I would love for an EU law that prohibits sellers from swallowing the cost of transaction fees or marketplace cuts.
Imagine the app store having to specify the additional cost a user has to pay for a monthly subscription or a customer balking at the 4%-6% surcharge they have to pay because they want to collect their AmEx points or want to pay with their built-in iPhone ApplePay feature.
Those leeches of the financial industry would disappear very quickly.
How credit cards make money
411–420 of 445 posts
Re: How credit cards make money
#412First lines of the article:
"Credit cards make money through net interest, interchange, fees, and marketing contributions."
I love you.
Re: How credit cards make money
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how close France was recently, to Marine Le Pen and genuine fascism. Or how quickly Venezuela turned into a one-party state under Chavez. People who have strong opinions against proportional representation invariably seem to be completely uninformed about its particulars, and love nothing more than to bring up random countries that they know nothing about and that have little to do with proportional representation,…
I don't think any of your points are wrong, but you neglected to address properly the substantial and useful point the person you are replying to made: That it's the primaries in the US system that provide citizen driven democracy. That's a fair point, and a meaningful one too. > The primaries only serve to choose a candidate who will be "electable" under a broken FPTP system come election time – it is a losing propo…
Their "broad popularity" only ever existed in the context of US FPTP election, in the context of a two-party system. If Americans had the option to vote for e.g. greens or labour or fiscal but-not-social conservatives, neither Obama nor Trump would be as popular. But Americans don't have such options, because even though some of them are right there on the ballot, voting for anyone but the two major parties under FPTP is literally throwing your vote away.
And it's not any different in primaries. Primaries are also FPTP, with all the same mechanics. The notion that you're better off voting your heart in primaries without consideration for all the standard FPTP mechanics making your vote useless is just another lie to make Americans feel better about their broken system, and is not backed by any math.
Re: How credit cards make money
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
"non-major in-person purchases as it's inherently private and anonymous" Most of the time that's an anti-feature - there is no point of hiding transactions of you buying bread, it could provide you an alibi in case you are accused of a crime, but there is no conceivable way it could be used against you.. (people don't stop to buy bread on the way to the crime scene)
You should consider wearing a gopro in public and stream at all times when you go out, that would surely provide you with an alibi /s
You joke, but we do that in high-risk environment, like driving in Russia (dashcams) or protesting.
Paying by card has saved my butt several times, when I was able to prove to a retailer when and where I bought a product for warranty purposes, or get out of a contract that had 2 weeks 'cooloff' period to terminate but the agency kept playing dumb and 'loosing' all my letters and emails.
Re: How credit cards make money
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thread seems to be saying banks get along with each other. It doesn't seem to me to be saying banks get along with their customers.
It's saying they'll drop everything to Do The Right Thing. Letting scammers walk away with easily recoverable money isn't the right thing, and doesn't benefit the banks either.
It didn't seem to be a Do The Right Thing story to me. To me it said they are nice to each other because they want to be on good terms with each other.
Re: How credit cards make money
#416> Debit cards are a very similar product with enough under-the-hood differences that they deserve their own moment in the sun. In particular, due to a quirk of U.S. interchange regulation, they basically fund most of the fintech industry Basically, the Durbin Amendment caps interchange on debit cards at a far, far lower rate than credit cards; they also have different networks (not MC or Visa) that can be run at leas…
You missed the biggest advantage of credit cards - the limited liability of the card holder to fraudulent charges! From a financial website… “ CREDIT CARDS Credit cards offer consumers the widest fraud protection. By Federal law, a cardholder is only liable for the first $50 of an unauthorized transaction at most, with many issuers offering cards with zero liability. DEBIT CARDS Debit card holders are protected under…
> "he biggest advantage of credit cards - the limited liability of the card holder to fraudulent charges" - in the USA, and IIRC also in UK, but not in general; in many countries there is no legal difference in cardholder liability between credit cards and debit cards.
Re: How credit cards make money
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Citi Dividend 1% Cash Back card allows me to create Virtual Cards for such things. Any other cards anybody can recommend?
Capital One has that, and Paypal.
Capital One has that
Sort of.
Do they still require using Chrome for that feature?
Fuck Google, I'm not about to use them for that!
Re: How credit cards make money
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the people that currently don't pay interest will suddenly be charged huge amounts They will be charged the same amount if the interest rates are set accordingly, it will just be explicit. >other people that pay the card off slower will suddenly be paying much less than before You say that as if their rate must remain, if not fixed, in a fixed ratio with others. I don't see why. >trying to replace fees with interes…
Just as a nice round example number, let's say someone is effectively paying a 1% fee at time of purchase. How do you turn that into an interest rate? Stuff at the start of the month and stuff at the end of the month are going to pay interest for different lengths of time. What if they change the timing of purchases? Let's say you pick an average you're satisfied with. Okay, now you've calculated a rate you need to c…
>that's not really an "interest rate" anymore, is it?
If a grace period is ok now, why would it not be ok?
But if there has to be one rate per customer, sure, fine, why can't it be adjusted based on their minimum balance over time?
>Tell me what interest rate could replace "2% fee, 1 billing cycle grace period, 16% interest afterwards"
Option 1 would be to add (for the sake of an example) 24%, keep a sort of grace period, classify people in two groups.
People who were eligible for 2% cash back now pay 0% during the grace period, 16% after.
People who were not eligible for cash back now pay 24% during the grace period, 40% after.
Option 2, if they want to get rid of grace periods, they just separate people who usually pay off their balance monthly and those who usually don't and charge them the different rates.
Re: How credit cards make money
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but what happens when someone does make fraudulent charges with it? "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." I'm especially leery of anything that someone powerful and/or authoritative says can't go wrong, because when it does go wron…
I've had people make fraudulent charges on my debit card. The answer to your question: It wasn't a big deal. The bank contacted me immediately and said they noticed strange behavior on my card and had thus blocked it. They sent me a transcript with the obvious fraudulent charges highlighted, and asked me to identify any additional ones. When I asked about reimbursement the man sighed and said they might not get every…
I don't have a horror story to tell. In general, I don't want to rely on the customer service of my credit union (or the regional bank that I used to use).
>I had everything back in my account within 24 hours
That's the thing though, they take your money, rather than the banks, even if briefly. Does it matter? I don't know, but it seems like a quantifiable risk.
I think that banks are privileged in some way, in being able to take what they claim you owe them, from any accounts with them.
So my theory is that it's prudent to be paying via some third party on general principles. I don't even use a credit card from the same bank that has my checking. Partly because of inferior terms and customer service, but partly to avoid them having leverage in a dispute.
Re: How credit cards make money
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not like debit cards are extremely safe to begin with. banks (in the US, at least) will happily let you withdraw $XXX more than you actually have and charge you a fee on top of it. do you routinely overdraw your bank account? if not, you probably a) keep more than enough in checking to cover a typical month's expenses, or b) carefully track your balance to ensure each purchase won't take you past zero. unless ha…
I've never owned a credit card. Can you have them automatically pay off the balance every month? It seems like this would cut into their profits. I think the point above was more or less: - With a debit card if you have 10k in the bank and spend 100 dollars a month, you don't need to do anything extra. - With a credit card, you need to remember to pay off your balance.
> I've never owned a credit card. Can you have them automatically pay off the balance every month? It seems like this would cut into their profits.
it's worth noting that issuers generally make money on credit cards. this is in contrast to checking accounts, which are often a loss leader. the card issuer will happily let you screw yourself over (to a point, this is what the credit limit is for), but they won't go out of their way to directly screw you. there's far less incentive to do overtly malicious things like debit reordering (pretty common for checking accounts). [0]
so yes, all major issuers offer autopay. there is a subtlety here in that they don't usually let you autopay your current balance in its entirety. instead, they'll let you autopay the last statement balance at most, which is enough to avoid accruing any interest.
tl;dr: if you keep a decent buffer in your checking account and set up autopay, a credit card is no more trouble than a debit card (and actually less trouble, in some ways).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdraft#Transaction_processi...