21–30 of 325 posts
>The merchant pays 2.5% The best way to pay for poor services already rendered and move on with life is to simply pay via card. Didn't like that haircut? Terrible food at the restaurant? Hold onto your cash and slip them the card.
Is this why the best cash back credit cards give 2%?
They tax our entire economy at X rate, while maintaining their infrastructure only requires Y cost ... and X is significantly higher than Y. From the actual article: > The payment processor keeps 0.35% ($0.35), then pays 2% ($2.00) to the cardholder’s issuing bank and 0.15% ($0.15) to Visa. The 2% is the interchange fee, commonly known as interchange. The 0.15% is the network assessment fee. 8 In other words, they ge…
I remember reading a comment here a while back about merchants being offered a discount on the processing fee if they also transmitted detailed data about the purchase (essentially the data that would be on the receipt). That data could then be resold on to advertisers. Does anyone remember this or have links to more data? (Not having much luck with search, maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing.)
>The merchant pays 2.5% The best way to pay for poor services already rendered and move on with life is to simply pay via card. Didn't like that haircut? Terrible food at the restaurant? Hold onto your cash and slip them the card.
Jokes on you. Merchants prefer credit cards because there is less loss than cash. 2.5% is nothing compared to 5-10% loss at the register. Plus easier and more accurate accounting.
In my opinion, the only solution is everyone (individuals as well as corporations) gets a direct account with the federal reserve as long as you can associate a taxpayer identification with the account. Using it is voluntary but it is free of cost, paid for by taxes, and moving money to and from accounts is free of cost. Depositors would get the same overnight interest rate that banks do, and this interest is added e…
Where are you going to do the transactions in your scheme? Because credit card transactions are not the same as sending money from one bank account to another. There are settlements, disputes, chargebacks, etc.
How is the central bank going to offer the same variety of products described in the article? I.e..
> Interchange fees vary dramatically based on the kind of card, category of spend, and even the metadata attached to a transaction. The network’s goal is to set fees that incentivize desired behaviors on their network, including using more secure payment methods (lowering interchange fees for merchants), or for companies to do more business spending (higher interchange fees on commercial credit cards).
Your scheme sounds like all these crypto guys who think they can replace credit cards with bitcoin transactions, as if they were the same thing
> The issuing bank keeps 2% Is this why the best cash back credit cards give 2%?
2% seems to be a local maximum of cashback cards. There's a lot of 2% cards, and only a handful above that.
Makes sense?
I remember reading a comment here a while back about merchants being offered a discount on the processing fee if they also transmitted detailed data about the purchase (essentially the data that would be on the receipt). That data could then be resold on to advertisers. Does anyone remember this or have links to more data? (Not having much luck with search, maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing.)
I would love if it was transmitted to the bank for my own use so I can easily remember what I purchased or run budgeting software against it! Obviously wouldn't be excited about it being resold tho.
I remember reading a comment here a while back about merchants being offered a discount on the processing fee if they also transmitted detailed data about the purchase (essentially the data that would be on the receipt). That data could then be resold on to advertisers. Does anyone remember this or have links to more data? (Not having much luck with search, maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing.)
I would love if it was transmitted to the bank for my own use so I can easily remember what I purchased or run budgeting software against it! Obviously wouldn't be excited about it being resold tho.
In my opinion, the only solution is everyone (individuals as well as corporations) gets a direct account with the federal reserve as long as you can associate a taxpayer identification with the account. Using it is voluntary but it is free of cost, paid for by taxes, and moving money to and from accounts is free of cost. Depositors would get the same overnight interest rate that banks do, and this interest is added e…
So the article shows how visa and mastercard are, by far, not the ones taking the largest fee, and the solution is to get rid of them? Where are you going to do the transactions in your scheme? Because credit card transactions are not the same as sending money from one bank account to another. There are settlements, disputes, chargebacks, etc. How is the central bank going to offer the same variety of products descri…
Brazil's Pix costs ~$10M/year to run: https://whatispix.com/
This is much cheaper than the entire credit card ecosystem skimming ~3% off of the economy. Efficiency!
FedNow Is Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 - July 2023 (1022 comments)
Walmart is currently trialing it to save $3B-$7B a year in interchange fees. No crypto, just XML messages through a mainframe at the Federal Reserve with a 20 second SLA.
> “It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.”
> Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow.
Walmart Plans Instant Bank Payments, Cutting Out Card Networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41593450 - September 2024 (3 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433164 (citations)
(as of this comment, there are 100+ instant payment systems live across the world; we should assume that all countries will eventually have an instant payment system, or integrate with someone else's)
https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PYMNTS-Int... [pdf] (September 2026 revision)