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Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

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Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#61

Bitcoin will solve most of these problems over time. Recurring payments isn't in yet, but other than that the tech is pretty close to where you need it to be. Probably theres a lot of room for a startup to come and offer value transfer solutions for indian citizens from outside the RBIs jurisdiction.

What I find compelling about cryptocurrencies is the inversion of trust. So for example we think of interactions with RBI or PayPal as necessary because we are trying to go from ledgers to rupees or dollars (because nobody accepts IOUs as payment).

But if cryptocurrencies take off the way they are probably destined to, then they may reach a higher level of trust than hard currency in some countries. We'll be trying to find ways to go from rupees or dollars to Bitcoins once Bitcoins are accepted everywhere.

I'm thinking the endgame for all of this is that banks will move more and more towards the investment side because it's so easy to make money on volatility (unless governments decide to crack down on making money simply for having money ..unlikely, although capital gains taxes will almost certainly go up to match normal income tax). The traditional "boring" banking that's used for things like mortgages and money transfers is going to have a tough time. That is, until we consider that dollars are backed by the power of their countries and Bitcoins aren't backed by anything, so people will probably rather hold their savings in banks with FDIC insurance rather than strings of random numbers.

After writing all of this out, I think what's going to happen is that capital gains taxes will give way to tariffs that are charged any time cryptocurrencies are converted to hard currency. So people will be free of hand holding until they go to buy a large asset like a car or home that the government can require hard currency for.

We'll probably need a progressive tax on cryptocurrency exchange or else we'll see wealth inequality magnified even higher than it is today. Another option would be to get rid of income tax and switch to a wealth-based accounting where people report the sum total of gains and losses for the year across all currencies and get taxed for increased wealth (or credited for a decrease).

On that note, the progressive tax could be applied each transaction by a factor proportional to each party's wealth rather than the amount of currency exchanged, so that taxes/credits could be applied continuously rather than on a yearly basis. So no more having to do your taxes, but bankers might switch to a style of accounting more like the IRS.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, as an European not used to dealing with them before the Internet, the system is just inane nowadays. "Just give these numbers to each and every merchant you do business with, and trust they won't abuse or leak them. Remember that you have to check each and every transaction to make sure it's not fraudulent, and have fun paying higher prices because merchants get hit with billions in fraud every year". Our sy…

The US system of authenticating the transaction vs the card/user seems to work pretty well. The US rapidly adopted online commerce and payment. Consumers, overall, have nothing to worry about. Since the merchants and banks are responsible for fraud on credit cards, they seem to be a bit more on to of things. N=1, but with Wells Fargo, my credit card gets blocked now and then due to suspected fraud. Once it was due to…

Since the merchants and banks are responsible for fraud on credit cards, they seem to be a bit more on to of things.

But are they?

"Total global payment-card fraud losses were $11.3 billion in 2012, up nearly 15% from the prior year. The United States—the only country in which counterfeit-card fraud is consistently growing—accounted for 47% of that amount, according to the Nilson Report: card issuers lost $3.4 billion and merchants another $1.9 billion."

This kind of inefficiency doesn't come cheap. There's a reason why VISA and Mastercard disallowed merchants to charge more for CC transactions.

EU and others seem to be rushing to implement strong auth, but as a consumer, screw that. Use machine learning and law enforcement to deal with it and let my experiences be unencumbered. Spending 2 minutes to authorize merchants seems like a large annoyance.

How is having your card blocked and having to wait days to receive it not being encumbered?

As for the debit card thing, that wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about remote payments, where we use direct debit, not debit cards.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#63

Kudos to RBI for not supporting pre-authorized credit-card transactions. These are a stupid idea. Consumers, never sign up for that crap, even if there are incentives. If you are charged some extra fee, you will not be able to get it back, because you authorized the contract. I almost got charged a superfluous $600 fee this way. Only, the foolhardy merchant sent me advance notice that this charge is coming to my cred…

> They will have to send people bills by e-mail (or perhaps even snail mail) and await payment, like any other honest business. Then suspend the account if it is in arrears for more than X days.

How do services like Netflix and Spotify work in India? In the UK I pay Netflix £6.99 a month (about the price of two coffees), and I'd get rather annoyed if I had to send them a cheque for that amount every month :D

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system of authenticating the transaction vs the card/user seems to work pretty well. The US rapidly adopted online commerce and payment. Consumers, overall, have nothing to worry about. Since the merchants and banks are responsible for fraud on credit cards, they seem to be a bit more on to of things. N=1, but with Wells Fargo, my credit card gets blocked now and then due to suspected fraud. Once it was due to…

Since the merchants and banks are responsible for fraud on credit cards, they seem to be a bit more on to of things. But are they? "Total global payment-card fraud losses were $11.3 billion in 2012, up nearly 15% from the prior year. The United States—the only country in which counterfeit-card fraud is consistently growing—accounted for 47% of that amount, according to the Nilson Report: card issuers lost $3.4 billio…

11 billion on what, 5-6 trillion in spending? So ~0.2%? In don't find that particularly terrible at all, in the slightest.

I've only had to replace my VISA card once in perhaps ten years, so overall it's not been an issue.

For direct debit, I get even more nervous. Now someone that's compromised my phone/PC or whatever I'm using can make difficult-to-reverse transactions?

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#65
>Can you imagine where half the SaaS startups will be without recurring credit card subscriptions?

I have done quite well opting not to use recurring credit card subscriptions for my SaaS, imho.

If you make a good product, customers will come back to use it again and again. They won't just forget about a product that worked wonders for them.

If you can't succeed without recurring billing then your product probably isn't good enough to succeed anyways.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#66
post #17

>In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. I am really happy that this is how it is. There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses. The RBI does provide an alternate means for supporting recurring bills. If you are…

> There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. I would argue any place can have cheats. That's why you can reverse and dispute card transactions if they are fraudulent.

> I would argue any place can have cheats. That's why you can reverse and dispute card transactions if they are fraudulent.

but India has the reputation of being one of the world's mecca of online scams. I'm sure plenty of good people in India too but there is an overwhelming population that choose to scam, deceit their way out of honest folk's money.

Poverty is always used as an excuse for such behavior but we've seen plenty of emerging economies where people have gone through poverty like Korea, Japan, Taiwan that aren't known to behaved as badly, using poverty as a modus operandi to inflict damage on others.

So yeah, I'm really glad there are steps in place to stop frauds and cheats coming out of this place, it's doing the rest of the world a great favor.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#68

>In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. I am really happy that this is how it is. There is no shortage of cheats and frauds in India. Thanks to the RBI I can rest easy without worrying about getting (unsanctioned) charges on my credit card from shady businesses. The RBI does provide an alternate means for supporting recurring bills. If you are…

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Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#69

>Can you imagine where half the SaaS startups will be without recurring credit card subscriptions? I have done quite well opting not to use recurring credit card subscriptions for my SaaS, imho. If you make a good product, customers will come back to use it again and again. They won't just forget about a product that worked wonders for them. If you can't succeed without recurring billing then your product probably is…

> If you make a good product, customers will come back to use it again and again. They won't just forget about a product that worked wonders for them.

Ehhh I can turn that around. If you make a good product, customers will have enough confidence in that product to not want to consciously have to make a payment on a recurring basis. I'd suggest it's not something necessary for your product to succeed, but it's something your customers will probably want.

Re: Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?

#70
There's a lot of things that the RBI is doing that the US will do shortly. For example the Chip-n-Pin implementation in India (and Europe) will soon be adopted in the US By Oct 2015.

We have an additional liability requirement (I wont call it safety, since what it essentially does is pass on liability) of Two-Factor auth for online payments as well - which means that most Indian credit cards work only with some difficulty on international ecommerce sites.

That said, the RBI has been progressive in P2P payments - for example a lot of people do not know about IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) which takes place over phone SMS to transfer money instantly ... without needing a smartphone.

I think the RBI is fairly intelligent in understanding payments, and is trying to learn from the mistakes made elsewhere.

I feel this pain particularly accurately since my startup (shameless plug: RedCarpetUp.com) is trying to disrupt offline payments and trying to build an "Uber-like" wallet for hyperlocal retail. We have had to overcome serious regulatory challenges, but still have some way to go.

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