[arnvald]

I like that, too. The only thing that bothers me is that Maestro cards can't be used for online payments, so if I buy something from other countries (where shops don't support iDeal) I still need to use credit card, and support for credit cards in NL is pretty bad.

Btw these high transaction fees are the reason why loyalty programs are so good in US while so bad in EU. EU caps credit card fees at around 1.5%, while in US it's much higher, so basically banks give people part of the fee in form of loyalty points

[krageon]

> Maestro cards can't be used for online payments

They can, for example ~15 years ago I used a maestro card to pay for a subscription to Sony. All they needed was a card number and an address (the latter for tax reasons, that is mandatory).

[arnvald]

That's interesting, are there different types of Maestro cards? I also had one years ago, but it didn't have CVV so I could not pay online. My current one does not even have a real card number, it has just my bank account number on it.

[krageon]

It is not a creditcard-compatible system. I was merely hooking into the thought that this was not possible at all, it definitely is. Most companies just choose not to support it (or use payment gateways that prefer not to).

[hakfoo]

It seems to be somewhat compatible.

I work in the card-payments space, but in the US. We can handle Maestro cards, so long as all parties are aligned to accept them. You need a shopping cart that doesn't scream "This card number looks weird" before even letting the customer submit it, a gateway that identifies it correctly, and a processor that's built to handle it. Probably the merchant account needs to be configured to accept it too, but that's outside my scope.

If the processor mentions Maestro at all, it's usually a corner-case line item in the documentation-- "Send field 923 = AA for Mastercard, and AB for Maestro, but everything else the same."

It's an interesting evolutionary divergence. We had/have "debit only" networks in the US (i. e. Star, Cirrus, Plus). They still exist but they are largely irrelevant for purchases because virtually every checking account provides a Visa or Mastercard badged card. There are a few situations where merchants can try to reroute the transaction to a debit network for lower fees, but it's a narrow interest at best.

They actually went through a legal tussle here because some merchants felt imposed on when the card networks said "If you take Credit Visa/Mastercard, you also have to take Debit Visa/Mastercard" back when the fees for doing so were higher.

[yarcob]

In Austria banks switched from Maestro to Mastercard Debit to make online payments easier.