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- Hacker News
- VisaNet & friends make the modern consumer world go round. The fees they extract are a drop in the bucket compared to the economic activity that they enable with their networks. Many businesses simply couldn't exist without something approximating this.
https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Commis...
by bob1029 - Well, in Germany the "girocard", the local card network, is the most popular form of payment. So I guess, citation needed?by amaccuish
- > VisaNet & friends make the modern consumer world go round.
I mean, as opposed to what? You could apply this to any infrastructure cartel like with AT&T in the 90s or Comcast or 100s of historical examples. The alternative to a bridge troll is not ”no bridge”.
by klabb3 - The problem is not that the tech is bad, it’s that the industry is a cartel with no viable way to disrupt the established players.by pennomi
- It seems Visa revenue is $40B/year. You shouldn't compare that to the amount of economic activity they enable - you should compare it to how much it could cost to run a system like theirs.by ks2048
- Yes. As a merchant it's pretty cool that the money just shows up and I don't have to chase down as much bad debt. The processing costs easily pay for themselves.by 9cb14c1ec0
- You are literally linking to a page published by Visa's Investors Relations Department.
The problem is that like all cartels, they hold progress back. Things could be even more efficient than the current state of affairs. For example we could have open standards with thousands of local players, much faster settlement times etc...
There are also aspects such as the fact that due to this concentration of power, the whole world is subject to US sanctions, such that a EU citizen sanctioned by the US is effectively cut off from civilization.
by rednb - >The merchant pays 2.5%
The best way to pay for poor services already rendered and move on with life is to simply pay via card. Didn't like that haircut? Terrible food at the restaurant? Hold onto your cash and slip them the card.
by 1970-01-01 - Jokes on you. Merchants prefer credit cards because there is less loss than cash. 2.5% is nothing compared to 5-10% loss at the register. Plus easier and more accurate accounting.by tonymet
- I almost never pay cash.by _zoltan_
- Some businesses pass you the credit card fees if they offer other payment methods. You'll even hear about a discount around VAT/2 if you pay with cash sometimes.
I think that hiding the CC fees into the price that you pay with all payment methods should be illegal.
by dietr1ch - Related : GNU Taler.
You can apply to a fund to implement this system.
by maelito - Has the characteristics to implement the digital Euro. Plus guarantees anonymity of buyers. And should be extremely cheap to operate. But is not under bank’s control.by wuming2
- The error that people make when criticizing card fees on merchants is that customers pay the cost. That’s not necessarily true.
There are benefits for merchants to accepting credit cards. More impulse buys, buying more per transaction. An owner may choose to absorb the merchant fee because the increase in sales (even at the lower profit per unit) means higher profits overall.
by refurb - I find this interesting as a technology, as a business process, and above all as a system for managing trust on a global scale across different jurisdictions. In a sense, the credit card system accomplishes something that even the UN, international law, Interpol and military mights cannot do: it enables individuals to enter into trustworthy global agreements with minimal effort and risk, and at very low transaction costs.by gatestone
- It's simply incredible, when you look at it soberly - just as so many other things. But unfortunately many people have their minds in a spiritual prison and only know how to complain, without having any kind of perspective on the world.by carlosjobim
- There used to be an account on Twitter that was heavily involved in this industry. Every now and then I'd glean some slightly useful information from their posts. My favourite one being "the name verification isn't a thing - you can enter anything". So I've been doing that ever since and it's _always_ passed.by 1a527dd5
- At least in the US, and as of a few years ago (when last I tested), address verification can also be a bit flaky. Zipcode/postalcode is solid, but street address matches don't reliably account for the various ways people can colloquially write them. It's not awful, just not good. We should re-test it some time, but as of a few years ago, street address checks were not a major improvement in fraud prevention compared to just Zipcode and CVV checks.by chao-
- That’s because there are more than 200 other parameters used for risk analysis during authentication. Worked in payments industry. Some banks don’t place high priority to name but some do.
- If anyone is interested in this topic from a historical standpoint, the Acquired episode on Visa is phenomenal: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visaby TheGoodBarn
- Damn, nearly 4hrs long, better be phenomenal. Thanks for the link!by utopiah
- Credit cards are the OG of rent seeking for the 21'st century. They recognized upfront that no one would pay their ridiculous middleman fees so they backdoor-ed the fee with the merchants and had them pass it on in price. Its on of the most insidious extraction engines ever made, Jesus would definitely flip their tables lol.
Now they do all kinds of accounting tricks to pretend that they have thin profit margins because they split up every part of the business into hundreds of 1-3% chunks of the profit. To sidestep regulation that already barely exists.
by citizenpaul - Networks like visa and Mastercard don’t seem evil. If you’ve ever had to dispute a charge and got your money back easily or relied on the fact that even if their computers are down they’ll still take the risk and allow you to take money out of your account you’d find the fees they charge pretty minimal. Now the issuer bank… that’s where most of the fee and why most banks now have reward cards because the issuing bank can ask for whatever additional fees on top of what visa/mastercard does.by tflinton
- Visa and Mastercard are legacy companies providing a service that is outdated in the modern world. China generally doesn't use Credit cards because when they "Modernized" there was new technology and infrastructure so you didn't need a nosey middel-man to handle the transaction. Instead they use apps. Scandinavia is hopefully moving away from these card-providers soon. They have the bankaxept system that works flawlessly in their area and have started introducing Apps for payments and microtransactions. For some reason some of the apps require a debit-card, but i hope they will drop that requirement soon.
I just hope these leeches on society will sone go bankrupt.
by alwaysmrno - > so you didn't need a nosey middel-man to handle the transaction
Aren't the apps just other middlemen that know even more about their users?
by ketzu - Just came back from a vacation in Denmark and Norway, paid with debit card everywhere.
Heck, paying with card is the default, if you do pay cash, the cashier sometimes has to cancel the card payment before accepting the cash.
by perlgeek - What happens if you don't have a phone that supports the App, or if you forgot your phone or lost it (aka stolen)?
How are you allowed to function if the App is missing?
- 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.)by techdmn
- Level 3 data.by supertrope
- the main purpose of that data is for fraud detection, anything downstream (i.e. selling it to advertisers) is just the cherry on top. Merchants are always financially incentivized both implicitly and explicitly to do anything that would reduce fraud and increase the rate of successful authorizations.