Zippay

Yeah, I've used Revolut abroad quite a lot, but on reflection I don't think paying in shops/etc is the intended use case for Zippay. It seems more targeted to exchanging money with people you already know, or splitting bills.

That's the issue though, it's not actually a direct like-for-like alternative to Revolut, and i can't just take everything I currently do with Revolut, shift it over to Zippay, then drop Revolut. For sure Zippay has person-to-person payments, but with the caveat that the recipient needs to be in your phone contacts. But it seems that the banks want you to continue using traditional services otherwise, so I can't say if I know that's a model people would buy into. I just don't think person-to-person on it's own is enough.

OK, but it still means needing to get their number.

I guess where I'm coming to is that it needs a compelling feature that Revolut doesn't have.

Zappay lets you send a Request for payment, split payments etc.

Never said otherwise.

The point is that the phone number is a personal contact detail which people might not be as comfortable sharing, and which might not be as simple to backtrack from if it becomes compromised.

A family member over the weekend wanted to send me money for their share of a dinner. In comes revolut payment. I said why didn't you just transfer it as they had my IBAN saved or alternatively zippay. The reply was why bother, that's what revolut is for.

And that has answered my queries about zippay.

I don't personally feel hostile towards Zippay, I just wish it offered more than it currently does.

I'd rather see Zippay rolled into WERO, which is a broader European platform in the Eurozone running on the same technology frameworks. The more access to networks we have the better as it manes that any such service would be potentially usable online.

What's worrying the ECB at the moment is the fact that Visa and MasterCard are a duopoly owned in the US and subject to whims of sanctioning, tariffing, trade wars and even just data siphoning and so on, as well as just the risk they could become very expensive if the two players start abusing their position.

Before 2006 ish they were both member-networks owned by the banks, but were demutualised and turned into corporations after IPOs, so they're very different beasts to what they originally were.

That's why WERO is being pushed out and it would just be a shame for Irish customers to end up having no access to evolving systems, especially if they're useful for online payments in the next few years.

It takes them so long to rollout something using standard technologies that the world passes them by. That's what happened with Revolut and it will happen with that too. Apple Cash for example is already offering it in some markets on iOS and others will follow suit.

By the time the 9 committees and the court of directors have gotten around to it, the Irish banks will have launched what was state of the art 10 years ago.

I think the factor is that the old banks are just purchasing what are effectively customised, but off the shelf solutions. They're pretty small organisation with fairly traditional use of IT systems - and not online innovators like Revolut, which is entirely about that. So, you'll always get a fairly boring and late rollout of technologies as they'll wait until the service is very well established by someone else, probably looking at what's going on in other markets and then they roll it out very cautiously.

I mean, when you look back at the Irish banks over the decades, they were even incredibly late to market with the now defunct Laser Card, which only launched in 1996 and was essentially a replica of Switch in the UK which had launched in 1988. Then when they rolled out Visa Debit they seemed to do so by basically just outsourcing everything to Visa - I assume it's purchased as a services package that's plugged into their systems, so the maintenance of anything complex is not falling on the banks themselves. Laser for example never really was able to make the transition to being a useful online payment option - and from what I gather they were struggling to keep it modernised and ahead of security risks, as the market's just so small.

I don't know what they're up to not joining Wero though - it seems to be where that tech is at in the Eurozone now : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_%28payment%29

https://wero-wallet.eu