this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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183
How to get rid of Mastercard and Visa? (feddit.org)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by minilemmy@feddit.org to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
99 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hey guys!

Visa and Mastercard are the 8th and 15th biggest companies in the world, worth more than 1.1T USD (!!!).

For any purchase made with a credit or debit cards and you give them 2-3% of your money.

That's one the biggest waste of money from EU you can imagine.

I'm trying to find viable alternatives but except paying cash it seem there is no real alternative. Even in where I live there is an alternate payment service but they take the money from my mastercard, duh...

And the idea would be to have something even my grandma can use, not some nerdy solution, any thoughts?

Edit: Bitcoin would be a solution if widely adopted, but more realistic would be something accepted by every cashier machine, and if possible using the NFC of your phone, a kind of "Apple/Google" Pay, that goes directly from your bank to the bank's shop. Where I live all debit cards are either visa or mastercard...

Edit2: There is an EU initiative that seem to be starting with WERO, never heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative

Edit3: It seem that Paysafecard and Skrill are EU solutions and sometimes proposed in the payment method, but not with STRIPE payment solutions

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[โ€“] cocolowlander@feddit.nl 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

iDEAL has been acquired by WERO which is an EU initiative for pan-European payment system. Wero is being rolled out by banks in France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg.

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

[โ€“] Tuuktuuk@sopuli.xyz 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I'd like to know who got the idea to name the system with a word meaning "tax" in Finnish, one of the official languages of EU... Both are related to money, so there is a possibility for confusion.

(We used to always use w, and had a reform some ~century ago to allow using v instead. Therefore, w is considered another form of v in Finnish, and thereby wero equals vero)

[โ€“] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The name is a portmanteau made up of the English personal pronoun we and the name of the European Union's common currency, the Euro, but is also based on the Italian word vero, meaning true.

Is what Wikipedia says.

But it also has a similar sound to German Wรคhrung (currency).

[โ€“] Tuuktuuk@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks! It's still a bit of a cock-up to choose a name like that, but at least there is some logic behind it.
It feels a lot like the rule published by ECB in 2001 that you are not allowed to say "for the Euro", "to the Euro", "from the Euro" etc. in Finnish but must simply replace all those with the plain word "Euro" alone.

A decision that makes sense for the 99 % but tramples our country because 1 % of EU population is a meaninglessly small number of people and therefore should not be taken into account. And should be trampled. (I'm apparently still feeling angry about that, even though in the end nobody ever tried to enforce that rule...)

And then there's a rule about diesel fuel that is otherwise very good but makes zero sense in the context of Lapland and actually means in practical terms "You are not allowed to use a diesel car in Lapland". And it is still enforced! Even if Lapland has less than 0,1 % of EU's population, it's still not okay to go and trample them "because they're only 0,1%". A whole region shouldn't be stomped to ground just because their population density is low.

[โ€“] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 weeks ago

Finland is also probably not in scope of this project. Itโ€™s pretty much a project of private banks (and semi-private banks) thatโ€™ll only cover Germany, France and BENELUX. OPโ€™s claim of it being a "EU initiative".

For the other things:

But yeah, such stuff happens occasionally. But usually you should get some exceptions in such situations.

I deeply dislike the rules about "marmalade", because itโ€™s slowly impacting how these words are used in the German language. Marmelade is any kind of jam (strawberry was always the most popular flavor). I think we got an exception, but itโ€™s still shifting.