[wolvoleo]

That's a chicken/egg problem. It's going to be really easy to circumvent. Just make an EU card provider and mandate that it has to be accepted everywhere in the EU. Then users will want it and a critical mass will be created for vendors outside the EU to accept it as well.

[hocuspocus]

EPI initially wanted to become a card scheme but quickly gave up.

Plastic cards are yesterday's battle, many national schemes exist in large European countries (CB in France, Girocard in Germany, ...) and would be hard to overhaul.

Focusing on mobile payments makes sense. Once a critical mass is reached (Austria, Benelux, France, Germany) there's a clear incentive for other players to work on interoperability, even if the pricing structure might be very different.

[wolvoleo]

Plastic cards no but they are also the underlying layer of digital PoS payments of course. They also use credit card numbers and infrastructure. This is the problem. Every time I buy something in a shop it goes through an American company.

[hocuspocus]

That's the thing, if you pay with a French payment card (plastic or through Apple/Google Pay) in France, it's processed by the domestic network CB. This is also true in other European countries with their respective networks. EPI tried to bring a new pan-European card scheme that would have superseded those, it didn't work out.

On the other hand, there's a significant chunk of the population that just pays using their mobile phone. They don't care about cards, numbers (which are going to disappear anyway), or the legacy infrastructure behind that.