It isn't affiliated with visa or mastercard at all. It is called interac. It is not a special debit card, it is just your normal bank card.

In fact, they are in competition, Interac is trying to keep things like Visa Debit out if the country.

My bank card now is both an Interac card and a Visa Debit card. But the Visa Debit part work anywhere except online US retailers.

Remove "visa" and "mastercard" from the comment I made and the question still stands.

Remove "visa" and "mastercard" and I still answered your question. It is not through credit card payment processing.

In some countries, there exist electronic payment processing networks other than Visa/Mastercard.

And those countries include the United States. No idea why that's relevant.

I'm not sure what extremely pedantic point you're trying to make.

The relevance of the parent you responded to is that a Canadian shop not accepting Visa (or Mastercard) is only a very mild inconvenience because there are other widely used payment networks.

I'm not sure what got so complicated about this question, but I was wondering what the person initially responded to here was talking about:

in Canada (actually, pretty much everywhere but America)

since the systems sound pretty identical.

I don't see what you're not understanding. If you live in America, then surely you are aware that Visa + Mastercard are overwhelmingly dominant as payment networks, yes?

Obviously Discover, Amex and Diner's Club exist, but they are barely worth mentioning. Hardly anyone (proportionally) carries those cards, and only a few merchants accept them.

In the United States, for a merchant to refuse Visa would be suicidal. In Canada, it's almost a non-issue because all the debit cards are processed on another, non-Visa network.

What of the above do you disagree with?