[mansa10]

Same problem in Denmark with our banks.

Our popular QR payment system, known as MobilePay, is owned by banks that have a financial interest in letting payments continue to process via visa/mc cards underneath, as they get a big interchange fee from reusing the legacy payment system. (around 0,2% interchange on a typical danish visa transaction).

In the past, we had a popular nationally owned cheaper safeguard against foreign payment monopolies in the form of Dankort, a local visa/mc alternative, but the company operating Dankort (NETS) has been sold by our gov+danish banks to an american equity firm, further removing any incentive for danish banks to not just quietly force visa/mc on everyone, so Dankort is now slowly dying.

The rent seeking is made even more perverse by the EU PSD2 legislation from 2018 that makes it illegal to forward payment fees onto shoppers, which removes all the textbook consumer behavior (judging price vs quality) from the equation. That law has created a situation where shoppers use whatever payment method their bank hands out to them and merchants are forced to blindly accept whatever shoppers use and pay up the fees which goes back to the same banks that decided what to give shoppers in the first place.

End result of this is that the banks best move is to push visa/mc, make everything seem hard to change & confuse politicians. Systems like Pix give me hope but I don't believe the existing system can be saved, it needs to be replaced by a new actor, aggressively supported at EU or national level, probably both.