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Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

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Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#91
European Union solved big part of the problem many years ago in 2015 with a new law. They capped the fees of Visa and Mastercard at max. 0.3% of the transaction volume on private consumer cards.

It has many upsides (especially increased acceptance). The only downside: There are no real or good cashback programs (like getting 1-2% back) in Europe because of this.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#92

Fraud protection of credit cards is the root of modern e-commerce. In some ways, Visa and Mastercard are the privatized court systems of the internet. If I end up on a random, self-hosted ecommerce site and decide to make a purchase - what guarantee do I have that the item will show up or be as-described? If I bought something through a bank transfer, reversing that purchase would be incredibly difficult. And, suing…

CoD. How did that even work? I mean how was fraud prevented? Did money get counted and balanced every night? How did they prevent drivers from getting robbed or inadvertently losing money (miscounting etc?$

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#93

Fraud protection of credit cards is the root of modern e-commerce. In some ways, Visa and Mastercard are the privatized court systems of the internet. If I end up on a random, self-hosted ecommerce site and decide to make a purchase - what guarantee do I have that the item will show up or be as-described? If I bought something through a bank transfer, reversing that purchase would be incredibly difficult. And, suing…

To note, all of these work on PayPal, with a bank account.

PayPal are a dick on fraudulent merchant account detection and it’s well know assets can be frozen on a whim, but at this point it’s the one of the few other options.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#94

Huh. Apple-pay? In my college town, credit cards are on the way out.

Apple Pay is using NFC to supply credit card info, but it's still most commonly Visa or Mastercard. Unless you mean the Apple Card, in which case it's a Mastercard.

Apple is just building a front for credit cards, so that they can take over the payment space once the customer has shifted their way of doing things.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#95
post #27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I hope a blockchain solution breaks through. A thought on how to do it. 1. Create a stable coin 2. Create a credit card that uses this token 3. Tie using it to some reward, supercharge it with VC if you have to 4. Release a QR payment component where vendors don't have to pay to receive payment, get rewards and payees earn double rewards 5. Integrate that bad boy far and wide Worth noting that Strip…

> This is something I hope a blockchain solution breaks through. Don't worry, Visa and probably Mastercard already have a crypto department. They've been digging into blockchain (and buying startups) for a while now.

I read, at one of those companies hundreds of people are working on crypto/blockchain.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#96
post #23

I still haven't understood why credit cards companies need to go through this complex multi-hop "settlement" pipeline that takes almost a day for transactions to get "processed". Is it because some banks still depend on mainframes doing batch processing?

> Is it because some banks still depend on mainframes doing batch processing? Pretty much all banks use mainframes to do batch processing. "SFTP runs the world". I got heavy into fintech a couple years ago, and at first I thought "This is all insane." I was coming from a SaaS world where it's easy to think about transactional guarantees with API calls. I finally "got it" when I realized that pretty much all of our fi…

>I'm no fan of crypto, but the one place where I can see real utility for blockchain is as a backend settlement service for banks.

So... what does the crypto provide there that a simple authenticated communication protocol with a few redundant centralized servers doesn't?

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#97

Fraud protection of credit cards is the root of modern e-commerce. In some ways, Visa and Mastercard are the privatized court systems of the internet. If I end up on a random, self-hosted ecommerce site and decide to make a purchase - what guarantee do I have that the item will show up or be as-described? If I bought something through a bank transfer, reversing that purchase would be incredibly difficult. And, suing…

The fees are 3% only in the US and the bulk of that is returned to buyers as cash back or loyalty points, and to offset the cost of loan origination and warranties. The EU has capped debit interchange at .2% and credit at .3%, Australia in the low 1s if I recall correctly. They just don’t really have rewards.

Nobody really has rewards.

We don't have them in Europe, and some people in the USA think they have them.

What they have is crazy high credit card fees and the need to juggle a bunch around to get a few things credit card companies decided to buy for you en masse.

When I buy a $5 latte, I give Visa $0.01. When you do the same, you pay $0.15.

Come the hell on. "REWARDS". Smh.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#98
Mercado Pago, from the article, represents a merchant processor, and certain consumer services. However I think the big change in Brazil is Pix, offered by the central bank. It allows instantaneous bank transfers for most cash accounts. The fees are 0 or nearly 0.

As far as I understand, Mercado Pago's big thing is installment plans. You can buy almost anything in Brazil "em ate 12x sem juros" or up to 12 installments without fees.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#99

Fraud protection of credit cards is the root of modern e-commerce. In some ways, Visa and Mastercard are the privatized court systems of the internet. If I end up on a random, self-hosted ecommerce site and decide to make a purchase - what guarantee do I have that the item will show up or be as-described? If I bought something through a bank transfer, reversing that purchase would be incredibly difficult. And, suing…

The fees are 3% only in the US and the bulk of that is returned to buyers as cash back or loyalty points, and to offset the cost of loan origination and warranties. The EU has capped debit interchange at .2% and credit at .3%, Australia in the low 1s if I recall correctly. They just don’t really have rewards.

Interesting. How much money is lost by banks giving out cash back rewards to Americans using credit cards in Europe?

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#100
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, phones never get lost. Or broken. Or stolen. Or discharge. Or malfunction. Or lock people out for no good reason. I can put a $100 bill through the washing machine and it's still perfectly usable. When I can do that with a phone, maybe I'll switch. I ran a credit card through the washer and dryer last month, and even though it got bent, and the stripe doesn't work anymore, the chip does. And the numbers…

Tech people know how to back up their devices, passwords, photos, etc. Hell most apps are good enough that people are backing up these things without even realizing it.

The majority of the world is not "tech people".

And even with backups, you still need to buy a new (minimum $100?) device if yours gets lost, stolen, or broken. Should it really cost $100 to replace a payment card? For many of us here, $100 isn't a big deal, but for a lot of people, that amount determines whether or not they eat this week, or manage to pay rent this month.

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