My honest take is: in an ideal world it should become possible to unsubscribe through our bank.

This also would prevent any dirty trick from companies trying to obfuscate unsubscribing.

We can already through PayPal, making it easy to unsub. But, guess what, service providers don't like that. Equally they'd not like a bank's solution.

However the payment card companies could handle this by facilitating subscriber to generate a new virtual card for each sub, then to cancel sub, cancel card. They'd need to qualify the current T&Cs which pass a charge through regardless.

▲

xnorswap an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the UK you already can for anything done via "Direct Debit", which covers a lot of regular payments.

▲

fontain 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can in Europe, e.g: https://wise.com/help/articles/1CoZht05rHDEJcycXU2RMh/what-a...

	▲	chrisjj 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not quite. "If you'd like to block a merchant and their recurring payments — please go directly to the merchant and ask them to stop recurring charges to your Wise card. If you can't reach the merchant, or they haven't cancelled your subscription after you've asked, you can block future recurring charges to your Wise card through your Wise account."
	▲	SkiFire13 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think that's standardized, it probably only has some heuristic to detect a subscription's associated payments and rejects them. It will not integrate in any way with merchants to cancel the subscription on their side, and in fact they suggest to first trying to cancel the subscription on the merchant side.

▲

Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is possible in Australia via the new PayTo system. But it’s quite new, doesn’t work for international payments and so far not much uses it.

▲

londons_explore 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This needs to be augmented with a new bit of contract law which enables a new type of 'subscription' where the terms are set by law.

Those terms would include things like "payments are monthly, service automatically ends when payments end, etc."

As things stand today, plenty of consumers end subscriptions by blocking payment, which practically works, but opens the doors to a scumbag company bulk chasing all those unpaid subscriptions through the courts and getting leins on millions of homes for $150 each and templated court cases.