Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.
As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.
And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.
A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.
That's not what I imply. I'm saying that it eases the creation of new taxes, which are ever-increasing in the EU due to the social welfare costs that increase with immigration and aging populations.
Or new compliance obligations, such as recently the new need to provide a source of fund if you buy a watch worth more than 10k€. The watch seller has to then pay a specialized company to analyze it, the customer loses time on trying to get the documents, you leak private data to unknown parties and compliance agents will know everything about you. So much for the "privacy".
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.