Anders Rundgren’s Post

Note: this posting is NOT a promotion for Saturn (it is not even for sale 😏), but an hopefully reasonably objective comparison of two paths for creating a more sovereign European payment landscape. The European Payment Initiative (EPI) is a private company which nowadays enjoy public support by the European Commission as well as Banque de France. Although the information is still pretty scarce, it appears to be centered around a common wallet. This is undoubtedly a necessity if you are going to take on Apple. However, in similarity to the GAFA and VISA/MC, the architecture is based on a “hub” model. To become a new VISA is of course tempting but may prove to be hard since national payment systems are already firmly established like Carte Bancaire in France and Swish in Sweden. Saturn is a very different project. Inspired by other recent technology advances it builds on decentralization. This does not automatically solve market acceptance, but by eliminating costly “middlemen” (be it Stripe or VISA), transaction fees become an issue for banks only. This arrangement also makes such systems much more resilient to outages including cyberattacks. Unlike EPI, Saturn is public and free from licenses. In fact, anybody having an Android phone can take the prototype for a spin or read the pretty voluminous specifications, without registration or signing NDAs. To be fair, I’m certainly not the only one who have considered decentralization as the future for European payments. The problem is that those who are responsible (and they are?), have not bothered too much about competition and/or architectural issues, not to mention standards. This is hardly surprising since it requires fairly wide ranging competences which effectively nobody possess. Lawyers, business developers, and technologists do not even speak the same language 😖