“It didn’t go unnoticed in Frankfurt that Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia in March 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine……Thirteen of the 20 countries in the euro have no domestic card scheme. You use an international operator, or you pay in cash.”
It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the US is threatening to invade an EU country’s (Denmark) territory, either. Would a future President Trump or President Vance threaten to shut down European financial infrastructure if it opposes an annexation of Greenland? Who knows, but better to take away that opportunity for leverage.
The plan is that you can link it to your bank account or open a special account at post offices throughout the EU. There will be phone apps for payments and digital Euro debit cards. Visa/Mastercard & Apple/Google Pay typically charge 3% fees; the digital Euro will have none. That will ensure it is speedily adopted by retailers and quickly supplants the US providers. Also worth noting its technology will be 100% European only, leaving zero vulnerability/leverage to non-Europeans.
I just bought something from a German online shop. I paid with a direct bank-to-bank transfer, zero fees (as far as I know).
The only problem of course is that this method of payment doesn’t have any kind of insurance against fraud, so it works only with already reputable stores. And of course it’s usable only in online shops.
For the love of dog, do not do this with Alibaba sellers if they ask you to. I’ve never gotten bit but I’ve heard horror stories.
Not a problem as I would never buy anything from Alibaba or Temu or any such place.
The potential for data breach there is much worse than credit/debit, you can’t just get a new account number like you can a card if it’s breached. You have to close your account or put it on total lockdown.
Payment by bank transfers doesn’t at all work like credit card payments since you don’t give them some kind of information which they can then use to get the money from you.
Instead THEY give you their bank details and you order your bank to transfer money to their account (a process made ever more easy over time and pretty straightforward now with smartphone bank apps which can read QR codes with their bank info).
At most they might get the number of the account the money was transferred from and no further information about it, the kind of information that, if leaked, is pretty much useless (can’t be used to get info on who owns that account or how much money is there, much less to get money out from that account).
Maybe some countries have really bad security and secrecy laws around bank accounts, but in those countries in Europe I lived in, the only one where that is maybe the case is Britain, whilst in the rest knowing somebody’s bank account number is useless.
The really risky stuff is Debit Cards which are directly linked to your bank account (for example VISA Electron) as those have none of the protections of Credit Cards and do have card data which can be used for distance purchases and hence if leaked would allow access to your accounts. Electronic bank transfers are something completely different from this.
As I understand it, and in the US at least, debit card protections have caught up with credit cards.
This is mostly true, with the caveat that the money is still missing from your bank account until customer service agrees with you about the fraud and issues you a refund, vs. a credit card where the money is missing from the card issuer’s bank account instead.
Why not? Close the account, open another one
Yeah let me quickly inform my employer, mortgage issuer, and all the bills to quickly take/give money to another account like it wouldn’t take days to get to them
I’m not sure I understand what the risk in sharing ones bank account number is. You need to share it anyway to receive payments, and at least in my nook of Europe all online bank transfers are verified by two factor authentication.
That’s about as good as e-mail address. Bank account number is somewhere you can send to.
Maybe, though I am not sure, someone could create a request for Direct Debit payment, but without authorization that’s all it is, “please give money”.