91–100 of 119 posts
I don't see how any activity here helps an alternative to cash for payments. I'm not even fussed about anonymity here: visa/mastercard seem to provide a nationalizable service at an extremely poor quality and cost. We really deserve much better as both payers and payees.
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In a competitive industry with high fixed costs and low _marginal_ costs, a race to the bottom often leads to pricing less than _average_ costs and a reduction in service quality (or inability for providers to replace infrastructure consumed in providing service.
But that argument completely ignores the consequences to prices less than average. If you drop your fees so low your customers get pissed, well then, you'll loose customers. Or if you can't afford to maintain infrastructure, then you'll lose customers due to your unreliability. A race to the bottom is the reason we have 60" flat screen TVs that are better quality and cost a fraction of what a similar TV cost 10 years…
And it often ends up warping the market so that choice is removed, a premium economy does not always spring up. To take your TV example, modern mainstream TVs now bundle spyware/malware/adware. Yes the hardware is better than it was, but it is being invisibly subsidised by the reduction in ethical standards. And now none of the major players can now afford not to do it if they want to compete. Is this exactly what people wanted? The market no longer offers allows them to choose and they aren't being fully informed about the implications.
It's really a failing of marketing - being unable to continue to justify the price of a product (whether it was warranted or not).
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The only problem with the “race to the bottom” with airlines is the lack of tools to allow easy comparison of like with like, which in turn means airlines don’t (yet) have many different sized seats and service levels on a plane. One day we’ll see flight aggregators that allow you to specify how much luggage you have, how tall you are, what kind of seat you want, if you want a decent meal, etc, and will give you a un…
In Europe, trains are somewhat closer to this and are in every way superior in my relatively limited experience. The difference when you go something like Paris > London is night and day compared to the horror that is flying.
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But that argument completely ignores the consequences to prices less than average. If you drop your fees so low your customers get pissed, well then, you'll loose customers. Or if you can't afford to maintain infrastructure, then you'll lose customers due to your unreliability. A race to the bottom is the reason we have 60" flat screen TVs that are better quality and cost a fraction of what a similar TV cost 10 years…
An idealised race to the bottom which just eats into excessive profits would be great. But typically companies want to maintain their margins, so it's the staff that get squeezed, or the service, or the ethics, or all of the above. And it often ends up warping the market so that choice is removed, a premium economy does not always spring up. To take your TV example, modern mainstream TVs now bundle spyware/malware/ad…
No one seriously argues against weights and measures legislation. We've supposedly had an information revolution but I still can't really trust any source of product information online.
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Apple charges approximately 10x the market rate for credit card processing for IAPs.
That is not all they provide.
I cited IAPs specifically because Apple is indeed only providing the payment system, there. There's no download or anything else (already paid for, via the developer program anyway).
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In a competitive industry with high fixed costs and low _marginal_ costs, a race to the bottom often leads to pricing less than _average_ costs and a reduction in service quality (or inability for providers to replace infrastructure consumed in providing service.
But that argument completely ignores the consequences to prices less than average. If you drop your fees so low your customers get pissed, well then, you'll loose customers. Or if you can't afford to maintain infrastructure, then you'll lose customers due to your unreliability. A race to the bottom is the reason we have 60" flat screen TVs that are better quality and cost a fraction of what a similar TV cost 10 years…
When you wrote "as some failing of capitalism", I believe the economic concept of "market forces" would have conveyed the same message better, compared to the larger concept of capitalism, which is essentially a political ideology that can trigger disagreement from people who have benefited from competing political ideologies like socialism.
Essentially, what I'm getting at is that a race to the bottom can happen as long as there are market forces at play, even if the society itself is not running a pure capitalist system like China (which IMHO is a cross between capitalism + communism vs. capitalism + democracy).
For instance, Uber China was forced to quit in 2016. They sold to rival Didi Chuxing because they couldn't keep up with the race to the bottom by them.
"Plaid has become the leading financial data aggregation company in the United States. Plaid is planning to leverage its connections to build a bank-linked payments network that would compete with Visa. Plaid’s money movement platform would allow consumers to pay merchants directly from their bank accounts using bank credentials rather than a debit card. Plaid’s established connections and technology uniquely positio…
It is quite a fascinating scenario. Apple and Google wallet are integrated into the credit card processing infrastructure. So they don't compete with Visa, their payments still go over Visa's rails. Plaid's killer feature has always been their private access to APIs that the banks won't give to anyone else. It's essentially like they're using modern web APIs while everyone else is using snail mail (i.e. ACH, bank tra…
Generally innovating through regulation is bad and I don't support it. But I think the aversion to it in the US is what creates these monopolies in the first place and in this specific use case, I think it's a faster way to solve the problem.
This is an example of what becomes possible (no card details and low fees):
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/truelayers-payments-api-le...
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My experience using plaid with Schwab, on which I have MFA, is that you need to add an MFA code to your password when connecting the two. It works for some duration (a few days?) and then loses sync and you have to re-enter the password+MFA combo.
Do you literally concatenate the two? I've been wondering how to get plaid to work with my accounts that have MFA.
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> The complaint alleges that Visa’s CEO viewed the acquisition as an “insurance policy” to protect against a “threat to our important US debit business.” This quote makes it sound like Visa is acting monopolistic, which is the behavior they don't want to see. Rest of the paragraph > This acquisition is the second-largest in Visa’s history, with an extraordinary price tag of $5.3 billion. Visa’s CEO justified the deal…
Yeah, the Justice Department may not have scrutinized this acquisition all that much, but this guy said the quiet part out loud.
Or you're right and CEOs of huge multi-international companies are a lot more stupid than we previously thought.