Many countries have alternatives already. In Poland Blik is ubiquitous and very very easy to use. And I love how it's implemented, Visa and MasterCard could learn from it.

Tldr - you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller, then a notification comes up on the app saying "seller X is trying to debit your account by amount Y, agree?". It's brilliant because then the seller gets nothing identifiable about you. Even if someone overhears the code, it's only valid 60 second so it's useless. Unlike with regular cards there is no risk of losing one or using a fake terminal that scans your card instead. And any transaction has to be explicitly rather than implicitly approved. Love it.

BLIK rocks. In addition to being a payment system for goods and services it can be used for instant private money transfers between individuals.

This is indeed one of the biggest weaknesses of "pull-based" payment cards, and something most if not all natively phone-based methods do better.

The best credit and debit cards can do is PIN verification or biometrics (for Apple/Google Pay), but even there you still trust the terminal to not show you a different amount than you'll be charged (assuming the screen is even pointing towards you; I've often been asked to tap without seeing what I'm even consenting to).

Online, there's 3DS, but that's not required everywhere and for every transaction.

There once was a vision to extend both positive cardholder approval and cardholder authentication for each card transaction, but it turns out the friction of that is higher on average than just letting everything but the most egregiously suspicious fraud go through by default and handle the rest via the disputes process.

Out of curiosity:

> you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller

Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?

I misread blik as “bilk” which is… probably the last word you’d want associated with your credit card or payment processor in English.

That's the problem. Every country has an alternative or ten, but what people actually need is one system that works across borders. That's the only way it reaches enough critical mass to be useful internationally beyond the EU, which nowadays is a requirement for it to be able to replace Visa/Mastercard in a decade or so.

Yeah but approving every purchase from a merchant I trust, like Amazon, would be annoying. Gotta allow for one tap to purchase, like eg apple pay does

6 digits effectively the time salted … the other digits are your lat long lol.