> Typically, the apps offer their users a choice: payouts at the speed of banking, for free, or payouts at the speed of the Internet, for a small convenience fee. Cash App charges 1.5% with a minimum of a quarter.
This is just another way the financial system (including fintech startups) preys on the poor. If you are well off, you wouldn't want to pay any convenience fee for the privilege of receiving money from a business a few days earlier. In fact, you can think of it as interest: from first principles if someone delays a payment to you, theoretically they should pay more because of interest; now if you opt for waiting 3 days and saving the 1.5% convenience fee, you would effectively earn an interest of 1/(1-0.015)-1 = 1.5% in 3 days. That's not even an annualized figure. If annualized it would be 1.5%/3*365=122% implied annual interest rate. No one in their right mind who does not have cash flow issues would opt for receiving debit card payments with such a fee.
> Many report that it transforms the nature of their interaction with the underlying application; delivery driving for casual drivers becomes something that you can burst up to fill an immediate cash need or mentally allocate against a particular desired expenditure (e.g. “Drive for 3 hours to afford a night out starting immediately after you log off.”)
If your cash flow is not an issue and have credit, this is how you would handle it: let's drive for 3 hours, receive the full payment amount in a few days instead of immediately, and put all the charges from the night out on a credit card, whose bill will become due in a month or two, with no interest. But the poor doesn't have a bank account or a credit card, so they suffer. They pay more in fees. That's the injustice of the system.