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What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

tautology.town

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Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#311

Post by boomlinde »

Bratmon wrote: post #145
mopsi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You resolve it the same way you handle in-store cash purchases of products that turn out to be faulty. There is no reason why fraud and contract violation must be handled by unelected and unaccountable payment processor, when the government has already set up a consumer protection system for disputes related to cash payments. The payment processor is best left as a dumb pipe that does what parties and (in case of dis…

So, wait. Are you saying each transaction has to be individually approved by the account holder? Because that would break the subscription-based billing model for a lot of businesses.

Here, this is standardized, and if a local subscription service provider wants to pull money from my account I explicitly grant them permission to do that, which I can revoke at a later point.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#312

Post by porridgeraisin »

supertrope wrote: post #114
zahlman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just seeing what looks like an attempt to sell me a PDF. What actually is the source of such costs? The cashier still has to be paid even if the customer is using a card. Presumably there isn't anywhere near that much theft from registers, or people messing up giving change?

Employee theft. Store manager theft. Robberies. Counterfeits. The extra time spent at each cash transaction and re-counting at the end of the day. Going to the bank, or paying an armored car service. Banks charge merchants a percentage of each cash deposit. Buying safes and pointing cameras down at each register.

This. My extended familys shop really benefitted from moving away from cash. Now the only source of cash is people who are paying from their black money stashes.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#313

Post by porridgeraisin »

losvedir wrote: post #44

I play the credit card "game" because I hate feeling like I'm leaving money on the table, but I really wish I didn't have to. Some degrees of fees make sense, to run the network, and handle fraud, but it's ridiculous that people have this sense that shopping should somehow fund your vacation. Where I am it's increasingly common to see credit card fees when checking out. I get it, because merchants are being charged 3…

In india we use UPI. But people still use cards enough to be in decent enough terms with them for when you want to make a risky purchase and chargeback. In a sense, it's simply insurance. You pay extra 2% everywhere so you can dispute a txn at any point later.

Personally I make very few risky + expensive purchases, so my CC usage is non existent. I am comfortable enough to not really care if a random shady hobby electronics website fleeces me 500rs.

Another use is that sometimes you get CC offers on Amazon: "use $BANK $TIER CC to get extra 7k off" which are useful enough to justify paying extra everywhere else if you do your big shopping though Amazon festival deals. E.g you can get a 55k iphone for 45k.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#314

Post by pocksuppet »

rootusrootus wrote: post #244
adrian_b wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there was a recent HN thread that linked to an article which argued that the credit card system of USA has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich, and the estimated amount of the money transferred in this way was huge. The EU limits for card fees prevent this in Europe, which is very good.

> has the purpose of taking money from the poor and giving them to the rich Are you saying it is intentional ? Is it not more simply explained as simple greed by two companies colluding to keep competitors out of their market?

But simple corporate greed is the same thing as taking money fro the poor and giving it to the rich?

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#315

Post by yayachiken »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #310
_bernd wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Germany as far as I'm aware all banking cards are in fact "simple" visa cards who uses "V-pay", since 2012/2014? Personally I "like" or prefer V-pay because it made payment in the EU more easily for me without the need of a credit card even 8 years ago. Since the pandemic, I only pay for a (real) credit card (with daily billing) because some goods or services can only be paid with a "real" card, like more…

> o nobody needs to pay extra fees Processing cash is by far >not free<! In fact, it costs a lot of money due to all the things involved (counting/collection/recycling etc). Anf it inwolves additional risks for the handling party.

People often say that but does the cost for handling cash really scale (even approximately) proportionally with the number of transactions or revenue?

Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all? If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#316

Post by mainde »

chao- wrote: post #295
1a527dd5 wrote: post #293

There used to be an account on Twitter that was heavily involved in this industry. Every now and then I'd glean some slightly useful information from their posts. My favourite one being "the name verification isn't a thing - you can enter anything". So I've been doing that ever since and it's _always_ passed.

At least in the US, and as of a few years ago (when last I tested), address verification can also be a bit flaky. Zipcode/postalcode is solid, but street address matches don't reliably account for the various ways people can colloquially write them. It's not awful, just not good . We should re-test it some time, but as of a few years ago, street address checks were not a major improvement in fraud prevention compared…

Address verification only ever checks the numbers in the address, nothing else. You can pretty much skip all the words that don't spell numbers and it should be the same iirc.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#317

Post by ghosty141 »

danvayn wrote: post #258
karlosvomacka wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For US readers - in my country in europe I'd say that 95% of people have only debit card, not credit card. it's very not common to have a credit card here. Card payments are extremely common, but everyone uses debit card.

Yes, it’s because Americans have to build credit or otherwise optimize their credit score to finance large purchases. In most other countries there either isn’t a credit score concept or your credit score does not have to be built up over a long period to be effective like it does here. It doesn’t help that a third of Americans dont really have savings either; credit helps them to work around this

In germany a similar scheme exists (Schufa) but it's less important.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#318

Post by amenghra »

losvedir wrote: post #44

I play the credit card "game" because I hate feeling like I'm leaving money on the table, but I really wish I didn't have to. Some degrees of fees make sense, to run the network, and handle fraud, but it's ridiculous that people have this sense that shopping should somehow fund your vacation. Where I am it's increasingly common to see credit card fees when checking out. I get it, because merchants are being charged 3…

There’s a startup in Switzerland (https://www.pimpay.ch/) trying to offer no per-transaction payments (at the Swiss-level). I wish them good luck but it’s not going to be easy to disrupt the existing players in this field.

This is something governments could fix by running the payments rails.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#319

Post by dqv »

lxgr wrote: post #203
Hardwired8976 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh when you deposit money with a teller, it gets added to your account, which is in physical terms probably just a big storage and a database who has how much. But in the case of debit card, the card ties the money to your account. It is actually that. It's as if someone would steal from a personal safe at the bank.

Except that you have strong statutory rights and commercial agreements between your bank and the card networks making it very likely that you’ll be made whole.

> likely

> will

Which is why the credit card is still the better option. Especially given that the max liability on a credit card is always $50 if caught within the first 60 days, while the max liability on a debit card is $50 only if caught within the first two days, then up to $500 if reported after up to 60 days.

They may post a provisional credit when I report the fraud on the debit card or they can wait up to 10 days to do so. With a credit card, no money has left my account and I get the final say on whether I want to part ways with my real money. If the bank really wants to fuck me over by saying it's not fraud, I get to make it as unprofitable as possible for them, which includes forcing them to sue me if they really want the money.

I will take the ding to my credit report and a lawsuit over actual money taken directly out of my account any day.

Re: What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

#320

Post by perlgeek »

alwaysmrno wrote: post #307

Visa and Mastercard are legacy companies providing a service that is outdated in the modern world. China generally doesn't use Credit cards because when they "Modernized" there was new technology and infrastructure so you didn't need a nosey middel-man to handle the transaction. Instead they use apps. Scandinavia is hopefully moving away from these card-providers soon. They have the bankaxept system that works flawle…

Just came back from a vacation in Denmark and Norway, paid with debit card everywhere.

Heck, paying with card is the default, if you do pay cash, the cashier sometimes has to cancel the card payment before accepting the cash.

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