Comment by topdan
2 months ago
China is a footnote in the article, but their story here is interesting. China's WTO accession commitments in 2001 agreed to open its financial services sector, including payment card services, to foreign companies, except they never did.
The US sued (presumably on behalf of VISA and MasterCard) and won in 2012: https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
MasterCard just started being full offered in 2024. VISA still has not. In the meantime, China built their own dominate offerings, essentially avoiding the duopoly.
Not only have they avoided the duopoly: they've avoided dependence on US tech and US financial surveillance/control. The EU depends on Visa/Mastercard for cross-border transactions especially, and they've never been able to get their act together well enough to establish a home-grown, EU-wide payment rails system that would give them independence from US processors should they need that independence. That's a lesson that Russia learned back in 2014 and remedied with its Mir rails.
Too bad but good that Europe at least have SEPA for euro money transfer so not dependant on SWIFT and at least for mobile payment you have many systems in different European countries like e.g BLIK in Poland
SEPA/SWIFT are not anything like the Visa/Mastercard duopoly: the former are bank-facing, while the latter are retail cusotmer-facing at point-of-sale.
You do indeed have many systems in different countries in the EU. The problem is that they don't interoperate, and the rebooted EPI has had to scale back its goals. Its goal now is to offer a digital wallet and P2P transactions, with a card scheme only in the distant future.