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A digital payments revolution in India

economist.com

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Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#171

Post by hakfoo »

marcosdumay wrote: post #96
cubefox wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walmart has observed a severe misalignment of incentives that has plagued the payments system in the United States for decades. Certain incumbents and large participants enjoy massive profits by stifling innovation in payments, ensuring that account access is limited to a small number of networks, and perpetuating barriers to entry for alternative solutions. Controlling this access allows the dominant players to ex…

They are ignoring the systemic manipulation of the entire market against people deemed "undesirable" or that are just poor. But well, they probably never noticed it.

In an enemy-of-my-enemy perspective, Walmart comes out as the "good guy" here because their market position aligns best with the unbanked/underbanked audience.

Neiman-Marcus is less likely to complain about their audience not having access to modern payment rails; they might kvetch about the cost of accepting a Platinum Amex, but that's a different debate entirely.

Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#172

Post by hakfoo »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #94
cubefox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less control, if anything. Remember how credit card companies blocked WikiLeaks and Pornhub?

How could that be less control when it will be in fact a centralized database? Remember how much trouble it was for the Canadian government to freeze the accounts of the Canadian truckers? Now it will just be a request to an "admin"...

There's two entirely different classes of control out there.

A state database will may be centralized, but it's also much more accountable to established legal norms.

Private systems run on their own internal rules, with less formality, appeal process, and recourse.

A major "control" issue is acceptance. A card network can decide (for example, based on fear of public embarrassment, angry stockholders, or pressure groups) to cut off anyone they don't want. The federal government would be tied up in the courts for decades if they acted equally precariously. So it's actually potentially a more reliable choice for "hot button" products like porn, guns, VPN service, etc.

I'd expect the risk of disclosure will get fairly tightly clamped down. With the current system, there are a lot of middlemen and law enforcement or just snoops can find someone to socially engineer data out of it.

Make it a federal thing, and I'd expect there are a lot stronger legal protections and rules available than just "ooh, if PCI hears about it they might complain". If these rules aren't there on day 1, two weeks after first time the local news busts a Senator for paying callgirls with FedNow, they'll be there.

Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#173

Post by 1024core »

nine_k wrote: post #65
1024core wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every non-citizen visitor to the US gets fingerprinted and photographed. How's that for "land of the free", eh? And while we're at it: every phone call in the US gets recorded and stored. That's what that big datacenter in Utah is for.

It's the land of the free, not the land of the unidentified! Even so, the extent to which living in the US is possible without various documents, and the lack of a unified national ID, makes the US a much milder environment in this regard than most of Europe. Yes, even healthcare: if you show some employment or other income, they will agree to ignore the absence of an SSN, for instance.

> and the lack of a unified national ID

Clearly you haven't heard of Real ID: https://www.dhs.gov/real-id

Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#174

Post by kylehotchkiss »

ffpip wrote: post #117
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #109

I wish there were better ways to use UPI as a tourist. Like if wise.com could support QR code payments to it. Right now the system isn’t very accessible to those on short term visits.

https://travel.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/technology/... (Foreign tourists & travellers in India can now make payments using UPI)

Interesting! It took me a lot of googling after reading to figure this out…

The international airports have Thomas Cook booths for exchanging cash to rupees. They now allow foreigners to create an account on this app called “fave” which they can reload only at the airport. This is limited only to g20 countries (that’s an odd requirement considering many wealthy countries aren’t in g20).

It’s a start but still way too complicated to figure out after 10 hour flight and stressful airport entry.

I hope they improve by integrating recharge by PayPal or another internationally useful service.

Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#175

Post by __jonas »

cubefox wrote: post #60
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

Germany: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giropay By the way, according the the Wikipedia article, the launch of the US American FedNow service is imminent. I wonder whether it has any chance against the more expensive but widely adopted credit card payments.

but giropay is owned by a private company, not the state or central bank.

also it’s an online payment service, not sure you can use it for direct transfers or in person payments like those others

Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#178

Post by kylehotchkiss »

runeks wrote: post #159

> Consumers prefer safer payment methods for big-ticket items. “I use upi to buy chai. But I wouldn’t use it for a plane ticket,” says one architect based in Mumbai. > There are other flaws with upi. This doesn't sound like a flaw at all to me, but a feature. Why on earth would I want to pay a 2% fee for "consumer protection" when I go to a physical store to buy a can of coke? The reason I do this is only because I h…

Maybe this is just plane tickets specifically, the government spent like a year and a half yelling at the airlines to refund people in cash and not lousy credits after all the Covid flight cancellations. That was an issue chargebacks would have been very helpful in reducing

Re: A digital payments revolution in India

#179

Post by ffpip »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #174
ffpip wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://travel.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/technology/... (Foreign tourists & travellers in India can now make payments using UPI)

Interesting! It took me a lot of googling after reading to figure this out… The international airports have Thomas Cook booths for exchanging cash to rupees. They now allow foreigners to create an account on this app called “fave” which they can reload only at the airport. This is limited only to g20 countries (that’s an odd requirement considering many wealthy countries aren’t in g20). It’s a start but still way too…

> that’s an odd requirement considering many wealthy countries aren’t in g20

It was during the G20 convention, so probably to promote it in some way

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