431–440 of 778 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rewards illusion Maybe if you don't pay your balance every month, but the rewards are very real for me.
The rewards may be real, but so are the cost increases the merchants gradually put in place to offset them.
With the rise of smartphone payments like Samsung Pay, Android Pay and Apple Pay , is there even a need for credit cards? How long until these companies start skipping payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and take the whole pie?
I don't live in a tech hub city but in all my shopping I have never seen anyone use one of the Apple/Samsung payment methods where I live. Even when I spent months in Silicon Valley I can count the number of times I saw it used on one hand.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment#/media/Fil...
Most interesting claim is that there are no late fees. If you don't pay it on time, I presume they're going to stop letting you continue making charges to the card until you do? But that it never gets you locked into the debt cycle of so many other cards? If true, this is the true real innovation. Or is there interest, but just no fee for not making your payment on time?
I guess this means there's no minimum monthly payment? E.g. generally a credit card will have a minimum of, say, $29/mo., if you have a balance of maybe $500... if you have a balance of $10K the minimum might go up to $129 or something. And if you don't pay the minimum, you're hit with the late fee. I never really understood the purpose of minimum monthly payment, except maybe it's useful in proving you're not a comp…
Basically it means that borrowers should at least be paying off the interest incurred on the principal owed at the beginning of the billing period.
I am going to state my unpopular opinion once again on HN, but so be it: SCREW GOLDMAN SACHS. So - with that said, without getting mad at me, look at the long history of shenanigans that GS is responsible. Lets start first with the Wolf of Wall Street (the movie) -- if you're not familiar, GS helped the PM of Malaysia rob the country of ~4 billion in profits, from which one of the Playboy-money-guys from Malaysia, st…
"Lower interest rates" "No penalty interest rates"
https://photos.reportinglive.com/p/2019-03-25/f1553535277.jp...
If the credit card does not have any numbers on it, how do you make purchases online on sites that don’t directly accept Apple Pay? Does the Wallet app on your iPhone generate virtual card numbers on request that you can use online? Or are you only allowed to use it at websites that explicitly accept Apple Pay? I read through all the official Apple PR stuff and the fine print, don’t see any mention of this.
Another thing to note about having no numbers, I sometimes volunteer to run the box office at a local theater, and we have a little Square reader that only accepts magstrips. But often it doesn’t seem to work properly, so I end up typing the numbers in manually in the Square app. I know it’s not ideal, but when you’ve got 10 people in line you just need to get it moving somehow. How would a store employee deal with a…
I had a card that won't swipe pretty frequently, after having to have my number typed or to produce a new card for the 3rd time I finally just reported mine broken and a new one was overnighted to me.
I've always thought that its the customers burden to produce a working payment method. If I got skipped in line because my card didn't work I'd have no problems letting someone else go ahead of me while I fumbled around with my phone and wallet.
I am going to state my unpopular opinion once again on HN, but so be it: SCREW GOLDMAN SACHS. So - with that said, without getting mad at me, look at the long history of shenanigans that GS is responsible. Lets start first with the Wolf of Wall Street (the movie) -- if you're not familiar, GS helped the PM of Malaysia rob the country of ~4 billion in profits, from which one of the Playboy-money-guys from Malaysia, st…
You should stop getting your news from Hollywood movies. Goldman Sachs is the very face of American capitalism. They are no more guilty than any other large financial institution of their age in shady practices. The problem you have is with the exploitative nature of the global capitalist system itself, not the specific actor. Just take a look at the history of Deutsche Bank, HSBC, or Credit Suisse if you think Goldm…
- Cashback is generally lower here because interchange fees are regulated/capped to 0.3% for personal credit cards and 0.2% for personal debit cards. Offers of 2% cashback simply won't work outside the US so I'll be curious to see how (if?) they try and expand this globally.
- "All of the spending tracking and other information is stored directly on the device, not Apple’s servers" - can't see how this will work in practice. If you lose your phone, do you lose information on historical purchases? What if you want them for your records? Perhaps "spending tracking" just refers to data derived from the transaction information... but then, couldn't you just recompute it?
- "Apple also says that it’ll use machine learning and Apple Maps to label stores that you use in the app, and use that data to track purchases across categories like “food and drink” or “shopping.” " - I guess this is novel in the United States, but challenger banks like Monzo/Starling have been doing this for a number of years.
- "Customers will also be able to track purchases, check balances, and see when their bill is due right from the app." - not novel, CC providers like Amex and banks like Monzo already do all of this, including push notifications.
- "To get an Apple Card, users will be able to sign up on their iPhone in the Apple Wallet app and get a digital card that they can use anywhere Apple Pay is accepted “within minutes.”" - again, not novel. If you sign up for a Monzo account, the KYC checks are done reasonably quickly (certainly same-day IME) and then your account is open. You can add it to Android Pay (https://monzo.com/blog/2018/11/19/instant-google-pay/) and make payments, bank transfer money in instantly etc.
Overall, I'm a little perplexed as to why this offering is interesting besides Apple having announced it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard. That incident was the first time I've ever taken the ne…
We need a post-office bank and payment processor, which will then be legally subject to the First Amendment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should stop getting your news from Hollywood movies. Goldman Sachs is the very face of American capitalism. They are no more guilty than any other large financial institution of their age in shady practices. The problem you have is with the exploitative nature of the global capitalist system itself, not the specific actor. Just take a look at the history of Deutsche Bank, HSBC, or Credit Suisse if you think Goldm…
Sounds a bit like Nuremberg defense, don't you think? "The System ordered us to rob people."
