Last week Trump targeted Pix and Brazil for discriminating against Mastercard and Visa[0]. Also last week there was the Steam debacle involving the same two companies which brought attention to the power that this duopoly holds all across the world. In Brazil many people, if not the majority use interest free instalments to pay for anything above groceries - “parcelas”, all of which, until now, were done through Mastercard & Visa. So this is yet another blow to these companies and perhaps accelerated by Trump’s threats.

It also highlights how desperately the EU is behind other countries in this space, with the news of the dependence on Azure and their aims to decouple from the US.

It’s a nice apt story for what’s being going on this last week.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/e17e6de1-d863-46f8-bfab-fa8cbfc49...

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dathinab a day ago | parent | next [-]

> discriminating against Mastercard and Visa

how can you discriminate against a duopoly ;)

> It also highlights how desperately the EU is behind other countries in this space,

(you seem to be drifting into the server center topic but I will take "this space" as payment processing)

It's complicated, EU has many payment standards which 1) are required between banks, and 2) theoretically allow integration with new payment processing methods needing only the end-users agreement not the banks. So you can relatively easily send money between people (and to company accounts, too) without touching visa/mastercard at all (how easy that "relative part" does still vary a lot tho. (Also if you are willing to pay a fixed up price (commonly free or 15ct) also fast, like in seconds).

At the same time when it comes to 1) banking cards, 2) payment terminals, pretty much everything is build on Mastercard/Visa (where I live mostly Visa). Like there is no competition when it comes to the secure chips this systems use. (But then both PayPall and pretty much all of China have kinda shown you don't really need them as long as you have internet, which payment terminal often need to for any non very small payment amounts). Also because people are so used to a well working reasonable secure card payment system many tries to push for app based alternatives kinda fail, sure due to their dominant position in online shopping Paypal is still a thing, but also commonly relegate to at most one of multiple options in online shopping. Just to be clear the exact dynamics differ _vastly_ between country in the EU.

Any I really don't like the generic pay in rates functionality, it's a trap which really can fuck up peoples life (similar to using the dipso all the time/not getting out of it, or large credit boundary or however it's called for credit cards; to be honest dispo tends to be worse tho).

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vimy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

EU is building Wero to replace all the national payment systems. It uses sepa under the hood.

https://wero-wallet.eu/

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inerte a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"interest free" deserves quotes. It appears to be so because the installments have the same value but in reality it's priced in the overall length vs price.

The installment culture is so pervasive in Brazil a lot of places don't even bother to show the full price (a vista). And some of them refuse to give a discount if you want to pay the full price now. Not because it doesn't make economic sense, but it's simply not an option a regular employee in major retail stores is even allowed to do, as companies default marketing and systems to installment payments.

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toomuchtodo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Europe and the UK have instant SEPA credits and debits, no? That's 41 countries within the single instant payment system.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea...

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dathinab a day ago | parent | next [-]

yes, but at the moment the user facing interfaces are not greate (in most countries, they are pretty good in some countries)

- sending money (P2P, P2B, B2B) often requires manually entering a IBAN in your banking app/website (_except in some countries_, and some systems on top of it can also reduce the friction) which is okay for many P2P use cases but not good for physical shop checkout P2B use case or ad hoc bill sharing use case in P2P (also compared to some other solutions this often comes with less consumer protections)

- doesn't interface (well) with the card payment/payment terminal ecosystem (but technically can and you do find it in some edge cases)

- fast (in seconds) payment cost extra and price is bank/country dependent (through in some countries it's free or consistently "cheap" e.g. a fixed 15ct(€) independent of amount and recipient)

but this is likely too change, some countries have already put up standards for more convenient P2P (and P2B??) payment methods and they seem to be in the process of being adapted EU wide (but not necessary UK and other non EU SEPA members)

in addition there are standardized interfaces for 3rd parties companies to link up with SEPA and/or you bank account which do technically allow companies to innovate on improvements. Practically this often runs into issues, 1) from a consumer POV in many (not all) EU countries the state of card payment is just fine and convenient features like easy bill sharing many people either don't need or don't know what they miss out on. 2) many issues are on the (physical) shop side, but you need to provide things users can use and having multiple systems in parallel is often not very practical, 3) at the same time without shops allowing new systems customer don't have any reason to adapt such new systems

anyway all of this likely will improve quite a bit relatively soon

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tonfa a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also digital euro is targeting payment systems (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...)

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jowea a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From the comments it seems it supports direct person to person transfers, but how easy is it to use it for payments? Can you use SEPA to pay for your groceries? Or buy something on the Internet?

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Argonaut998 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s crap in comparison. It’s not flexible at all. It’s still SEPA even though it’s “instant” and not all banks support it yet (although they are supposed to).

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toomuchtodo 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

October 2025 is the deadline for all banks to support the instant part, and I don't understand your complaint that it's instant but "still SEPA." That's good! It's a utility that just works. You can always bolt trimmings on at the institutional level. What are your expectations for what it should be?

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aosaigh a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What do you mean it's not flexible? I've always thought of the EU as being way ahead of the US in banking terms, with lots of digital banks offering instant payments and all EU banks offering SEPA instant transfers. I'm interested to hear about these other platforms outside of the EU/US and how they are innovating.

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alexalx666 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

N26 execs instant payments reliably in Germany

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MilaM a day ago | parent | prev [-]

SEPA is not crap. It's actually pretty awesome, considering that you can instantly transfer money between 5000+ banks in 30+ countries, with practically zero fees.

The UX of SEPA is lacking in comparison to other modern payment systems for sure. I'm confident though, that it will improve soon. Wero [1] seems like a decent start and appears to be gaining traction lately. It's basically a layer on top of SEPA Instant payment with extra features and a decent app based UI/UX.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)

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SomeUserName432 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> with practically zero fees

We pay 2.50 EUR for a SEPA transfer, it's ridiculously expensive.

We need local integrations for every market to cut costs.

	▲	pavlov a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Where in Europe are you getting charged that much? Usually SEPA payments are completely free for consumers. And I believe there’s a EU-mandated fee cap which is much less than 2.50 €. But if you have a business account, things are different.
	▲	MilaM a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That is pretty expensive, I agree. I pay zero additional fees when using my private account. For my business account I'm charged ~30 Cents flat per transaction. I know that there are banks offering better terms, but I'm too lazy to switch for just a couple of Euros in savings.

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jjcob a day ago | parent | prev [-]

In austria QR codes for sharing payment info are getting popular. Many invoices have a QR code on them. You can then use your banking app to pay the invoice.

Banking apps can also generate a QR code for receiving payments.

They are not quite as seamless as tap-to-pay, but they work with pretty much every bank in the Austria, which is neat.