This is a short piece about what I think the two entities in the title have in common. And the way I found remarkably telling is through signing up to the European Rail Passengers Union, which by the way you should absolutely consider if you are using railways in Europe at all.
First things first: I wanted to sign up to the ERPU because I think they do crucial work to improve the passenger experience on rails in Europe – which sucks right now.
The ERPU is an association under Belgian law, you can sign up online for only 12€/year, and hey, in the payment process, amongst all the usual payment options, I get “iDEAL Wero”.
Wero you say? I can try this new European payment method? Nice! I’m hooked! So, I click.
And there’s a QR code saying “scan me with your banking app”.
Well. My banking app says, this is not a Wero link – and apparently it isn’t.
So I click on the other button that says: Or use internet banking, select your bank.
All right, so I click this.
And it lists … only Belgian banks.
So, what do I do? I take the plane. I pay using Visa/Mastercard/Amexco.
This is exactly what the European Rail experience is today:
You try. You try again. The connection is shoddy, you have no rights in case ticket 1 fails and you miss your train on ticket 2. So, you use Paypal. So, you take the plane.
Here it’s the same. There’s this European payment service Wero, that in principle could be used Europe wide. But implementation on all sides – bank, service provider – is crappy. It’s limited to national borders for yet another completely in-transparent reason. And so, you pay using credit card.
And it’s probably for the exact same reasons too. Like train operators, many banks have their turf, are safe because they’re the default and somewhat state backed (yes, I’m looking at you Sparkassen) and haven’t adapted to demand in decades. Like train regulation, regulators only seem to care what’s going on when shit is on fire (cf. sub prime loan crisis et al., or railway tracks crumbling under twice the load they were constructed for et al.). And like in train land, there’s the other agile, indirectly but heavily subsidised means of payment with a shitload of hidden downsides that you default to. You don’t think cars and planes have massive downsides? Maybe you also think, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and Apple/Google Pay offer their services for free. Heck no, you simply don’t ever see the bill. And: Yes, et al indeed.
And this is not a dunk on the folks at ERPU. On the contrary: they’ve taken what is available in terms of payment services, integrated it nicely into their web page. Jon is doing actual field work travelling around all the crazy cross border connections that barely work in Europe. No. The horror starts once you leave their web page and enter into the payment service realm.
But it illustrates so very clearly why it’s so bad. And why work like the one of ERPU is needed. Hell, maybe we need more than the European Rail Passenger Union. We need a European Payment Users Union. How’s that?
