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Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

elciudadano.com

351–360 of 397 posts

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB Exactly. That is one of the aspects that allow for the system to be sovereign and scalable. Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to. This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.

> Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to. This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient. I agree. But was that not the case before Pix/SPI? It really didn’t change the status quo. The STR (transfer reserve system), which SPI is still fully dependent in practice btw, is decentralized, modern and efficient. The biggest change here was scale and adoption by private banks and e…

It was not. TED had to talk with banks, only the final settlement went thought Central Bank.

With Pix, banks don't talk with each other. They are basically using Central Bank API to send and receive money.

before it was Bank Z ---> Bank Y

With Pix it's Bank X ---> SPI/BC ---> Bank B

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned Sure, I can see the confusion, I should have made that clearer. Let me rephrase it: the "core PIX" is mostly an implementation of ISO20022 (pain,pacs, etc) messaging on top of HTTP APIs and BCB's own ledgers, plus a centralized KV datastore (Dict). The implementation was excellent, but…

There is a wide misconception that state stuff needs to be fully state-developed. I don't subscribe to that view. Delegating and designing just-enough simple solutions, avoiding bureaucratic tanglements, is an immense challenge and done beautifully in this case. The other direction (not using standards, owning parts you don't need) would make it for slower adoption, lots of new government responsibilities and very fe…

In Brazil case, there's actually public banks, and they use Brazilian servers.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#353
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might be getting something soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro

Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects. There's the Digital Euro and then there's Wero and Target and a bunch of other shit that doesn't reach consumer scale usage or attention.

Anything else?

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better. There is no problem to continue using maybe Visa/Mastercard when dealing abroad or external, but when you are a normal citizen, it's far better to use Pix in this case, you are supporting a national company, paying fee's to them and not at the whims of an external countries policies. Edit: They also tend to be non profits ironically enough. In Ireland…

Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.

Germany didn't turn off Girocard that's just fake News. I literally paid yesterday using Girocard.

It also works with some big German retailers outside of Germany (like with Billa in Austria which is a subsidiary of Rewe Group)

Maestro and Visa just stopped offering Maestro/V-Pay so they can charge the higher fees vor Visa/MasterCard. The only thing that changed is the Co-Badge on most Girocards

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#355
post #349
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men. I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.

> buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction There is; it's called a bank.

Which has zero incentive to side with the other party. You pay by bank transfer, once the money is on the merchant's account, why would their bank ever agree to a refund in case of dispute? Now it's between you and the merchant, good luck with filing police reports and court claims especially abroad.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#356
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction There is; it's called a bank.

Which has zero incentive to side with the other party. You pay by bank transfer, once the money is on the merchant's account, why would their bank ever agree to a refund in case of dispute? Now it's between you and the merchant, good luck with filing police reports and court claims especially abroad.

In Switzerland there are a lot of cases where the bank will actually refund you if it was a fraudulent payment.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#357
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which has zero incentive to side with the other party. You pay by bank transfer, once the money is on the merchant's account, why would their bank ever agree to a refund in case of dispute? Now it's between you and the merchant, good luck with filing police reports and court claims especially abroad.

In Switzerland there are a lot of cases where the bank will actually refund you if it was a fraudulent payment.

Hu, no?

The most common scams nowadays involve social engineering to make people log into their online banking and transfer money, specifically because there's no way to revert transactions. The victims are typically 100% liable as they accept and authorize these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbihSwrKhk

https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/kassenstur...

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better. There is no problem to continue using maybe Visa/Mastercard when dealing abroad or external, but when you are a normal citizen, it's far better to use Pix in this case, you are supporting a national company, paying fee's to them and not at the whims of an external countries policies. Edit: They also tend to be non profits ironically enough. In Ireland…

> in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market Do you happen to have any insight on this? I mean, how is it that one or two companies can manage to squeeze everyone else out so completely? If two big players control Point of Sales (POS), shouldn't someone be able to come in and make a business out of underselling the competition? I would think that smaller overhead means smaller margins are…

> how is it that one or two companies can manage to squeeze everyone else out so completely?

Like everywhere: lobby and corruption. Works like a charm. Being based in the "World policeman" also helps.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharing banking information is not safe in Europe, decades ago a phone scammer convinced me to give them my information and they were able to pull money from my account without any permission from me whatsoever, they just acted like I already signed up to their scam service when I never did. That was a completely foreign and insane idea to me (and it is still insane and should not be allowed) that someone can simply…

In the UK direct debits don't require 2FA (but do require approved forms either online or on paper) but you can also very easily get a refund for any direct debit taken from your account so I assume it's simply not worth the scammers' time.

It's probably somewhat worth it because some people will never notice the debit.

Re: Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visa/MC is nice but allows ... Not sure how it is overseas - but in the US, the #1 problem with Visa/MC is the huge percentage that they skim off every transaction. Businesses running on tight profit margins often give a discount if you pay with cash instead.

I think the fees are on order of 1-3% depending on your risk and business type. Certainly an issue but it's mitigated a bit by the decreased costs of going cashless. I.e. cashless operations avoids theft by employees; overhead for stocking, counting, and handling money; reduced insurance due to less chances of robbery; etc.

Gas stations in my area often give a 3% discount for paying with cash, vs. credit.

Leading me to suspect that they're paying 3%+ to Visa/MC. And that the benefits of cashless are nowhere near what its proponents claim.

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