Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

Re:Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun by laksjhdlka on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @11:22AM (#46962109)

Exactly, now that the internet is ubiquitous, none of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical. They are regulatory, they are political, they are social.

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Re:Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun by jimnotgym on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @11:46AM (#46962609)

And before Trump it wasn't worth the aggravation. It wasn't worth the pushback from the US government.

Trump sure has moved the needle on that! We used to pay protection money to the US via this. Now we don't get the protection, so we don't need to pay.

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Re:Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun by close04 on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @11:57AM (#46962860)

> one of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical

VISA and Mastercard never resolved major technical problems. It's nothing a bank wouldn't already be able to achieve internally from a technological complexity point of view. They didn't invent any of the technologies, they just navigated the political and regulatory hurdles, then leveraged their position for more.

Your comment makes it look like the problems are "just" political or regulatory. These are more often then not the bigger ones.

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Re:Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun by TulliusCicero on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @05:41PM (#46968020)

Surely the EU could pull off something similar to what India did with their instant payments program? That system seems to have garnered near-universal praise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

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