The European Mobile Payment Association (EMPSA) consists of 16 members in 17 European Markets, representing more than 90 million users, more than one million merchants and hundreds of European Banks. Current members include: BAMCARD (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Bankart (Slovenia), BANCOMAT (Italy), Bancontact Payconiq Company (Belgium), Bizum (Spain), BLIK (Poland), BORICA AD (Bulgaria), Bluecode (Austria and Germany), DIAS S.A. (Greece) iDEAL (Netherlands), MobilePay (Denmark and Finland), Plick (Italy), SIBS (Portugal), Swish (Sweden), TWINT (Switzerland) und Vipps (Norway).
So you want a monopoly?
Interop by means of a shared standard wouldn’t require a monopoly. Heck, we already have SEPA direct deposit, all we really need is a user-friendly frontend for it.
More being able to send money to people in other countries
Edit: also, they usually have local monopolies in their own country, there is only one MB Way active in Portugal
I wouldn’t call this a monopoly. It’s an association to let users of one country’s service send money to users of another country using a different service. Bizum at least (and I guess many if not all of the rest) is a joint project, you use it from your bank’s app, any bank you choose. Until this it was only easy and fast to send money to accounts within the same bank which made people going even more into the big ones. Now a Pole, an Italian, a German, a French (yeh I know), and a Spaniard can have dinner at a restaurant and pay their share conveniently without making the server’s day longer, and without having to subscribe to any other app or service than their good ol’ bank accounts.
Yeah goes very much against the decentralization we stand for here.
