Comment by wazoox
6 hours ago
You can't have a credit card which makes your life miserable in the modern world even if you can find a bank : Visa, Master Card, Amex are all American.
6 hours ago
You can't have a credit card which makes your life miserable in the modern world even if you can find a bank : Visa, Master Card, Amex are all American.
Financial sovereignty is one of the reasons India went with its own RuPay (https://www.rupay.co.in/credit-cards) credit cards.
Russia after starting aggressive war against Ukraine quickly deployed own version of payment system. And it has been working much better than Visa/Madtercards with much more straightforward integration with online services and very intuitive apps. Russian people who moved from Russia as refugees or just to escape mobilization or prosecution have found banking system in EU/UK/US are rather unsmooth to put it mildly.
Many European countries still have their own (single-country) versions of debit cards - EC card/giropay in Germany for instance - and they are often accepted more widely than credit cards.
But international travel becomes painful. (Hence EC cards are co-badged as a fall-back with Visa Debit or Maestro, impossible if you are sanctioned.)
Europe used to have its own system, but it merged with Mastercard in 2002.
These days however the focus has moved to digital payments, and Europe is now backing Wero, which they aim to start rolling out properly in 2026.