US consumers are too conservative in the way they expect payments to work—checks are still in circulation and “swipe & sign” has barely been put to rest (has it?). Any system like this would require adoption by a few diverse and large-scale retail institutions to make it worthwhile for consumers to use. Or else it would be a mere alternative to “PayPal me”…
US people feel absolutely fossils payment wise. Of course the US has the best marketing / pr but the state of payments is just depressing compared to even 'regulation blocked' eu.
Which is why you take both but make the credit card customer eat the fees. Then many customers will save you (i.e. themselves) the money by paying cash and the ones that insist on using a credit card are free to pay what it actually costs.
Why do I almost never see a cash discount like this in practice? An I shopping in the wrong places? Or does something else prevent it?
The best players to disrupt Visa Mastercard duopoly would rather be a consortium of payment processors such as Shopify / Stripe / Google Pay / Apple Pay and banks taking in sandwhich Visa and Mastercard (where the money is stored, where the money is spent)
Pix, UPI, etc have definitively shown that Governments are the best players to disrupt the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
I agree, and I hope initiatives like the Digital Euro [0] will have success soon.
> Tough problem. You need a Jony Ive on your team to help solve it. I don't think so. A Jony Ive will not be in a position to solve the actual problem - what use is a non-universal payment mechanism to consumers and to retailers? I read the linked page and don't see answers to the main adoption problem: how is the purchaser supposed to pay? 1. Purchaser has to download the app? Okay, but purchaser already has a few e…
I'd argue that the problem is that QR codes shouldn't be an 'app' problem, and yes there's a chicken-egg problem with PoS terminals verifying incoming bank payments but that's a separate issue. If you want to do account-to-account payments you can show the customer the account/routing number, amount & invoice ID - but obviously that's high friction and the customer needs to login to their account and send a payment w…
I think my main point still stands: a Jony Ive type person would not be any help whatsoever.
US consumers are too conservative in the way they expect payments to work—checks are still in circulation and “swipe & sign” has barely been put to rest (has it?). Any system like this would require adoption by a few diverse and large-scale retail institutions to make it worthwhile for consumers to use. Or else it would be a mere alternative to “PayPal me”…
It is very much a chicken and egg problem. Merchants have no reason to adopt it if there aren't very many customers that use it, and customers have no reason to adopt it unless there are a lot of merchants, or at least some important frequently used merchants that use it. I think for a new payment system to catch on it needs to either have a significant benefit for both payers and merchants, or be pushed by governmen…
And other countries don't have chickens and eggs? They didn't use to pay for things in the past in those other jurisdictions that have adopted modern payment systems?
It isn't - using cards, with fees, is cheaper than cash. I realized that when shops started to refuse cash (even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash). The argument? Cash is too expensive.
> even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash this is not true as it is not what "legal tender" means. Legal tender is something that the government must accept as payment, not private enterprise. > Businesses don’t have to accept cash.[0] > There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or service…
Note that legal tender does apply to private entities when it comes to paying debts, at least in the US. Creditors must accept legal tender, or give up claim to the debt.
It’s true that private businesses can set pretty much any payment terms they want for a transaction that hasn’t yet taken place. But the moment you move to a situation where you owe money, they do have to accept cash.
Cofounder of Lopay here - we have the same mission: offer free payments to businesses, but we're working with existing networks to do this. QR code payments are particularly hard in countries like US and UK as you're trying to change consumer behaviour. I tried doing this in 2014 and again in 2019 - both failed to gain traction (aside from during COVID). In the UK it's possible to accept card payments for 0% via Lopa…
QR codes feel like such a step backwards compared to NFC. The UX with current mobile OSes is not good. And if you require an app, or even worse an active data connection, well, I much prefer a quick double-click of my phone’s side button and then putting it near the payment terminal. And I’m really skeptical about security. NFC is vulnerable to relay attacks and QR codes can be secured by using one-time codes or rolling time-based codes, but showing a bright high contrast “scan this to take my money” image in public feels very wrong.
Seems misleading or at the very least incomplete not to mention that basically only the US has these high credit card interchange fees of 2-3%. EU & UK cap it at 0.3% (0.2% for debit cards), and the rest of the world are closer to EU than US fees, if I understand correctly. The power of the free market.
Yes - entire cost of processing trx including all intermediaries in EU is around 1%. Less if you are huge. Unlikely they were able to beat it.