241–250 of 333 posts
The future is direct payments without middlemen. So consolidation of these legacy players is not unexpected - their revenue whilst sizeable is going to continually decrease every year as people use cards less (Many countries have/are rolling out their domestic app2app or bank2retailer payment system).
What if you are a merchant that needs to sell to O(10) countries? Integrating with each country's domestic payment rail is not feasible.
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I was curious so to get a very rough ballpark figure. So I went to the Wikipedia List of largest mergers and acquisitions article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac... ) Added up all the free market enterprise section completed deals where the purchaser was indicated as US based Obama era: 2009: 6, 2010: 1, 2011: 4, 2012: 1, 2013: 4, 2014: 5, 2015: 7, 2016: 6 Trump term 1: 2017: 4, 2018: 8…
"More business happens under comparatively pro-business Administration" is certainly a revelation. I don't mean to be snarky but "I counted things on Wikipedia" is not exactly slam dunk proof when the GP was all but saying Trump is selling antitrust immunity on the open market.
The president is making a genuine, serious attempt to install his personal attorney to the office of Attorney General and he has a good chance of succeeding. This country is cooked.
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There's a pretty clear difference between a lawsuit by 8 individuals, vs one filed by attorneys general representing a combined ~100m people.
Nevertheless, I have very little faith in states somehow blocking big mergers. Can you cite an example where this has happened? We've had basically every airline, several supermarket chains, and every major media company go through 1-2 rounds of megamergers. Which, specifically, have been successfully blocked by states?
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>If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password. 3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
3-D Secure has been a fiasco IMO. I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's jump out of the middle of checkout and go to a page which looks like they're trying to phish your bank account to continue, and by the way, you can just skip it. So customers did, and then merchants followed, except in countries that effectively required it because they cared about fraud. One o…
> I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US
Exactly, it has been a fiasco in the US, but it's working quite well in Europe.
> When we finally decide we don't want to get lapped by India and Brazil in payment tech
They are indeed ahead, but they still work based on some kind of user authentication that's not a plaintext credit card number. That's the same disruption as 3DS, except normalized and a better executed.
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> informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.
i just wonder why you think fees are high. seemingly the only thing that keeps fees low elsewhere in the world is regulations.
Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.
Paying with Paypal is as easy as logging in. With Wero/iDeal you always need a phone or a code. People trust PayPal more too.
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"More business happens under comparatively pro-business Administration" is certainly a revelation. I don't mean to be snarky but "I counted things on Wikipedia" is not exactly slam dunk proof when the GP was all but saying Trump is selling antitrust immunity on the open market.
It was still non-zero amount of evidence and that’s exactly what was being asked for.
A thing happens in every administration regime where once it becomes clear that X is acceptable (e.g. renewables projects, LBOs, nuclear, oil drilling, etc), there will be a lot of submissions to do X without any bribes at all.
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Great for merchants, not so much for consumers. Once the merchant has your money it's very difficult to get it back if things go wrong.
Which is pretty much the case with Visa and MC too. There's little card payment fraud in Europe thanks to mandated strong authentication, and very low transaction fees as interchange is capped by the EU; card issuers don't initiate chargebacks so easily.
You're confusing fraud as in unauthorized payments with fraud as in you not receiving what you paid for. The latter is not prevented by 3DS in any way.
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Braintree was a legit competitor, last time I checked they won't even onboard you if you don't have an established business grossing over 100k/yr.
I remember about 10 years ago I switched our billing / subscription code from paypal to braintree. Braintree was better than paypal but that wasnt saying much. Then paypal bought Braintree and started fucking around with it, asking for conference calls because they wanted us off one of their old flows so they could get us on webhooks that preformed worse and were a pain to implement. Anyway we switched to stripe. Don…