this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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If you have an account in any European bank, you can pay by bank transfer or SEPA in basically any European business, and often it's their favourite way to do it because there is no commission. I don't know country by country, but in Germany the standard for payment system is Girocard which is German payment processing, and the cards usually come equipped with both it and some American standard like visa and mastercard, but a lot of people opt out, if they don't care about payment outside of Europe.
Any car rental worth it's salt in Europe will accept some form of SEPA, but also, renting a car is not an essential part of people's lives here, so it's not even something people care about that much
It may not be part of your life, but I've done it hundreds of time as a travelling tech (plus a few as a tourist), and I've had times when airports with hundreds/thousands of rental cars had trouble satisfying demand, so it seems there are others with the same need.
And no, they don't accept SEPA, although terms vary by country, and if they do they require a safety deposit that can go from a few hundred euros to the thousands, not exactly practical.
Being traveling tech is absolutely not usual occupancy, so it doesn't change what I said. But if you work in Europe and traveling around, and moving around instruments is part of your job, you should have a company card anyway for it, so again, it doesn't really matter for the rest of Europeans.
What I'm trying to convey, that even though you will have some incompetence without American run banking systems, unless you're in a very specific operation, like needing to rent a car at an airport for example, you wouldn't be severely inconvenient.
I'm saying it as a refugee from a country that (for justifiable reasons) is getting some negativity around, and being born there I'm deemed not actually a good person in advance, and it took me a lot of time to convince various governments that I'm not a dangerous exemplar of my race. The time I spent without access to international banking systems like Visa weren't debilitating, even though inconvenient at times.
How is a deposit not practical? Unless they require it in cash that has to then at the end be picked up at the pickup point (which would be crazy)? A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license. It's the same reason they don't typically rent to people below 25 (or without a higher deposit).
It's really only unpractical if you don't have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars? Otherwise you just pay a bit more the first time and then get that money deposited back on your account when you return the car. There's basically no difference in the end other than a bigger number the first time, and if you wreck the car or something, you will lose the deposit through your credit card too.