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Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

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Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#201

Post by gsky »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #185
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #94

India has had UPI since 2016 now and recently overtook Visa and Mastercards global transaction volume with 650 million transactions per day [1]. These payment processors seem to be basically levying a 1-3% tax on a nations entire GDP and enforcing their own ideas of what transactions should or shouldn't be allowed. With UPI and Pix etc. paving the way and showing its possible, it actually sounds insane to give so muc…

First things first — this is correct. As a matter of fact, the Brazillian Pix - which gets much more “eyeballs” on places like HN, are much newer than UPI and UPI was one of the inspirations, if I may say so, behind it; and it dwarves in scale. Not to mention UPI is designed to be decentralised (almost decentralised). Fair warning (pc, please know that I am not targeting you) about the URL pc has shared - it’s litera…

This is disgusting. Calling the biggest democratic party as authoritarian is nothing but disgusting.

Why do you people think you and your opinions are better than majority?

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#203

Post by dakiol »

pqs wrote: post #179
mzitelli wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEPA is a banking infrastructure layer and it is not consumer focused. Also, only ~60% of European banks adopted it. While Pix was mandatory for all banks to adopt and 80% of Brazilian population already used it.

In Spain we have Bizum. You can send money to any phone number. It's instand and, as I understand, it works on top of SEPA.

Never understood why it’s tied to a phone number. I don’t like to leak mine just for silly payments.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#204

Post by john01dav »

thimabi wrote: post #49
mzitelli wrote: post #17

Brazil central bank introduced Pix a few years ago. It took over the country as the public basic infrastructure for money transfer. Totally free and instantaneous transactions between people and companies, available to all banks. Then, just last week, the US presidency launched an investigation considering Pix an unfair trade practice against the US. Actions like that may show the current direction of the US governme…

I got in this thread with the expectation of seeing a comment like yours, so thank you for that. I think what worries the U.S. more is the likelihood of Pix spreading around the world. It’s such a great public program that I believe many countries will eventually adopt it, or adopt some version of it. In fact, AFAIK some places already have it, like Thailand and Malaysia. Consumers like it because it is widely availa…

> Right now, the only thing that makes credit cards a better proposition is being able to pay without having enough money in the bank, and maybe enjoying greater protection from fraudulent merchants. But I believe even that will change in the future, to the benefit of Pix-like systems.

Does Pix offer something like credit card rewards? I understand that you ultimately pay for this through fees that make prices slightly higher, but it is still an incentive to use credit cards over other payment methods.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#205

Post by john01dav »

whatevaa wrote: post #196
Loughla wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about fighting charges? In the US, if I flag a charge on my credit card it's immediately cancelled and they deal with it. How does that work?

What happens when it's so easy and people start abusing this system?

May be related: Discover refused a charge back from when Walmart sold me invisibly unusable food in a sealed container and was creating bureaucratic hoops to return it. They told me that they blanket deny all charge backs for food.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#206

Post by Alupis »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #160
CalChris wrote: post #159

> According to the Federal Reserve, over 100 billion debit card payments were made in 2021, compared to 51 billion credit card payments. In terms of transaction value, debit cards processed $4.6 trillion, while credit cards reached $4.9 trillion, indicating that credit transactions tend to be about double in average value. Interesting that debit cards are twice the swipes that credit cards are. Didn't know that. I wo…

Just a quick note, no one has ever become wealthy from their credit card rewards. I don’t know what your system is, but it sounds like you enjoy it, so you do you. And yes. Cash and debit cards have always subsidized credit.

It's often about getting benefits out of transactions you're going to make regardless of how you pay for it.

If you're going to buy groceries, does it matter if you pay cash (debit) or use a credit card? The credit card gives you some percentage of that purchase back in rewards, which you then redeem on other things such as airfare, hotels, dinner out, uber, etc.

Think of it like a coupon that's valid everywhere, and every time you use it, a tiny sum is deposited into a savings account.

Pay it off at the end of the month and it's pretty much free money. Credit cards also have better cardholder protections, security and safety than using debit cards or cash.

Some people use credit cards for every purchase and become highly skilled at maximizing card rewards. This is also why many will say card fees don't matter - you often accrue enough rewards to pay for the fee itself plus lots more, making the fee irrelevant. The fee is there to compel you to use the card often enough to exceed the fee's value.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#207

Post by throwaway473825 »

norman784 wrote: post #181
notpushkin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK some places already have it, like Thailand and Malaysia. Also Vietnam (Napas247), Singapore (PayNow), Philippines (QR Ph), Japan (lots different systems), China (WeChat/Alipay, I think?), Russia (SBP), Belarus (ERIP, in a sense), and the whole of EU (SEPA transfers). One problem is, most of them don’t really work for you if you’re a foreigner. Moreta (YC S24) is doing something in SEA, and I’ve seen another s…

The EU is also now pushing WERO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)

That's a commercial service backed by some European banks. It's not at all comparable with a non-profit service like Brazil's Pix.

The closest EU equivalent would probably be the planned digital euro, but the banks are fighting tooth and nail to prevent that.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#208

Post by john01dav »

mzitelli wrote: post #17

Brazil central bank introduced Pix a few years ago. It took over the country as the public basic infrastructure for money transfer. Totally free and instantaneous transactions between people and companies, available to all banks. Then, just last week, the US presidency launched an investigation considering Pix an unfair trade practice against the US. Actions like that may show the current direction of the US governme…

I'd like to see a system like that that also integrates taxes. That is, it tracks total income for each payee each year and deducts taxes based on the appropriate tax bracket. It should also support sales tax and state income tax. That way, all that you need to do is appropriately mark the transactions and tax compliance is done. You could even mark business expenses in it and have deductions automatically processed.

Someone could lie about the nature of their transactions, but that's called tax fraud and it's already possible and we already have mechanisms to deal with that.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#209

Post by dotwaffle »

srivmo wrote: post #191

The article underplays the role stablecoins are going to play in the next 10 years. Compared to 6+ intermediaries in a standard SWIFT payment, a cross-border payment facilitated by USDC/USDT just needs 2 players - an on-ramp provider and an off-ramp provider. The result ⇒ insanely low costs, much lesser than 1-5% typically charged by a SWIFT payment. This network is sustainable and running on established blockchains…

> Compared to 6+ intermediaries in a standard SWIFT payment

Huh? I think the message format in ISO20022 can only 3 intermediaries before having to resort to more complex mechanisms. Most SWIFT payments have 0 or 1 intermediaries.

Re: Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

#210

Post by righthand »

rprend wrote: post #30

Speaking as someone who tried (and failed) to build a competitor, merchants don’t actually care about the fees. We built a mobile payment system using bank transfer rails (ACH debits and FedNow credits) for ecom platforms. QR payments, just like AliPay, but for the US. We studied past failures at this same idea, and targeted specifically high ticket items (jewelry, luxury), because the fees are a bigger problem, and…

Do you think a FOSS version of this would be possible? Or is the infra too complex or require working with regulator bodies? I have been thinking how to empower individuals to collect payments without relying on Visa, Mastercard or Venmo necessarily and putting a pretty wrapper around ACH sounds nice.
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