Baŝto

Open Source VSCode addons like https://github.com/continuedev/continue support a couple of different AI providers. Although I only use it with my locally running ollama and Qwen3 Coder 30B.

JCB is short for Japanese Credit Bank

Japan Credit Bureau

At most I expect that some company alliance manages to expand to all of Euro zone. But it doesn’t look like they are keen on bothering with currency exchange.

Debit card is the way to go, not credit card.

We’ll see if any system will try to expand to more countries. Merging products like it happened for Wero is a way as well.

For a functional card you still only have Visa and MasterCard as options

Yes. I could use my Girocard in other European countries, but only because they always get co-badged with what is now Visa Debit and Debit MasterCard. Outside of SEPA it didn’t work at all in the past

credit cards are used for everything,

Visa and Mastercard also have debit card systems. You can’t easily escape their duopoloy, but you don’t have to own a credit card in Europe.

The biggest part for me is online payment and that’s where it matters most that multiple countries share a system. I already used the predecessor service, but I hope this could lead to wider adoption on the vendor side. So far it looks worse than the previous system. If they don’t change that I need an app to pay online, it’s useless.

This also by no means covers or plan to cover all of EU. It’s just Germany, France and BENELUX

I hope they’ll try to bring the Girocard to more countries next. Right now it only works in other countries because of visa/mastercard co-branding.

Cards already work without US companies, just on a national basis.