See "What do Visa and Mastercard do?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49614280

It's not something irreplaceable but it's not trivial either.

Listen to the Visa episode of The Acquired Podcast, and you'll change your mind.

We used to call those checks!

That's what Brazilian pix does and the reason visa/Mastercard and the US government want to kill it

> Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud

This is a very US-centric take. In the UK, EU and Australia, interchange rates are capped at more like 0.2/0.3%.

0% because it’s a service that’s so obviously should be provided by the government is better.

The USPS is overwhelmingly the most efficient and inexpensive way to ship things. Try sending a letter cross country with UPS - it costs $15. USPS costs $0.50.

Government doesn't always mean worse.

Not "any". The bank themselves need to partner with Apple Pay and presumably pay Apple the percentage cut from the article.

if apple wallet works on android and I have a choice, that's competititon

if apple wallet requires apple phone, and google wallet require android phone, that not competition.

competition is good. no competition should be regulated out of existence.

Article says Google wallet works just like Apple Pay, except they don’t charge a 0.15% fee.

> is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.

Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.

The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)

That is much better, but you're still paying visa/mastercard some percentage fee for a service which should be provided by e.g. the central bank.

yea, feels like tech giants do not have access to this already? they know where you are and what you do every second of every day, keeping away from ( while they know I was a target ) what was the amount on my receipt is really giving it to them :)

How about Chase continues to eat shit on that 0.15% extra profit they really want to capture, but aren’t owed… and everyone else goes on with their day?

Yeah, but it meant they didn’t have to pay credit card fees. And isn’t that what’s really the most important thing here? Lol.

As far as I know, the current Google Pay is identical to Apple Pay: it’s just EMV tap-to-pay. So it would be the same protections. Samsung pay too.

It was kind of neat that Samsung had that thing for a short while that would somehow trick the magstripe reader in a POS terminal by blasting magnetic fields at it to think that you had swiped your card.

I think there was a different one before that that was not, but I’m also pretty sure that’s long gone. And I think it was more like Apple Pay on the web, where it was really for paying in a non-card environment. But I’m not an android person, so I’m not sure.

Probably, but there is an upper limit on what people will be able to tolerate, everyone is aware of it and capitalism is trying to make products that meet it.

So, it’s not unlimited cost here.

The fact right now is that handling cash is more expensive than handling card- even with the fees, which is why Sweden, Estonia etc; are essentially cash-free countries.

At some point the fee’s will make you break-even I guess?

Not quite. FedNow is public payment infrastructure for institutions. Apple Pay is consumer-facing.

This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.

Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.

I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.

> Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction

I don't really get how this can be possible. A person can definitely get their card out of their wallet in less time than it takes the cashier to finish scanning their items.

Obviously if the customer is confused then it can take arbitrarily long, but how is a phone less confusing than a card? People don't get to the register only to realize that their card's battery is run down or it's the first time they've used a phone for payments and then they want to stand there for 15 minutes in front of you trying to set it up.

I know it was in Europe FAR before the US too. I’m speaking from a very US centric perspective as that’s all I personally experienced.

No one wanted to put on EMV terminals because they didn’t want to pay the upgrade cost. Even if they bought them because they were the only thing, they wouldn’t turn any of the EMV stuff on. You still did everything like 1995. It was the liability shift that finally forced people to start. And that coincided well with Apple Pay. Which obviously was planned by Apple.

I also remember people hating it and trying to avoid it because it was so slow early on.

On the other hand, a lot of places that supported tap to pay didn’t even know. Lots of times when I started using Apple Pay I got confusion from the person checking me out. “What did you do, how did you pay” or “I didn’t know you could do that”. Multiple times retailers I used it at stopped taking it later. I assume they found out people were using it and freaked out because they didn’t know it was on.

There are still lots of retailers where the signs don’t say you can use it, or even the screens on the terminals, but it works fine. It’s still kind of mess but it generally works almost everywhere.

Working in this field:

The national co-integration is actually not a problem,asmost modern stacks are build on ISO20022 mainly, to the basis for co-integraion exists. Its just that attention on these topics is not that big. You could easily connect Brazil to the ECB with a correct setup.

I can stop shopping at places that decide to make it hard for me. It’s easier than ever to find someone else willing to sell me the same thing.

Especially since no one sells unique stuff anymore, it’s mostly the same discount crap from China. So it’s not like I can’t get it elsewhere.