EU payments stop ... they stop.
Or this is one of several independent steps, it only works when all are ready, and they are willing to spend the money.
> Funny how the US has never done that unilaterally, always through the UN,
https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...
> But I must ask: given that this doesn't make 1 mm progress towards their stated goal ... qui bono?
Consider that you may be wrong.
You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime
We already have Sailfish OS but no one is using it.
I have a Jolla phone preorder. I'll become a user next year (probably)
There is massive incentive for all banks to get onboard with this as soon as it's available. Paying a few percent vs nothing at all is the easiest sales argument ever.
This sets a bad precedent. I'm a software contractor from EU, but I don't usually work for EU clients, and I don't want to see the trade wars spill into contracting/dev work - but fully expect it given current trends.
That's a different dependency that can be cut at a later point, if necessary. They don't represent the same systemic risk as payment platforms.
Those china built products you mean?
Baby steps.
Digital euro aka digital currency total surveillance and control
"Digital euro" sounds cute and modern though doesn't it. It'll fool many
If you criticise it you're obviously pro America and pro Visa/MasterCard or pro Russia because you obviously want the EU to fail!! It's clever to bundle it all up in one initiative
Yeah I'm not willingly giving eu anything, and certainly not (more of) my money. They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
> They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
Care to give a couple of examples?
Political and forbidden.
This is only in the interest of the EU tyrants and absolutely no one else. And it'll cost another few billions
The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.
It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.
We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.
Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.
But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)
I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
What has any of that to do with my comments?
> I'm french
Me too, so I know that the country entered the EEC without any desire to disappear into a superstate but that's what's happening very insidiously, including because the country has had very weak leadership for decades.
That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.
Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedonism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.
Doesn't strike me as bad, the alternative is for Europe to continue its slide into irrelevance (nobody cares about any of the small country individually, only united does it have some leverage against US/China/Russia)
There is a huge gap between an united front on key issues when deemed in mutual interest and this great bulldozing of national sovereignty and identities. I also think that using "keeping up with the US/China" to justify it is a fallacious argument: The integration policy comes first and everything else are a posteriori arguments to justify it.
Can you tell me when was it better than nowadays ? The EU is far from perfect, but still I'm glad to be born after its creation than before. Because my grandparents were born before and they know what it was to be at war.
as opposed to having 28 different implementations? give me a break.
The EU was supposed to "simplify" things, yet regulation inflation is real and there has never been so many compliance requirements decided by the EU.
I still fail to see the regulation inflation. It is not like there was an absence of regulation before the EU. But now once you comply with EU regulation, you have access to a significantly larger market than before, where you had to comply with national regulations.
So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.
AI, RGPD/DSA/etc, yearly money laundering regs are a good example. They come on top of local regulations, they don't replace them. Each country still has its own special laws.
> The EU was supposed to "simplify" things
No. That's false. The EU was supposed to bring peace. The EU "single market" is a mean to achieve peace, not a goal in itself.
The EU started with the coal and steel initiative, which created a common market for those commodities. It was indeed "peace through trade", but mainly trade.
And the goalpost has since moved very far, I don't see really how preventing countries from sending back illegal immigrants or making same-sex marriage has anything to do with European peace.
> And the goalpost has since moved very far
Actually, the "goalposts" in 1983 already were "an ever closer union"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solemn_Declaration_on_European...
The point made is still valid since the EEC was created in 1957 and, before it, the Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Of course it is also unclear what they had in mind with that phrasing, and perhaps it even varied depending on whom you asked: The UK government under Thatcher signed it but I think we can all agree that she wasn't aiming for a federal EU (her famous "No, no, no" speech in 1990 makes it beyond doubt). I think the people at large did not want nation states to disappear within a federal EU, either (and probably still don't).
The original EEC was to help maintain peace through economic interdependency. Now the EU is very different with ultimate goal of full integration, i.e. a federal state. The single market is a step, the single currency is another step, EU Parliament, tax rules, now possibly defence matters, etc. Step by step but always in the same direction.
It's still simpler to deal with EU regulations instead of dealing with the national regulations of each member country. The weaknesses of the EU are where the member countries are not aligned yet.
The problem is that it also prevents countries from reducing the regulations in order to foster local innovation, avoid disadvantageous rules (there are more lobbyists than bureaucrats in Brussels, for a reason) or adapt to a new reality (AI being a good case). Moreover, each country still have their own specific laws, the EU regs come on top, and don't decrease the amount of laws. And the EU votes a lot of laws, since its the main power it has, on average 7 per day.
I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.
Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?
Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.
We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.
I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.
SEPA payments are now instant in almost every country. I understand the rollout is gradual but in some of the countries QR payments through SEPA is has been highly popular for few years now.
I have merchants/restaurants asking me if i can pay with QR instead of card because they get more money. And in local eCommerce all the online stores give it as option and often have it as prefered default.
I think the problem is that many countries have huge lag in adoption and often lie about it. Electronic crossborder prescriptions (ePrescription) was pushed and countries claimed to adopt it so they got some EU money yet when you are in Greece (one of the countries claiming support) nobody has ever really heard about ePrescription.
The other problem is constant Not invented here syndrom of Germany that never wants to adopt anything already running and instead invents their own variation.
Because whatever the HN crowd thinks of the EU, the EU is capitalist first. The EU mostly lets the markets figure stuff out, and only steps in when markets fail miserably.
Literally nothing prevented EU banks (or any other banks) from getting together and implementing this.
Exactly. I dont understand how many europeans dont see this at all.
You have lost faith in the EU because they want to do exactly what you want ...?
Does the Thai payment system work in a German restaurant? Then why should the EU one work in Malaysia?
Can you pay with WeChat in France? Can you pay with CashApp in Ireland?
This is a very silly comment. I for one more than welcome this new payment system.
In very touristy places it is not uncommon for merchants to allow Chinese payment networks to be used.
You misread this comment. Thai payment system works across the Asian countries (they are not in a UNION are they?). You can use that payment system if you have a bank in Singapore,Korea,Indonesia etc.
Instant no fee payments.
SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK. This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.
>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?
The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.
The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.
ES has Bizum, NL has Tikkie, and iDEAL, IT has Bancomat, Poland has BLIK.
Thailand is just a country. Why are you comparing Thailand to the world's second biggest economy?
Are you really telling me that failing to coordinate several dozen countries, some with their own currency, is a showcase of failure of the EU?
This makes absolutely no sense.
Those services you mentioned along with some others (like German Giropay) have been connected under one umbrela of Wero in 2024.
That's whats so confusing about this Digital euro. Why not just push Wero? It already is cooperation of many banks that have presence all around europe. I guess difference is that Digital euro will be going through european central bank? That could be huge fail because by 2029 (when digital euro should start) SEPA instant payments with QR codes and initiatives like Wero will be super established.
It's not surprising at all that a single country could do this, especially since it's such a relatively affluent one and none of their neighbors had anything similar.
Thailand is definitely not an affluent country.
That why I used the word relatively. Many of its neighbors are way less affluent.
Additionally you need to understand that to be a true VISA/MC alternative like JCB that card needs to work abroad with the POS terminals just needing a SW update. And it needs to rolled out NOW.