Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1ba9115454 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's that Germans want to only use cash, I think it's more that the payment systems in Germany are not great.

Lot's of bars/beer gardens/shops can't take cards.

German banks seem to use their own system called EC card which is not usable anywhere else in the world.

You can't use an EC card to buy stuff online you have to make a bank transfer.

View on HN

> German banks seem to use their own system called EC card which is not usable anywhere else in the world.

EC is the actual old name, it stands for EuroCheque which was the unified European payment method long before credit cards or even electronic payment existed. Eurocheques were accepted as cash up to a certain max value, much like TravellerCheques, except that it was just standard and pretty much everyone had access to them. Later, debit cards were added with much the same guarantee. Nobody had a use for credit cards, so they never really took hold.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocheque

EC/Maestro works anywhere in Europe and in most parts of the world. It even works in US at the ATM.

But the converse is not true; when europeans go to Germany they can't pay with cards that are normally accepted elsewhere. That is a major nuisance.

Really? When you can pay with a card, you can pay by either EC (girocard; German thing, or maestro by mastercard, 500-600 million such cards in circulation worldwide) or a regular credit/debit card (Visa, Mastercard, etc) almost always, and often stuff like Cirrus/VisaPlus is accepted too. That's a wide variety of options?

What other major payment systems are missing?

Look, I'm speaking from personal experience only, but due to work needs I travel almost every week to Frankfurt (purportedly the financial capital of Europe) with an amex, a visa and a mastercard; and each time I pick a taxi or I go to a restaurant there is about a 50% chance they do not take anything but EC Karte, or Cash only. It is so annoying that at work we have a running Splitwise group of about 25 people because always someone does not bring enough cash on them, only some spare change from last day plus all the usual cards. This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden. So I think German is an outlier here, and in a bad way. It is not the worst problem in the world; I just said it is annoying.

I wasn't trying to say you're wrong, just genuinely curious as I never experienced that myself. Then again I'm German and would never pay a German cab with anything but cash :p

But yeah, you need cash in Germany!

> This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden.

With Euro cash you can pay in most of these countries (in my experience in cases of emergency it even should be possible to pay with Euro cash in UK, Switzerland and Sweden).

That's not surprising. Transaction costs for credit card payments in Germany are higher (2 to 4 percent) than for electronic cash payments (0.3 to 0.95 percent). It's simply not feasible for many sellers to offer credit card payments, especially as everyone in Germany has an electronic cash card anyway.

You might use an app like taxi.eu to call a taxi, which allows to add constraints like "credit cards accepted".

I've been in Germany recently (with a card that is normally accepted elsewhere) and everything worked just fine. When was the last time you were there?

Two weeks ago. I'm there almost all weeks. It is still a nuisance (although I'll admit it is much better than in 2011, as commerces start using payment processor startups such as sumup instead of traditional german banking)

I live in Berlin, I would say the majority places will refuse to accept anything other than EC card

>But the converse is not true; when europeans go to Germany they can't pay with cards that are normally accepted elsewhere. That is a major nuisance.

Are you talking about niche cards like Amex?

My Visa was widely accepted in Germany, except at places that don't take cards at all. (Kebab stand, bar, etc)

No, I'm speaking precisely about places that only take cash or ecash (EC, maestro) but reject major credit card networks (amex visa Mastercard). They are not only kebab stands.

The issue has significantly higher complexity than either of you have portrayed here. Check here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)#Europe

It works in the US in some ATMs; I was in Orlando and managed to find 1 ATM, at the airport, that worked, all the rest, although it said Maestro, did not work. And we tried in over 50 machines as credit cards are uncommon in europe (and NL banks do not do conventional debit cards), we did not bring other cards.

>> German banks seem to use their own system called EC card which is not usable anywhere else in the world.

Thats simply not true. Its at least usable in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and the Czech republic. These are at least the locations I've travelled to recently and used a Card like that. The only problem I had with it were obnoxiuos fees.

Having a domestic payment scheme isn't an issue regarding card adoption. I'd even argue that offering a cheap domestic payment scheme is fundamental to adoption on the merchant side. See the situation in France for instance.

All EC cards issued by German banks are co-branded, it used to be only Maestro, nowadays mostly V-pay. They do work fine abroad. (V-pay a bit less so than Maestro, but that's not a bug, that's a feature, skimming is a big issue in big German cities, that's why a lot of banks switched to V-pay)

There might be a slight point here, but speaking for me its all about not giving even more data (power) to "the few", that clearly do not wield that data in our interest.

The article is a little weird IMHO. It's not like Germans are paying their rent or buying cars in cash - it's day to day things.

Also, it's not clear to me - do they count debit transactions as "cash"? IIRC you could go to a supermarket and use a card but those may have been debit - it's hard to tell with chip and pin.

I think a lot of people in America do the same thing - withdraw cash for bars, coffees, etc rather than swipe a credit card for every little thing.

"You can't use an EC card to buy stuff online you have to make a bank transfer."

That's wrong. EC (Maestro) is part of the Cirrus network and works world wide for cash withdrawels. Other debit cards are aligned with the Plus network. Same thing.

ECMaestro cards are separate from the Cirrus network and don't even have a card number.

Which is good, because due to that the fees of German EC cards are significantly lower than those of the rest of the Cirrus system cards.

> Lot's of bars/beer gardens/shops can't take cards.

I suspect this allows many small businesses in Germany to simply under declare their income, along with avoiding the fees to the card companies.

This is true. There was an article in Exberliner a few years ago explaining how rampant it was for cafe owners in Neukölln to keep everything cash only and pay employees off the books. With such a high amount of foreigners and expats in dubious visa situations there's a lot of opportunities to play the system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com