Navigation. 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59  60  61 

1. Seen from the US, the world may seem very flat indeed when it comes to online payments. But this impression may be (very) deceptive. The European landscape is very diverse. In the US, we have a particular situation since cheque usage is very high there (probably the last two countries where cheques are still so important are France and the US) and therefore the e-payment landscape has had a tendency to stick to that offline landscape by mimicking the real world and re-creating the cheque in an online format? Still, credit cards are ubiquitous and they make up approx. 80% of the preferred users’ current online payment method.


2. Merchants are a little different from their users, and their perception of credit card security is very different. A conclusion we will come across too at a later stage when we review security issues and actually analyse them.


3. E-cash not really present strangely enough as we could expect to see at least paypal on top of the e-payment agenda. Merchants prefer debit cards – self explanatory I suppose.