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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)

#261

Post by ta12653421 »

throwaway473825 wrote: post #207
norman784 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that - ECB, EU Comission / Council also supporting it.

Though, most of the shares belong to major EU banks, yes.

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

#262

Post by cornholio »

mirzap wrote: post #199
cornholio wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bundling consumer protection with the payment system was always a bad idea. Payments need to be instantaneous and free. The returns/refunds can be handled offline by a mutually agreed facilitator that does not have a monopoly on the payment system. You can also have a legal mandate that all internet purchase, for example, should employ such a service, that charges a market fee and is then liable for making fair decis…

It is not a bad idea. This is how it is supposed to be. My bank offers this even with Mastercard. I have to approve transactions when paying online. It's instant, I finish checkout, and then I receive the push notification asking me to confirm the transaction. I don't know if I would ever use CC in a country where banks don't allow this.

Now you are just confusing consumer protection with having a secure online payment system, which credit cards are not and never will be. The entire "transaction approval" shtick is just a bandaid for passing a static password around in clear text, your credit card info.

Consumer protection deals with chargebacks after the payment was made and the products/services are not delivered to required standards. This gives enormous power to credit card companies against merchants and enables obscene rent extraction against consumers who don't require it, yet still pay 2-4% more on everything they buy, even with other payment methods.

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

#263

Post by isodev »

elric wrote: post #225
isodev wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU (the ECB) is actively working towards a system similar to SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) but for cards [0]. This would enable card transfers to also become faster (SEPA is instantaneous even cross-border within the EU) also allow for operations not depending on Visa or Mastercard. There is a major EU effort to develop an alternative 'instant payment' system that doesn't depend on Visa or Mastercard called We…

I had never heard of wero, despite living in Belgium and having been actively involved in fintech. Android also tells me that the app is not available in my country. Sounds like it's supposed to replace Payconiq (which is currently the biggest mobile payment service in Belgium). The fragmentation of payment services is starting to annoy me. I can use cash or cards everywhere in the eurozone with 100% compatibility. B…

I believe Wero is just a service (doesn't have an app or anything like that). You'd activate it from your existing bank's app. For example, the KBC app has a Wero icon you can use to enable payments via the system.

But generally I agree it's not an ideal situation and I fully blame Apple for the current state of things - all QR-code based systems (payconiq, Bancontact, etc.) could've been avoided if apps could provide payments and access NFC from the start but here we are.

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

#264

Post by Loughla »

hahn-kev wrote: post #177
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?

They way it works I don't receive a charge like you do with visa, the merchant presents a code, you scan it when your bank app and then the bank app asks if you want to send # of money to [merchant name], if you don't want to pay it then you don't approve the transfer in your app on your phone. However after the fact there's less options, I've never gone through

That's not really what I asked.

What happens if a fraudulent charge happens?

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

#265

Post by mtrovo »

whatevaa wrote: post #233
matheusmoreira wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brazilian government can choose to start taxing every single pix transaction at any time. Due to the electronic and centralized nature of the system, such taxes would be utterly inescapable. The only thing stopping them is the sheer unpopularity of such an action. It's already being used for data cross referencing, tax collection and investigation purposes. There are plans to implement into these payment systems…

Nothing stops US government from doing the same to Visa/MasterCard networks.

Not really coming from the US gov but it already happens in very weird ways:

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/episode-8-inside-p...

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

#266

Post by rprend »

anal_reactor wrote: post #155
orangea wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> targeted specifically high ticket items (jewelry, luxury) My immediate instinct upon reading this is "of course those businesses wouldn't be interested". They are selling a brand and image first, and if it looked like they wanted people to download some new app and put in their bank details to make a purchase instead of swiping a credit card it would cheapen the brand. Luxury stores are all about a streamlined expe…

I think when the guy mentioned he studied past failures it's prime example of crunching the numbers and applying theories without actual common sense. "Ah yes, I wouldn't buy a Gucci bag for $999 but for $995 it's a deal done" you don't need PhD in economics to realize this is stupid. The fact that the second part of his comment is full of acronyms "we ASDFed the GHIJ over KLMN" suggest it's yet another case of a man…

Haha i wish i were just a bean counting manager. A number of venture backed startups have tried exactly this idea, and it was a tarpit.

Confused about your hate of acronyms. The bank rails are a practical limitation on how effectively a startup can compete in this space. Do you feel the same hate when people use technical terms about coding eg “we deployed with Kubernetes on AWS”?

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

#267

Post by rprend »

orangea wrote: post #54
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…

> targeted specifically high ticket items (jewelry, luxury) My immediate instinct upon reading this is "of course those businesses wouldn't be interested". They are selling a brand and image first, and if it looked like they wanted people to download some new app and put in their bank details to make a purchase instead of swiping a credit card it would cheapen the brand. Luxury stores are all about a streamlined expe…

This is ecom, not in person, and we found these places are brand agnostic about payments— they don’t control the look/feel of PayPal, Klarna, etc. And for every Hermes, there are a dozen luxury merchants less anal about the brand.

White labeling the payments infra as “their pay” did intrigue them, but not enough

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

#268

Post by rprend »

lmm wrote: post #92
orangea wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> targeted specifically high ticket items (jewelry, luxury) My immediate instinct upon reading this is "of course those businesses wouldn't be interested". They are selling a brand and image first, and if it looked like they wanted people to download some new app and put in their bank details to make a purchase instead of swiping a credit card it would cheapen the brand. Luxury stores are all about a streamlined expe…

Yeah. High-margin, high-end businesses can afford the fees. If there's a space to compete it's low-margin businesses where 3% really stings, even if it's 3% of a smaller gross. I used to work with a company that served mainly immigrants and blue-collar workers, and something lower-fee than credit/debit was a constant conversation (we were partway through building an ACH backend by the time I left, but I don't know if…

We tried with SMBs (it was our original focus, low net margin businesses). But 1. Deployment times are way worse in person, 2. Merchants still actually didn’t care (they said they did! But there was no strong need). 3. conversion at checkout is lower for small tickets than high tickets.

SMB business model just didn’t work, with tons of white glove customer support needed for a customer we’d make $20-$50/month in fees

With high ticket sellers the purchases are high intentionality enough that you can convert customers.

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

#269

Post by rprend »

twoodfin wrote: post #63
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…

I suspect high-end merchants get that the financially well-off potential customers who hold high-fee rewards cards expect to be able to use them. Worth the 3% on a high-margin purchase to attract the customer vs. annoying them. The fee ends up split between the cardholder, bank, Visa/MC, maybe the card brand sponsor… everyone’s happy.

I’m still convinced that someone could play our playbook and it would work. Just someone with deeper pockets and deeper industry connections.

Luxury is struggling in 2025 and is losing to the resale market which is growing 3x faster. They’re especially struggling with gen z. Build a branded luxury-only payments network that owns the category “buy to resell”. Attach purchase metadata to pay-by-bank identity for digital proof of purchase.

You have to play it right (digital proof of purchase generates social media posts and a verified stamp, ie buying it to flex). But that way you can convert young customers from rewards cards AmEx etc without having to compete on rewards

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

#270

Post by carlosjobim »

lillecarl wrote: post #108
carlosjobim wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fractional reserve banking. Banks would even pay interest on money you had in your account in times past. And then the fact that banks and card companies are charging merchants a fee for transactions and have margin to give back some of those fees to the customers.

I still get interest, it's really bad though. And the transaction fees are very low here (someone said 0.2% but I don't know) which should cover a lot of infrastructure, fraud and such.

Transaction fees have a great variation depending on which contract the business has with banks or payment providers. It's not a set percentage for a country. For example a large retailer with a huge number of transactions per day will have a deal for the lowest fees possible, and then those fees differ if the card is credit or debit, national or foreign, and between standard or premium cards, and private or business cards.

If you have a job, your bank should give you a premium card and then you will get cash back instead of having to pay your bank. If your bank doesn't offer this, it's just a matter of switching to any European bank of your preference.

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