Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share.
They also integrate seamlessly to UPI.
Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currencies? Is that it? Something else?
[0]: Data rules came in 2017/18, RuPay was developed in 2012 iirc. But it got unprecedented push after the rule.
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments)
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)
Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/
RuPay is just like Visa/Mastercard in the sense you get physical cards that you can use at ATMs, use at ecomm sites, etc.
Wero doesn’t seem to be that. Am I missing something? Does making a new direct alternative to Visa/MC doesn’t make sense for the EU? If so, why?
> Wero doesn’t seem to be that. Am I missing something? Does making a new direct alternative to Visa/MC doesn’t make sense for the EU? If so, why?
To avoid US government control of your payments and US corporate payment processor extraction of value via your payment flows. How do you avoid someone else controlling your infra? You instantiate, operate, and maintain your own infra. Brazil runs their instant payment system Pix for ~$10M/year, for example. The cost is very reasonable to do so.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAChinese/comments/1qgq6ya/why_di...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-digital-payments-r...
[3] https://easebuzz.in/explainers/upi/upi-qr-code/
[4] https://dev.to/woovi/how-does-pix-qrcode-work-5e3k
If you're building out a brand new system, why not make use of the computing device with input/output capabilities (that can be used to confirm amount, payee etc.) almost everybody already has in their pocket/purse anyway and instead rely on merchants being honest and only taking what they're owed out of your account without your confirmation?
Of course physical cards will also play some role in any future EU payment system, if for nothing other than resiliency (a card works without any battery and is cheap to keep in a drawer or suitcase as a backup for a stolen phone) and sovereignty (note who makes most phones' operating systems and runs their attestation providers).
Some merchants disable RuPay CC payments even when they don't get charged merchant fees till the payment crosses the INR 2K threshold.
Strangest thing is when I can pay the guy pushing a handcart around selling vegetables using a RuPay CC while a medical store refuses to accept it.
My colleague's father runs medical store. He apparently cooks the books too.
RuPay is.
You get a physical cc/dc with RuPay as provider instead of MC/Visa.
If I am not missing something, Wero is not that.
That is what I wanted to know: why not a traditional, homegrown card that is a direct 1-to-1 alternative of MC/Visa cards? Does that not make sense for the EU now? Why?
Because the European market is fragmented. France, Italy, Germany, etc all have some sort of established localized payment system and in some states like Ireland and the Netherlands are entirely dependent on Visa.
There is no "pan-European" bank and individual states still care about their sovereignity. France will continue to back and support BNP and Credit Agricole against Germany's Deutsche Bank (and vice versa). The only solution at that point is to just bypass the whole problem and just go directly with mobile payments.
Additionally, China, India, and Brazil began building their DPD stack in the 2000s but European states didn't start until the last 2-3 years.
UPI still connects with bank accounts.
My question was about something else: why EU doesn’t try and develop a homegrown card provider? It would provide exactly what MC/Visa does. Are we beyond that point in terms of technological advancement? Some other reason?
They have. A combination of petty squabbling and the lack of any real value proposition has always killed it. To have any chance of succeeding in the EU a new system needs to be something that no-one currently provides, because consumers are unlikely to adopt something that isn't clearly better than what they currently have, but more importantly no EU country is going to adopt a different EU country's system.
We used to have Europay, which competed with Visa and MasterCard. But it merged with MasterCard in 2002.
