Payments Culture

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Payments Culture
Payments Culture
Germany's Legacy Payment Tech And The Impact of AI

Germany's Legacy Payment Tech And The Impact of AI

The world is changing fast is Europe keeping up?

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Matt Jones
Jan 31, 2025
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Payments Culture
Payments Culture
Germany's Legacy Payment Tech And The Impact of AI
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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.

A German girocard - source

Girocard is the debit card of the German Banking Indu…

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