Visa and mastercard innovated in an era where payment settlement was notoriously difficult and expensive but they've used their monopolies to entrench themselves in (by negotiating deals with merchants and bribing consumers with points) while the rest of the world moves on towards "layer 2" payment systems that are much cheaper and efficient.
All of them are happy to receive cash or interac (Canadian debit infrastructure) or even e-transfers in some cases (Canadian venmo). But they'll say an extra $1-2 charge if you want to pay by credit card.
Maybe I'm just remembering badly, but I don't remember encountering this twenty years ago; back then the rules were clear that you either didn't accept credit payments, or you did and it was the same price as cash.
Merchant agreements didn't allow surcharges until 2022: https://www.cbc.ca/news/credit-card-surcharge-faq-1.6610356
It also included a number of other valuable consumer protections, such as forcing card issuers to provide clear advance notice of interest-rate increases.
The financial-system reforms were some of the Obama administration's most valuable.
My memory is in accordance with yours
A sensible business owner increases the base price a little to offset card fees instead of bothering customers with these details and losing sales.
Credit-card issuers in the USA are a textbook example of a consumer- and retailer-harming monopoly.
However, with cash one needs to have / has / has to pay for:
* a more complex register * a person who takes more time to do the transaction * someone who counts the register at the end of the day to ensure it matches * someone who drives to the bank to deposit the money (at random times) * additional insurance * a bank account which probably charges for these cash services
If you don't count time, then cash is better.
And also, in Europe, if you as a business prefer cash, we all know it means that you make X, but you only report X/2.
Anyone can pay to anyone instantly free of Charge. Only limit is it's limited to ~ $1000 payment. The QR code can also be dynamically created by POS terminals containing the total bill amount as well, so upon scanning the amount is auto populated in the payment app, you just have to enter the security pin.
And since it's a Govt. Project, its not limited to just one app, there are lots and lots of apps working on the same system. There is even a VISA/Mastercard credit alternative : RuPay that works within the system.
The QR is a URI with the ID, amount and maybe other stuff. It's a client-side implementation.
RuPay sure "works within the system" but is pretty much useless for international payments/subscriptions. Not really a VISA/MasterCard replacement.
(I don't know anything about UPI, but in Indonesia we use a similar system)
Its just a URI.
upi://pay?pa=payeeID&pn=payeeName
this is why QR codes, especially ones with complicated encoded uris, are a security problem. they're very hard for leypeople to audit before doing the wrong thing
It is not how any of this works. But sure, keep up the uninformed fear mongering.
1. Static QR codes displayed by the vendor have the problem you describe.
2. Dynamic QR codes are time limited, have the amount embedded in them along with the destination. These are the ones generated by websites or POS terminals for payment. Most people will only use these at a POS terminals, pay and move on.
Fraudulent websites have used static QR codes but I'm told one can dispute the transaction and the amount is usually reversed in a couple of days.
I guess Tencent are making their profit from the interest they earn on the money that was transferred into them that just stays in people's Wechat wallets in effectively a parallel currency.
Revolut works similarly. You don’t pay any fees on transfers to other Revolut accounts, but you do for other bank accounts.
Does it? I'd be surprised if it does in the UK at least, as all banks do free transfers to every other bank in the UK via Faster Payments. I thought it was the same in the EU?
> If the card processing cost is 4 percent of the sale price, the fee amounts to $6. That $6 is not 4 percent of the profit; it is 12 percent of the merchant’s margin.
Sure, but merchants are raising prices overall together with all their competitors, or charging more when using a card. Credit cards aren't taking away 12% of merchants' profits that they'd keep otherwise.
Also, credit card fees are not 4%, they're 1.5-3.5% with an average of around 2.3%.
> The merchant may pay little or nothing per transaction, the funds usually arrive immediately and no physical terminal is required.
But what's missing here is fraud protection. It's more like debit cards than credit cards, and debit card transactions are much cheaper in the US too (more like 0.7%).
Now that it's increasingly common for local merchants to implement a credit card surcharge (so non-CC users don't have to pay more), and a large percentage of credit card fees come straight back to the user as rewards (e.g. a 2% cash reward), it's not really clear that payment fees matter all that much in the end. See:
Fed Data Shows Economics of Interchange: 86% of Fees Fund Rewards Programs: https://www.pymnts.com/news/loyalty-and-rewards-news/2025/fe...
And they’re much lower than that in the UK and EU. Even the smallest UK retailers can pay as low as 1.6% or 0.8% + £0.02. The big guys who are running billions of £ are paying 0.5% or less.
(These apply to in-person transactions, accepting cards on the internet typically costs more).
Now, would it be nice to not overpay at the first place. Technically we could re-implement the whole thing (instant payout, fraud detection, etc.) like Brazil or India did. It would bring more than $100B back to the US consumers every year, that could be spent elsewhere.
Monopolistic practices prevent competitors charging less from arising.
86% is small?
That depends on the market. Suppose you're selling something which has a substitute available for the same price, so the customer will buy whichever one costs less by any amount, but the substitute is in a different market where the payment is in the form of a bank transfer or it's a tax deduction etc., or the substitute is paid for in time rather than money.
Then none of the sellers accepting credit cards can raise the price because otherwise the buyer would go to the substitute.
And all markets are like that to some extent. For some the seller can't raise the price by a cent without losing 100% of their sales. For others, raising the price would "only" cost them 5% of their sales... but that's still 5% of their sales gone, and all the same fixed costs to cover. And, of course, in the cases where the price goes up, now it's the customer eating the fees, which is fairly nefarious when it's being subtly hidden from them.
> Also, credit card fees are not 4%, they're 1.5-3.5% with an average of around 2.3%.
Stripe is 2.9% + $0.30. For a $10 transaction, that's 5.9%. For a $3 transaction it's 12.9% -- of revenue, not profit.
> But what's missing here is fraud protection.
"Fraud protection" is is independent of the fees. You're making the case for that yourself -- if 86% of the fees go to rewards programs then they could be reduced by 86% without affecting "fraud protection", and the rewards programs are a wretched thicket of dark patterns and unpaid interest scams taking advantage of people who are bad at math or too short on time to configure them efficiently, on top of a tax on lower income people who don't qualify for them.
It's also not clear why "fraud protection" should cost anything. The bank has no meaningful way to investigate a low dollar amount he-said she-said and the high dollar amount ones should be going to the actual court system, so why should they have anything more than a set of rules (e.g. which transactions are eligible, how long you have to file a dispute) under which you can make a request to have them flip the bits back in their computer for free?
I know that the banks are trying to build a payment solution on top of this technology but it's not really getting traction.
I am wondering if there is a way to bootstrap something bottom-up by offering something to merchants that has a clear value prop.
The merchant's system displays this code, you open your online banking app, scan the code, select "SEPA INST" (here's the usability catch!) to make the payment instantaneous, and confirm. Within 10 seconds, the money is transferred to the merchant's account. Either the merchant's bank or a third-party Open Banking API immediately informs the merchant's system (e.g. by push notification or webhook), and a receipt is issued.
Everything is already here, but since this system would be virtually free to use, nobody really has an incentive to push it. It costs money to educate the public, and there is no money to be made. Instead, everyone gets paid handsomely by the card mafia.
- you can send money to companies and individuals alike. It's easier to trick people into fake shop payments, a card payment provider requires at least a bit it verification/registration
- it's really hard to dispute/call back sepa payments. The card companies often step in there afaik
You can't dispute or call back SEPA INST payments. But you can't dispute cash payments either. This is just fine for most day-to-day transactions, I don't need insurance when I buy groceries or pay the taxi driver.
If the card processing fees could be added to the customer's bill, it would be in the customer's interest to support a cheaper/free alternative. But since card payments are "free" in the eye of the consumer, why should he be using anything but the most convenient option? And what is more convenient than just touching your card/phone to the terminal? As long as this deal stands, EU merchants will be slaves to the card companies.
How did Venmo and Cash app get any traction? After all, we already had PayPal. There was already a way to transfer money to your friends.
How did Robinhood get any traction? We already had Etrade and other online brokers.
Processing a Mastercard card is "$0.13 + "Interchange+" + 0.60%" where the "Interchange+" would be 0.30% for EU. So more like €0.10 + 0.90% so for €10.00 product, it would be €1 of fee (1.00%). Much less than here in US, but still not negligible for small businesses that run on thin margins (and 20% VAT).
What many people in Germany want is a payment system that is as anonymous and is as hard to control by some untrusted entitity (both government and banks are very distrusted) as possible and what cash offers. That's basically cash.
Not without reason, in Germany there exists the well-known phrase "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" ("cash is lived freedom").
Any other payment method will not give customers any benefits over those methods. Unless banks are willing to take responsibility for fraud like with card purchases.
"designed to be anonymous for the payer, but payees are always identified"
Why not anonymity for both sides?
We're still orders of magnitude smaller than Visa and Mastercard, but I do believe products like ours (and competition is red hot here, theres so much good choice!) will be good for consumers.
Money should be like a message: free and instant
We're open source btw, happy to show off codebase and review PRs
The only way which has worked for me was actually using g2a with their crypto provider to get a 10$ gift card of rewarble and activate it.
Does your app allow something like this? can I convert any crypto to payment provider which can be accepted from the other side or am I reading it wrong because you do mention PIX, if it can work with PIX, does it work with VISA/Mastercard cards too?
We blocked that card processor, obviously. But the % is very much not constant across e.g. Visa, often every purchase in a day is slightly different, and we can't even tell people what the rate is for their purchase due to a couple layers in between (still figuring out if we can fix that). It's vile, and probably should be illegal to not pass through the cost visibly.
I helped out a friend who owns a deli when he took over from his parents. His dad saw cash as a way to avoid taxation and had some awful payment processor where they paid a high fee and was renting a POTS based terminal - $60/mo to Verizon and $30/mo for the terminal.
Now he keeps one set of books, and raised his average sale by about 10%. Their catering business, which drives profits, are up significantly with online ordering through the POS.
Ditto with a non-profit I was on the board of. Pushing Venmo and Square for donations increased donations by like 30% and reduced shrink at fundraisers. Anyone who claims they can’t afford a 3% fee is going out of business anyway.
See the "raw" rates here: https://www.mastercard.com/content/dam/mccom/us/business/doc...
> complaint: credit card fees are high and maliciously opaque.
> suggestion: have you considered adding another company in the middle?
... do y'all understand that those middle companies profit from being in the middle? that profit comes from somewhere, where oh where could it be...
why on earth would you expect them to improve your income? you are literally buying convenience from them. or is this just thinly disguised advertising?
I guess the question is whether they can distinguish between people who are going to carry a balance but ultimately pay and people who are a true default/bankruptcy risk.
The drawback is when the US Bank office down the street that hosts the account closed for water damage, it stopped receiving the checks, and it took forever to bounce, so I had no idea that I was not paying my HOA... And this happened in San Francisco, California where the Bank of America and the US Bank are on the same street, a block away...
I cannot wait for FedNow or anything trying to fix this mess.
Laughable, at least in the USA. It took decades for us to finally get cards with chips in them, and when we finally did... the issuers "forgot" to implement the other half of the equation: PINs.
"Chip-&-PIN" was standard through the rest of the industrialized world for ages, while card companies abetted theft in the USA by neglecting to implement PINs.
My BoA still prints checks and mail them to the US Bank across the street when I have to pay my HOA. So yes, why not FedNow... BoA and USBank ?
Lack of adoption probably because it seems to function just as a faster ACH, without any of the UX improvements systems like Pix, UPI, blik, etc have...