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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

#11

Post by Aspos »

gloryjulio wrote: post #4
hungryhobbit wrote: post #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…

> and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network. If it's so easy to disrupt visa/mastercard payment network, they wouldn't be able to charge this much. Payment is a highly competitive business. We witnessed so many payment companies went under or were bought out, but these two stay for years and are still profitable. The truth is their moat is considered very durable and hard to build. A gl…

If someone owned all the highways, building an alternative would be difficult as well.

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

#12

Post by coredog64 »

gloryjulio wrote: post #4
hungryhobbit wrote: post #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…

> and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network. If it's so easy to disrupt visa/mastercard payment network, they wouldn't be able to charge this much. Payment is a highly competitive business. We witnessed so many payment companies went under or were bought out, but these two stay for years and are still profitable. The truth is their moat is considered very durable and hard to build. A gl…

Same as it ever was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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

#13

Post by mikeweiss »

techdmn wrote: post #7

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.

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

#14

Post by supertrope »

techdmn wrote: post #7

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.)

Level 3 data.

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

#15

Post by collabs »

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 every day. I think if we could make this happen, the chokehold of Mastercard and Visa can be greatly diminished. The disintermediation of commercial banks, the loss of credit card perks, and the added cost of customer service should be an acceptable cost of removing the parasites visa and master card from our economy.

most importantly, this opens up a lot of money that the federal reserve can hold directly, something that will become more and more important as bond yields go sky high.

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

#17

Post by Bratmon »

collabs wrote: post #15

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…

How are chargebacks resolved in this situation?

This is an important question- most of the costs of a credit card providers come from dealing with fraud and chargebacks. That's partially because, under US law, credit card companies have to eat fraudulent charges if they can't get the person or company that did the fraud to do so. (Funnily enough, this is one of two places where protections for average people in the US are significantly better than protections for average people in Europe).

But credit card companies can keep their costs low by making a business decision not to renew the accounts of frequent chargeback-ers or chargeback-ees (even if they never officially found those individuals at fault). If the government had to make a payment system for everyone and take on all responsibility for all fraud, that would create an incentive with massive second-order effects.

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

#18

Post by tonymet »

Don’t forget arbitrage, which is the withholding of transferred funds for 7 days while the capital remains in visa’s accounts for “investing” / speculation.

It’s like if you gave your buddy $100 to give to his room mate, and he decides to wait a week and gamble it on Kalshi

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

#19

Post by hadrien01 »

techdmn wrote: post #7

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.)

Level 2/3 data: https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods/cards/enhanced-scheme...

It's only available in the US, many countries have lower interchange fees and prohibit sending this data.

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