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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I’m in Europe and following the news of the MasterCard and Visa censorship I activelly went looking for how else could I pay for things online without using their networks, and as it turns out there are plenty of solutions supported by both Steam and GOG which I was just ignoring before because they just looked as lots of “weirdly named” unrecognized payment options.
I’m now using those in my purchases and so far they actually look more convenient than the Visa/MasterCard (for example, with iDEA which is Dutch, I can literally pay from my mobile phone banking app by just taking a picture of a QR-Code on my screen). The problem in Europe is just there being lots of local solutions and no EU-wide one yet, though I’m lucky because I have bank accounts in different countries (having lived in several countries in Europe) so I have access to many options.
Keep in mind that outside Britain, the rest of Europe have long had their own debit card withdrawal and payment networks and not relied on Visa/MasterCard (to me Britain was, frankly, weird in that it relies on mainly VISA Debit and had no local payment solution, probably explained by lack of political will in the UK for that: most such payment networks in Europe were born out of political pressure on banks to come up with a standard and sometimes were even started as state-owned companies) so a lot of these local online payment options are extensions of those existing networks, which is probably why trying come up with an single integrated cross-border payment processor has been slow going.
That said, thanks to it having been mandated at the EU level, bank transfers are nowadays fully cross-border integrated and you can transfer money between accounts anywhere in EU with the same ease and for the same cost you can for local accounts (the banks really resisted that, by the way, as it took away most of their “international transfers” profits) so we’re probably not far from a single EU-wide payment processor (or at least EU-wide account support on existing solutions).
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The banking sector is very competitive in the UK compared to pretty much any other country, so dodgy behaviour from banks/payment processors wasn’t very frequent.
More recently, however, just like the EU, the UK is working on their own system right now. The EU doesn’t have a unified payment processing system either, just a patchwork of different ones.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I lived in the UK and worked in the Finance Industry there, as well as in a couple of other countries in Europe, and the idea that the UK banking sector is “very competitive […] compared to pretty much any other country” or there not being frequent dodgy behaviours from banks/payment processors is hilariously.
Just look at how a physical payment with one’s debit card (which goes directly to the bank account) can trigger oversized “uncovered overdraft fees” rather than just deny the payment if there are not enough funds like in countries like Portugal and The Netherlands: I literally dumped the first bank I had in the UK when I moved there from The Netherlands exactly because they charged me £30 overdraft fees rather on a payment ON A DEBIT CARD because the because my current acound had £5 less than the amount I was trying to pay (plenty of money on the savings account though) rather than it being rejected as I had been told it would happen when I first got that account and enquired about it.
UK banking is riddles with insane fees for every little possible thing imaginable, from presential payments where the account doesn’t have enough funds (where instead of the payment being denied they charge you money instead) to things like getting a paper bank statement and they’re invariably insanelly more that the actual cost for the bank of it.
Even in my homeland of Portugal, where banking is pretty much a cartel where all the big institutions regularly buy politicians from both main parties, banking is nowhere as slimy and abusive as in Britain. I get the impression you never had a bank account anywhere else if you think banking in the UK is “very competitive” and that the frequency of “dodgy behaviours” is low there, because comparativelly with where I lived and banked elsewhere in Europe, retail banking in the UK is a totally disgraceful leech-filled swamp.
As for the rest, Europe doesn’t have a unified payment processing system but pretty much each country in it has one, whilst in the UK there is no such thing at all and instead mainly Visa is used. As for they’re “working on it”, in my personal experience in Britain it means nothing at all because all the cunts in leadership positions in both Government and Finance over there are liars who regularly get away with it: it ain’t happenning until it actually happens.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So much text here, and yet so incorrect.
Then topped off with a “they’re working on it? Well I say they’re not!!!” lmao
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
So you don’t actually have any personal experience of banking anywhere else than Britain and your “even bankings is great in Great Britain” statements are nothing more than nationalistic bollocks.
Cheers for confirming my earlier impression.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Seriously? You think the UK banking sector is competitive?
You must be smoking some powerful stuff.
Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Looks cool.
Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
There is a EU-wide payment option.
wero-wallet.eu
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Not universal yet but heading that way. MBWay is gaining momentum as well and the eEuro could be a thing.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s not EU wide.
Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
It will be.
This is the EU timeline
Payment service providers in the euro area will have to ensure that their clients are also able to send instant payments in euro, and verify the intended beneficiary
finance.ec.europa.eu/…/payment-services_en