Germany's Legacy Payment Tech And The Impact of AI
The world is changing fast is Europe keeping up?
Disclaimer: views expressed here are my own and do not represent any other organisation
Around 15 years ago, I lived in Germany for a couple of years. I’m feeling old right now saying that, but I really enjoyed my time living in the country, and I learned a lot. I learned that parts of mainland Europe loved cash - in a way that the UK, even back then, did not. I quickly noticed that in Germany most stores didn’t accept credit cards.
For most Germans, this wasn’t such an issue. With any bank account, Germans got, and still get, a Girocard. This seems like most other payment cards, but a key difference is that there is no long card number across the front of the card. (This long card number is usually called a Primary Account Number, or PAN, in Visa and Mastercard lingo.) Without the PAN, these cards can’t be used for online payments, yet they can be used for payments in-stores almost everywhere across Germany.
Girocard is the debit card of the German Banking Indu…