Finally!
If I’m not mistaken there’s an EU project to integrate all such systems across Europe.
european payment initiative https://epicompany.eu/
Good that they’re working on it, but man is this stuff slow. Germany’s still all in on PayPal. I think the EU should just create a common solution. Oh, and create a common way to confirm identities and sign documents online. This national fragmentation is just dumb.
Every country has different requirements. Cross country digital authentication is already possible thanks to EIDAS, so there’s no need to invent something that’ll suit the least common denominator for all countries like a centralised system would. You use your own government’s login method, and it should work across the entire EU as long as the institutions are following European law.
You don’t just switch payment providers, though. There’s a lot of auditing and security checks involved in doing anything related to payments, and now you’re coordinating different banks at the same time. Here, the entire country uses one single payment system, iDeal, and that took half a decade to get off the ground and much longer for stores to actually integrate everywhere.
The bank-run Dutch iDeal payment system seems to be moving to Wero next year, that’s going to be a pretty huge transition. If they can pull that off, that may generate the trust other banks may need to actually put in the effort to integrate that deeply into another payment solution.
Also, the availability of non-local payment options such as PayPal over whatever local payment systems there are is a positive in my book. I can’t pay online in most European countries without going through PayPal because most of them have their own national systems. Had two German stores and one Danish service not accepted PayPal, I would’ve been screwed last year.
Oh absolutely, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard are absolutely crucial. This position allows them to leech off the entire dogital payments system in a way that does not have anything to do with their cost of operating. So an alternative doesn’t hurt.
Regarding online ID: The Norwegian government websites only accept ID from Norwegian providers, and if you want to sign anything with a commercial party you’ll need Norwegian BankID. Germany operates entirely on wet ink sent by snail mail. Some government websites accept ID cards, but the commercial world has not taken notice at all. I don’t know where this unified European ID world is, but my guess is Theoryland and maybe Estonia and Finland.
Norway is not part of the European Union though. Government websites of countries in the EU can absolutely be accessed with ID systems of other EU countries. I can’t tell you how universal this is, because I don’t know, but I can tell you that it’s absolutely real, because I’ve made use of this possibility.
Yeah, but this is not Wero. This is a private company (think PayPal, but not shitty and European).
According to a Danish piece on it, there probably will still be Cross-Border- payment fees, even though some countries in that agreement could just rely on a standard SEPA transfer without any additional costs
What is “Nordic systems”?
I’m from Finland and we mostly use bank transfers and sometimes Mobileypay
It is MobilePay Vipps that is cooperating with other local payment providers to allow transfer across apps.
I think the title is misleading. It is not that payment systems are made compatible, but popular local apps. It’s like saying PayPal and Swish are now compatible. According to a Danish piece I read on it, there will probably still be Cross-Border- payment fees, even though if the system would be SEPA-based, there wouldn’t be fees (as long as it is the same currency).
Isn’t MB Way a payment system? It was brought up a few times as such by people in the past
Yeah, I guess it’s semantics to a certain degree. I’d call them a payment provider, like PayPal or Klarna, but a payment system for me would be something bigger like SWIFT/SEPA.
TIL! It seems that the Italian Bancomat Pay is already interoperable with Spain and Portugal, but I have no way to test this
Wow nice nice nice :D
Wow this is awesome.
