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VISA will be the main driver to protect the old system where they control the network and the mechants-fees. That is what makes them money. Billions years over years.
The Podcast "Aquired" has a 3h long podcast that tells the crazy story of VISA, its founder and how they came to control the market. If anyone will do anything in its power to not liberalize the payment landscape, then it will be this very Company. It will go thermonuclear on their revenue stream.
βIf [the] digital Euro can also be used for tax payments etc and general acceptance is mandated, a significant amount of their clients could do their full finances with the digital Euro and wonβt need an account with a commercial bank anymore,β German cooperative bank lobbyists warned the Commission in one of the documents.
Imagine "warning" them that their idea could have the desired effect!
I always thought that commercial banking and the transfer industry will basically lose their whole raison d'Γͺtre if we ever get CBDCs working, and I didn't understand if they had any plans for it. I guess not.
This is confusing, doesn't EU mandate a free / basic tier of banking account already? And isn't pretty much every currency digital too?
Public payment processor is a pipe dream though. Someone has to do AML, insurance. Free wire transfers are subsidized by other revenue streams.
It technically could be subsidized by taxes. Not saying if that's good or bad.
There's a catch here. Large amount of AML regulations imposed on banks is an indirect form of taxation, even if it wasn't the original goal. Banks have to do bulk of investigative work that makes sense to do there. To do that they have to employ crapload of people (in Poland, Hungary, Estonia etc). I'm not sure individual governments or EU want to get into that because they could turn out to be less competitive than private sector which has no qualms with outsourcing / offshoring as much as possible.
I think this is related to the GNU Taler open source project. Appears they are testing to see if the technology is appropriate. New EU project NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone