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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

#401
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You better don't look into how banks make money on your savings.

You better don't look into how banks created your savings by creating loans that were used to invest into companies and thus pay salaries.

I looked. I know. It's not me who is surprised.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would explain why so many damn coffee shops dont deal with cash now - the double as a coffee shop and data reseller

Merchants aren't going cash only to sell your data, they're doing it because it's expensive to handle cash and makes their taxes a whole lot more troublesome too.

Well, many merchants use cash because they can dodge tax lol.

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

#404
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a theoretical sense, you are right. The life of most currency notes is bank to customer to merchant to bank, and the bank could just track serial numbers to figure out your spending habits. Practically, it would make little sense. The actual life of most currency notes is bank1 to customer to merchant to bank2, and there is a large probability that bank1 and bank2 are different entities. And then, so many more peo…

Is the probability that large for bank1 vs bank2? There’s only a few major banks left. Chase has so many ATMs it’s hard to compete with the access.

I live in a city with a population of ~ 25,000, and we have I think 10 bank branches, 1 credit union branch, a different credit union ATM (they closed their branch but left an ATM), and a gas station ATM. We've got Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, the other 7 are more of local or regional banks.

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

#406
post #170
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, at least in some cases. When I book flights directly from an airline, the bank knows the name of the passenger, the date of the flight, the origin and destination airports, as well as the cabin class. For one bank (Chase), the information is printed on the statements; for another they have a web lookup tool.

Flights are one of the very few cases where this happens automatically though the card providers systems. It's called L2 data, and it's sent a little while after the transaction goes through.

Yup. I’m actually quite curious how airlines are convinced to send such information to banks whereas other kinds of stores aren’t.

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

#407

Credit cards are the OG of rent seeking for the 21'st century. They recognized upfront that no one would pay their ridiculous middleman fees so they backdoor-ed the fee with the merchants and had them pass it on in price. Its on of the most insidious extraction engines ever made, Jesus would definitely flip their tables lol. Now they do all kinds of accounting tricks to pretend that they have thin profit margins beca…

Networks like visa and Mastercard don’t seem evil. If you’ve ever had to dispute a charge and got your money back easily or relied on the fact that even if their computers are down they’ll still take the risk and allow you to take money out of your account you’d find the fees they charge pretty minimal. Now the issuer bank… that’s where most of the fee and why most banks now have reward cards because the issuing bank…

How does every form of evil have some sort of apologist on the internet. I was near certian that even before AI there were very active automated or low paid workers astroturfing for companies anytime malfeasance is brought to light. In the age of LLM's I now know for a fact that its happening. I guess I found one.

OPERATING MARGIN (FY 2024 / 2025)

Payment Networks: Visa Inc. (V) 67.2%

Mastercard (MA) 57.8%

Major Card Issuer Banks:

JPMorgan Chase 33.5%

Capital One (COF) 24.1%

Bank of America (BAC)26.8%

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you cut out all the other details they mentioned I guess. how much do you think taking the cash to the bank weekly costs?

Nothing, because the owner is rejoicing every step of the way. I'd say employee theft is the only reason a coffee shop would be "no-cash", and fear of robbery in a few places.

Transporting and handling cash is absolutely not free, and unlike joe sixpack taking out $20k in a stack of benjamins that one time to buy a motorcycle with cash, it's much worse when

a. a lot of it is coins, so it's heavy and bulky, and

b. it becomes a regular thing that everyone on the street observes you doing over and over

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