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The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.

I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.

[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25639977.icc-judge-says-us... [2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...

Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".

The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.

Not really, in the Netherlands prostitution is legal but sexworkers have a hard time getting bank accounts.

The banks are wary of the connection to human trafficking and the obvious 99% cash transactions.

Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.

Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.

While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.

I welcome sovereign digital payments initiatives.

I would argue that physical currency transfer is already public infrastructure, in the terms of coins and notes that are physically given.

So it only makes sense that digital currency is too.

> Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.

I think you fail to understand why these are public infrastructure.

Why should water be public infra but food is not?

Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.

Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.

X, Y, Z are not public infrastructure, why should payments be any different?
Internet should be too, and yet here we are
We don’t need to speculate how this will work.

India, with a population 3 times the size of the EU already did this more than half a decade ago.

And it works brilliantly.

I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.

The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.

Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.

Sweden, a counntry in the EU, did this in 2012.

Then they introduced a (small) fee.

Apparently Norway's Vipps is free for small amounts, but charges 1% for large.

Too tempting for the EU not to play, but that will replace a duopoly with a monopoly, which will end up doing what monopolies have always done. "For the greater good" here is to incentivize competition.

The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.

> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”

But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.

That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.

Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.

If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.

Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.

While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.

The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.

In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.

Let me guess, this will only run on "certified" devices and not on Linux or FOSS Android phones...
Aside of the fees, another important goal is political freedom against any US sanction on our citizen.

We saw recently that ICC judges were excluded of Visa/Mastercard/... payment system

source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...

For everyone comparing an EU-wide initiative to country-specific ones keep in mind that EU is composed of 28 sovereign states. Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.

It's not equivalent to India, or the US.

It'd be more comparable to ASEAN (11) or the Arab league (22).

> Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.

Yes, but also Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a thing already (1). SEPA instant has been live in some places since 2017 (2).

1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.htm...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...

Mixed feelings about the digital aspect of it (and thus tracking), but it is certainly time to derisk on US system dependency.
Rather being tracked by EU than being tracked by America (100% guaranteed that US govt as access to all Mastercard/visa transactions).
Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.

Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.

Last I checked, the application they were working on relied on google services. So at the end of the day it's still an american company that could decide to not let you run it if they want to.
Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!

Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !

PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).

PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.

I hope they will learn from the success of the Brazilian PIX system.
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.

As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.

And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.

A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
Many countries in EU will have a similar QR code payment system like Thailand based on SEPA. Slovakia is rolling out its own in 2026.

The problem is to standardize all these things built on top of SEPA to work across the UNION.

> I dont understand why it took so long.

EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.

Will I be able to use this to make purchases the government doesn't approve of? No? Then it is little different. Although all the stuff I want to buy that the government doesn't approve of comes from Japan and I doubt they'd accept it.
Right now it's a bit opposite - you can't purchase using Visa/MC some services that are legal in your country but considered illegal in US. Visa/MC just won't allow that.
This is about the 'Digital Euro', which seems to be both:

- a central bank digital currency, and

- a system for transferring this currency between people and businesses

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.

European cards typically cannot do chargeback.
I moved from Germany to Norway and it would be awesome if they could integrate with each other. I have yet to find a way to transfer money between my Norwegian bank account and my Revolut account without substantial fees (on top of currency conversion fees).
I wish the UK won't be stupid and joins the initiative. I also do understand that the US will exert a lot of pressure on Brits to prevent this from happening.
Honestly this is a bit wierd. There already is payment network - SEPA. Many countries have instant bank transfers and i believe instant SEPA should be mandatory from 1. 1. 2026. There already are countries where it's extremely common to use QR payments (basically prefilled bank transfer). It's pushing VISA/Mastercard out.

In typical european nature the first standard was SPAYD (short payment descriptor) from Austria/Czechia/Slovakia but yeah two years later Germany/Netherlands had to come up with their different format EPC QR. But who cares the differences are trivial - just different structure of the QR string. My bank app supports both. The only thing this system needs is mandatory notification system / api so the sellers can get fast confirmation of the payment. Then again some banks already do that so you just pick right bank as seller.

Taking QR codes aside there is also Wero that is already running in many of the countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France). I am not sure what the hell is digital euro? Will they rename Wero to digital euro or whats going on?

> Every part of the digital euro will be built by Europeans. Every company hired to work on it must be European owned. If the ownership changes, if it falls into non-European hands, that company is dropped from the project. A substitute takes its place.

... but you need your Apple or Android phone to use it at all?

That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
This would be awesome. However, EU declaring this is a bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
With the hability to see and track every payment?
bank fees will still be an issue. This thing in the works for years and years.

Better to just connect the myriad of instant bank payment systems that already exist all over europe than to invent another standard.

Finally.
Yeah I'm not willingly giving eu anything, and certainly not (more of) my money. They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
Digital euro aka digital currency total surveillance and control

"Digital euro" sounds cute and modern though doesn't it. It'll fool many

If you criticise it you're obviously pro America and pro Visa/MasterCard or pro Russia because you obviously want the EU to fail!! It's clever to bundle it all up in one initiative

I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.

Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?

Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.

We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.

I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.

The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).