331–340 of 377 posts
There are benefits for merchants to accepting credit cards. More impulse buys, buying more per transaction. An owner may choose to absorb the merchant fee because the increase in sales (even at the lower profit per unit) means higher profits overall.
Visa and Mastercard are legacy companies providing a service that is outdated in the modern world.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…
How are you allowed to function if the App is missing?
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Central bank instant payment system. The US has FedNow, and has had it for almost 3 years. It costs a few pennies to move up to $10M per XML message. 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 cur…
> 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. Please tell your user that this SLA is much too high for many purposes. A cafe or such would lose a ton of money if every transaction took 20 seconds longer to conduct.
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They charge you 23%? I thought in the EU the maximum interchange fee for consumer credit cards is capped at 0.3% of the transaction value.
Plus fixed fees. I don't want to put responsability on anyone, I don't know who takes what in the chain, but I see the fees in practice. I took the cheapest PSP I could find in Europe... Stripe is way more expensive, taking 25 cents of fixed fee !
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There is, it's called debit cards, but Stripe et al. "simplified" pricing by charging a percentage regardless of card type instead of the traditional interchange-plus pricing. Merchant banks "used to" make money by tacking on fixed fees, i.e. a set-up fee, terminal fee, monthly fee, etc, but then Stripe came along and provided (1) a better dev experience, (2) better onboarding, and (3) simplified pricing.
Debit cards still go through the same credit card infrastructure. The practical difference at this point is whether the card company backend defer payment until collection date for the benefit of customers, or don't wait and just call APIs on the spot. There's a whole "internet" of credit card infra that lets you pay using those numbers on the card like they are phone numbers. Stripe don't do handle their own payment…
Stripe is a credit and debit card processor (and also a card issuer). They are NOT a bank, but do control some BINs (notably 4242 which is used for the famous test card 4242x4)
Well I don't really know what they do, but what I know is that Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €. All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way r…
I don't think there ever was another business model? Nobody has ever got true microtransactions for the web to work.
Even the old days of premium rate telephone numbers and paying for ringtones weren't particularly "micro".
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…
What happens if you don't have a phone that supports the App, or if you forgot your phone or lost it (aka stolen)? How are you allowed to function if the App is missing?
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Crypto is in no way better money. It’s slow and expensive and doesn’t scale. The real answer is an alternative that relies on a centralised provider - or set of them - who use traditional databases and the like, but do things in a modern efficient way and don’t charge the same fees as the current card providers do.
> It’s slow and expensive and doesn’t scale. This is 2020 speak. In 2026, crypto scales and its extremely cheap. it costs less than a hundredth of a cent to do a transfer today.
And is helping fry the planet.
No thanks.
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In the US. Not in Europe because interchange fees for consumer cards are capped at 0.3%
I've seen cards with 1% chargeback in the EU though. How does that work? And it wasn't just a temporary marketing promotion. I've used such a card for many years. (It was issues by a big bank that had almost no presence in my country... so maybe they were eating the cost just to build up a bigger presence and potentially enter the country?)