From a Reddit user:
I briefly went through the documents about this and the entire thing is mostly about a push towards a single capital market. The most notable points are:
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Launch of an EU-wide, auto-enrollment to Long Term Savings Product, which looks like a pension fund/savings account where citizens of the EU will be able to invest, leveraging tax incentives
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Harmonisation of EU Member States’ regulatory frameworks
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Implementation of an EU-wide capital market access-point for small and medium enterprises so that they can have access to capital from the entire EU
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Rollback of some red tape around the scrutinisation frameworks
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Creation of European Green Guarantee - an EU-wide scheme of guarantees for banks to mitigate lending risks to help green investment projects and companies get liquidity
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Introduction of a new scheme combining the European Long Term Fund with tax incentives
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Pan-European payment infrastructure with the Digital Euro
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Widespread availability of supranational AAA EU Bonds to increase flexibility of the European Central Bank
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1ilmxfn/comment/mbwsdbj/
But the article is worth reading
“It’s not against the American credit card, it’s about the fact that we are not able in Europe to build up European credit cards,” Letta said, estimating that some $300 billion a year in European savings are going into the US financial market, to a US company.
This annoys me even in Australia
We have a perfectly functional, highly modern and universal debit card system in Germany, girocard. It’s when I’m in other EU countries that the downgrade to the visa/mastercard networks takes place. Transfer fees are between the seller and their POS provider/bank, but generally cheaper than handling cash. It piggybacks on standard wire transfers, which are unified in Europe (via SEPA).
It’s also where a lot of the “Germany only does cash” myth comes from. No, the restaurant isn’t accepting only cash they realise that you’re a tourist and only have a credit card which is a hassle (and chargeback risk) they don’t want to deal with.
That one card does contact & contact-free payments, it’s your ATM card, and second factor for online banking.
If German cooperative, public and private banks can agree on a standard why can’t the rest of Europe just take it up, just as they do with various DIN norms. We’ve had this shit since the 80s, growing out of ATM cards turned into cheque guarantee cards.
seems like a nationality thing? or at least he was implying french and italian people wouldn’t “because it’s german”
I just don’t quite understand how it’s 2025 and these standards are just finally on the verge of potentially being started
It would be the French or Italians paying with French and Italian cards which happen to follow a German standard. There’s no one German company behind it, it’s an interoperability standard set by the whole German banking industry. Who are very much open to take other banks on board, publish everything very openly, don’t demand license fees for those standards, whatnot.
Spaniards definitely manage to give out Girocards to their German customers, both Santander and PNB Paribas are playing on the German market. I bet they also offer the standard HBCI (or whatever it’s called now) software interface so you can hook it up to your accounting program etc. It’s a standard feature in German banking, even the bank’s web interfaces use HBCI on the backend to talk to the mainframe.