I'd be hesitant to give any app any sort of access to my checking account. I would only do so with a second account with just enough there to cover my purchase. While it is a nuisance, the phone is simply too large of an attack vector to consider anything else.

There are some with apps still gives a discount but do not require giving them payment info.

For example the "Earnify" app for all BP, all Amoco, and many ampm stations (it should eventually be all ampm but the rollout is still underway) will let you enter payment information, but you can also tell it to just use Apple Pay. (They don't have an equivalent option on Android).

The Earnify savings are $0.05/gal. You can link an Amazon Prime account and that adds another $0.05/gal and on Fridays another $0.10/gal on top of that for a total of $0.20/gal off. (It also has sometimes given $0.50-$1.00/gal off during Prime Days).

Since (1) ampm is usually the least expensive Top Tier certified gas in an area or the second least expensive (after Costco) and (2) any extra additives and cleaners beyond those required for Top Tier certification do not have enough benefits over the life of the car to justify paying more (according to independent tests) I'm baffled that so many people who complain vociferously about the price of gas are not going to ampm (or Costco) even when there is one near where they do get gas and it is often $0.50+/gal cheaper even without any app discounts.

In what scenario is Sunoco going to try to steal all my money?

The problem is the ‘fraud safety’. Your ‘safety’ is likely to be some else’s inconvenience (or vice-versa), and credit cards are all about ease-of-use. Fraud-related costs are also one of, if not the largest single contributor(s) to payment processing fees.

Also ZERO chance I’m connecting my bank account to a gas station. Gas stations are where I’ve had the most fraud attempts originate on my credit card.

Connecting my checking account to that? Fuuuuck that.

I have a "feature phone" (dumb phone). In my experience, people just kind of look boggled for a minute and then give up. They probably would have just sighed and released the car to you, or asked for cash.

(I just use cash most places. Works great.)

It's getting more common but it's still not practical.

Typically on the web you need to select your bank, get redirected to your bank's website with a pre-filled transfer you validate, approve 2FA on your phone app, and then the purchase gets confirmed only 1 or 2 business days later when the transfer gets received.

I see small businesses just give you their IBAN too, and you need to manually add it and make a transfer. Not seamless at all.

We need alternatives, in Australia we do have eftos for local card transactions and instant payments by osko/Payid.

Asia has it better with more payment networks, union pay and QR code based networks.

This is generally a bad idea. There's no dispute resolution mechanism if you get scammed and no way to get your money back.

However the EU is getting the "digital euro" in a few years as an alternative to VISA/Mastercard which is supposed to have similar dispute resolution mechanisms.

What cards are you using that get you 5% cash back on gas?

The banker who approved the idea of anyone PULLING money out of your account instead of you PUSHING it deserves to have all of his certifications revoked.

Would he like it if the cashier took his wallet for money as opposed to him giving the money?!

Have you ever bought gas? The price advertised is the cash price, if you pay by card it’s $0.10 higher per gallon. They’re giving you the cash price in this scheme.

The point would have held without the off-the-cuff racial stereotypes…

I’m also wondering if you and I have encountered rather different permutations of these “pay-via-loyalty-app” schemes. In the part of the world where I’ve been spending time, the gas purveyors who I notice pushing the apps are the big, brand-name fuel station networks. The same ones who’ve pushed own-brand payment services to fleet managers for a while.

If you’re worried about card skimmers, wouldn’t you prefer to use the method that routes payment directly through Corporate Fuel Parent, rather than trusting the franchisee with any of your financial information?

You think writing a check to a gas station is an unacceptable security risk?

That's just the way people have paid for gas since they had bank accounts.

> deep discount

You could just pay cash and get the same price? They’re just offering the cash price if you use the app and set up ach payments?

Others have already mentioned that the credit card surcharge is something that the customer has control over. But in regards to the other fees:

> Why not add on an additional fee for every other thing like, fuel surcharge on delivery costs, employee surcharges (I don't live in a place where tipping is expected), or even energy surcharges?

A lot of companies already do this. As long as those fees are mentioned somewhere before purchasing, it's legal here:

https://abc7news.com/post/what-are-surcharges-bill-when-eat-...

California banned all these surprise fees, and then the restaurant industry got their own exemption:

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/06/california-restaur...

The credit card fee is the only thing that changes based on the payment method. The fuel cost, employee cost, etc. is the same for the same product, but if you pay with a credit card, it costs the seller more money.

It's common for the price you pay to change when the method of purchase changes. For example, having a product delivered costs the seller more than if you picked it up from the store, so you have to pay a delivery fee.

Because, between all of these expenses, it is the one the customer controls. The customer chooses what card to use, but the merchant pays the associated cost.

The divergence is just the fee being placed into the margin you're paying regardless.

If you pay via a medium that does not return some of the margin to you in the form of rewards or a 'cash/debit' rebate, then functionally you're paying an invisible tax.

This means everyone should be using credit, ideally the highest reward options, which themselves have the highest processing fees, which result in higher prices all around. The creation of higher tiers of rewards and super-premium cards just repeats this cycle, whereby normal cardholders and cash/debit users are now subsidizing high-spend premium card users.

Further, large retailers negotiate significantly preferential rates and lower processing fees for their book of business. This means small and medium sized businesses pay significantly more per transaction for processing, meaning they're less competitive and less pricing pressure is placed on large retailers, which again raises prices for you.

There's also the card issuer side of things, but in short if you're not changing your credit cards regularly, companies will depreciate rewards and benefits over time in previous lines to move you into a higher margin segment of their portfolio.

In short, there's already a divergence, and you're already paying for it in multiple ways.

There's some precedent on how do deal with this on this side of the pond. Require the list price to be achievable with some card at no extra fee (so no cheating with a high annual fee card or some exclusive condition for example) and have the merchant disclose which. Then the extra fee only appears with cards that charge more.

Or put another way: the list price must be reasonably achievable, but charging more for "extras" (eg. a more expensive card with benefits) is always permitted.

Once you've diverged from the listed price actually being the price you pay, I don't see much value in just keeping is vaguely close but still incorrect. I'd prefer either a completely itemized price or an all-inclusive price to a sort-of-inclusive price.

The best answer is probably a combination of the two: break out the bullshit costs the customer has to pay so that the consumer can see them, but still give them the upfront cost as early in the transaction as possible.

True, and I empathize, but... that difference is basically a spending tax that your card provider has chosen to impose on you. If it helps, instead of a per-transaction cost, consider it packaged together with your cashback, credit points, and the like.

Meanwhile in Australia, it’s illegal (misleading trading) to display a price lower than the customer pays, and has been for a long time. It’s fine; fees etc are disclosed up front.

So you prefer always paying the higher 'card price'?

That's exactly the problem: people don't want to know how much they're actually paying for banking services. They just want their credit card "rewards."

Solution: The listed price should be the cash price. If you want it, pay cash.

So don't use a card that has the payment processing fees.

Then pay with cash.

> Now we'll be back to a situation where customers who use a cheap payment method will be subsidizing customers who use an expensive payment method.

And guess who wins there...

Just curious, how is this not painfully obvious and so there's opposition to it? Nobody is expecting this to lower prices, right...

For some years, it has been the practice of non-profits to present an opt-in fee payment to donors, such as for an online card donation. They will expose the fees that they will pay for the transaction, and ask you to cover them so that they enjoy the maximal donation. This has always been opt-in until last week.

Last week, I visited two unrelated non-profit museums, and when there is free admission I strive to make a freewill donation to show my appreciation and lend support to the mission. I offered the same amount to each location, and the second one, according to my bank statement, has involuntarily charged me for the fees as well. No wonder they greatly prefer tossing cash into the Plexiglas box.

> It's a smart thing, because it causes the processing costs of expensive payment types to be borne by the customer who is using the expensive payment method

Why the same logic does not apply to cash payments? They have costs too.

> Unfortunately it has become a popular idea to ban the surcharging of these costs by retailers, so it's likely to be outlawed by next year, which is completely asinine.

It's completely sane. Surcharges are now outlawed in Australia (from 1 Oct) and I finally paid for my coffee exactly the same amount that was written in the blackboard. Businesses that do not want to absorb the 0.5% fees are free to stop accepting credit cards or can raise prices (none near me did that so far). That's fine, the most important thing is if coffee is 5.50, you pay 5.50, not some random amount.

I agree with your assessment. If I want to use cash then I should be able to and at a cash price. If I want to pay with a card and that card come with transaction fees, convenience fees, and insurance fees (e.g. the card issuer east fraud) then I should pay for it, not the guy using cash.

Traditional merchant accounts don’t expose the cost to the merchant until it settles. If you review the bill, it will list a few rates/amounts for different things that vary by card type. It can vary based on so many factors it’s practically impossible to estimate. The tiers don’t have tier level settings, each card product in that tier can have different amounts.

Stripe and the flat x% + $y are of course popular because of the simplicity and predictability of it.

There are businesses that specifically don't allow credit cards and only allow Debit and Cash to reduce these fees already and they are still in business. WinCo Foods is the biggest example I know of, so insinuating that it's impossible to operate if you exclude payment method types/cards isn't really true.

According to economic theory, price controls produce shortages. It's likely that capping transaction fees would have unintended consequences, for instance excluding customers from being able to get a credit card in the first place. I'm not against all regulation, but I think we should prefer market-based solutions that remove barriers to entry and that allow more companies to compete in the space.

It is my understanding that companies are forbidden from offering differential pricing for cards and cash. At the very least, prices on the shelf must include credit card processing fees in the base price. Sometimes small-time businesses will offer cash discounts, but most retail and grocery places won't.

VISA and MasterCard rules prohibit this, unless specifically allowed by local law.

> I'm not confident in my country's ability to create its own payment processing platform

You live in Canada, which already has better options than the U.S., though the sittuation is getting better in the U.S.

For example, Interac is free for most people and very easy to use.

Debit payments often cost merchants less than 10 cents per tap. The local gelato place only takes debit or cash; if you don't have either, they're happy to accept an Interac payment, and do so more often than you'd think.

Part of the problem is that the incentives are misaligned. People want their points systems. Merchants want customers, but they also want lower transaction fees. Most customers have debit cards that would be much cheaper for merchants, but choose to use their credit cards, because they want the "rewards."

While the 3% or so that a bank charges might seem low, if you look at this from a low-margin business, that 3% may actually be much higher percentage of their net profit.

Regulation concerning rewards systems could go a long way towards shifting the system to be much less costly for businesses.

There's not much hope of real change here; Canadian banks are very profitable, and are a cornerstone of our economy. It's very unlikely that politicians will do anything to risk that.

Countries like India and Brazil have shown that you can successfully run payments infrastructure nationally. Turns out it's not all that difficult or expensive or at all. India's NPCI processes 500m transactions daily with an annual budget of about 50m dollars. They make a profit over that while keeping the system free for a majority of users.

[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/npci-rs-500-crore-p...

$59.5 million seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the rent that these middlemen are taking. And was the COVID-tracking app an abject failure because it didn't get public adoption or because the technology wasn't fundamentally sound. Because if it failed because of the former, then simply regulating companies to use it (or even just putting it out there as a cheaper option to outcompete Visa) would solve a lot of those adoption problems.

Wallet/Qrcode payments in many countries are roughly free. Visa/MC/Banks charge roughly 3-5% when you account for all fees (ie: Stripe). The security angle is also BS because these costs are hidden from consumers as they are thrown on merchants who will average them out again on consumers.

They are draining/milking the cow. At some point, they had significant value in quick information transmission when the internet and smart phones weren't really a thing. But now the only advantage is chargebacks/refunds which coincidentally, the experience there is being made shittier.

Still, not worth the 3-5% premium. Glad many merchants are starting to charge for credit card use and push back.

Countries can build payment networks. It's doable. They already run central banks that facilitate payments, you use them every time you write a check. In Japan, they turned transit cards into a payment network. India and Brazil built smartphone payment apps and they're the most popular form of payment in their respective countries, to the point where USTR is shitting its pants about it.

The underlying issue is not if we can build the network (we can) but getting people to actually use it. For example, if we wanted to repeat the Japanese success of IC cards here, we'd run headfirst into the problem that our public transit networks aren't big enough to be a credible Visa/MC alternative:

- Most public transit systems large enough to issue their own fare cards and readers are also regional monopolies, because there's not enough transit demand to sustain multiple companies with different routes. If I'm in Pittsburgh, all the buses and trolleys are run by PRT. In the Wasatch Front, it's UTA. Those agencies have little interest in becoming banks; they operate the fare cards mainly to keep fare payment easy, and they don't need to coordinate with anyone because everyone already joined into a single large transit agency.

- Metro areas with multiple transit agencies often have political differences that make coordination difficult. For example, in Long Island, NY, Nassau County's NICE bus system had legacy Metrocard fare payment that wasn't upgraded to OMNY until a month or two before Metrocard was completely ripped out and shut down. A rare exception to this would be the San Francisco Bay Area where there is an insane amount of political fragmentation and somehow they all wound up taking Clipper.

- A lot of Americans just never touch trains or buses enough to actually need a transit card.

- A lot of transit agencies are just surrendering to Visa & Mastercard and taking credit cards now anyway, even though transit fares are exactly the kind of microtransaction that is ill-suited for those networks.

Ironically, the best bet for an American-run payment network would actually be to nationalize E-ZPass[0]. In fact, in 2008 Congress passed a bill specifically mandating a unified toll payment system, but nothing came of it because the bill had no actual teeth. The main problem with this idea is that E-ZPass transponders won't fit in your wallet; you'd have to launch a separate form factor for an "E-ZPass Card" and at that point you run into all the same problems I just mentioned with making a unified transit fare system.

[0] E-ZPass is an RFID transponder system for toll payment that is very well-adopted along the east coast.

> I don't mean value-generating in the profiteering sense, but in the "this is worth operating on public funds because, ultimately, it is more than worth what tax payers put into it".

Very sure the amount those companies make yearly is worth saving.

> We tried to make a COVID-tracking app and spent $59.5 million, and it was an abject failure.

and then we just…kept letting those people stay in charge of spending our money.

and there’s a story of very expensive incompetency like that every quarter at minimum.

I mean there are options. It's not like people in Brazil or Europe can't make electronic payments. That said, I do think the US is very prone to public services being made worse and poison-pilled on purpose.

On that general note, I think the comparison point to look at for 'state of the art' in the subject would be India's just plain excellent UPI system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface) and all its supporting infrastructure. It's seriously great in a way that's hard to understand for people whose only context is being familiar with Western credit card or bank transfer systems. Nigh instant payment reconciliation, free and extremely convenient for individuals, operational costs small enough that it's practical for everyday micro-transactions for the poor (I'm talking on the territory of 5¢ in USD terms) which makes cashless payments extremely practical for even ordinary street merchants.

Credit card companies are essentially charging a rake on the consumer economy. They provide a valuable service, but skimming every transaction and funneling it into a handful of private companies is a net detriment for the vast majority of society. They've been at it for decades. First-mover advantage. Entrenchment effect. When CCs are integral to the transaction of money, it's essentially a tax on exchanging money. It's monopolies conducting parasitic toll collection.

Consumers shouldn't have to pay a fee to give someone money. Sellers shouldn't have to pay a fee to collect money. Security should be built into the system, not a luxury you're taxed for.

They should not be able to tithe all of society in perpetuity because they set up shop decades ago.

See also: the app store, telecoms, health insurance in the US

Why couldn't this be a public service though? Governments spend so much money on producing and managing cash as a public good. Why can't we do the same for digital payment infrastructure?

The "credit card company" provides none of that - your bank does.

Perhaps the card network provides insurance against bank failures, but they also allow fraudulent chargebacks which I'm certain account for a much greater amount of money than bank failures.

Dan why can't I write any more comments?

They also reduce friction for purchases, which merchants that aren't short-sighted realize nets them far more on balance. Retailers that are or have been locked out of processing credit cards (marijuana retailers, porn) are often desperate to appeal those restrictions.

> On the other side of the transaction, the credit card company is guaranteeing payment to the merchant, who now doesn't have to care about trying to assess the financial reliability of every customer.

The customer can file a chargeback in which case they win almost every time even if they are scamming.

Nobody is denying it costs money, the problem is it's not proportional to the value they add, nor their costs.

In the EU, their rake is capped by law, to an order of magnitude less than what they charge in the US. And it's still profitable. (Otherwise they would have pulled out of the market if they were losing money, obviously.)

The fraud prevention/etc you discuss benefits from economies of scale, but their fixed x% per transaction does not reflect those economies of scale. The free market has broken down here because of the difficulty for new market entrants.

How do countries like India and Brazil do it then if it's so hard and challenging that it couldn't possibly be a public service?

> Payment networks are not an easy thing to build or maintain

Then why are there so many of them? I like travelling and almost every country I go to has its own thing going on, often more than one. I lost count long ago

Vipps Mobilepay in the Nordic region already has 13 million users and is a founding member of a European network that will soon cover 13 countries.

The component parts have been up and running for years.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsxmVW7CxmA

> We could cut the cost of VISA's network in half or better if we could drop the compliance piece. I don't know how that would play out for the consumer segment though.

I doubt the amount credit card companies charge in fees has much to do with the actual costs of running their service and are being inflated just because they can. My guess is that reducing the VISA's costs by letting them ignore security considerations would only mean that consumers get regularly screwed over while VISA continued to raise their fees every year.

If the fee is covering all the investments required to make it convenient, we're socializing the risk taken by customers who buy from sketchy merchants or lose their card. That insurance system is a net positive for consumers, but they don't know they are paying for it.

> We could cut the cost of VISA's network in half or better if we could drop the compliance piece.

We could also cut the cost to merchants by notably more than half if we dropped credit card rewards.

> 7) I don't even want to know what this does to the complexity of trying to use a card when traveling internationally

Not much - Canada has debit/credit cards that use debit domestically and Visa or Mastercard internationally. They're the default type of debit card that many people get.

The government does that already. Only point 7 still stands.

> The creepy thing is how that escrow built into credit cards is forced on every little transaction.

That's essentially what a CC company does though, every transaction they're briding the timing gap between the card holder paying the CC company and the CC company paying the business. That's the core value add and cost they're bearing that they charge for.

They have risks from both sides of the transaction; on the one hand scam merchants who might get chargebacks and on the other customers who never pay off their balances (thought I guess that risk is covered by their interest charges mostly).

I have had to fight hard for disputes, even with “premium” credit cards like Amex Platinum. I’m not talking about “not as described” bs, but being asked over and over for the same info to wear me down.

I recently ordered some snacks from another country and after 3 months the vendor stopped responding while never having sent anything. When I asked for a chargeback, my claim was denied because I didn’t have proof they didn’t send anything! I literally had an email from them that said they are backed up and unable to send stuff.

As I understand it, most of the fees associated with US credit cards don’t actually go to the parties that are on the hook for disputes.

I actually think this is an example of where government should be more involved - like often times if I file a chargeback, there's a solid likelihood that there should a real world repercussion to the other party because it's probably related to fraudulent or abusive behavior.

PayPal does this well with friends & family transfers.

Not just disputes. Also absorbing some significant part of the cost of fraud.

What connection does the 3% have to the ability to do a chargeback? The card company isn't absorbing the loss, they are just pushing it back on the merchant and collect it from them unless the merchant successfully disputes the chargeback.

I have only once in my life had to request a chargeback for some random charge I had never initiated.

Where do you live or shop that you are happy to take what is effectively a 3% pay cut for the privilege of having a slightly easier option to get your money back if someone charges you the wrong amount?

Credit cards in many regions outside the US can do chargebacks at 1/6th that cost or less.

To a first approximation, the 3% isn't paying for disputes; it's paying for rewards to the customer (essentially a built-in discounting mechanism that gets to discriminate on credit rating), and for profit margin to the payment processor. Disputes are paid for by the merchant, and if you get too many of them you potentially lose the ability to process credit cards.

The vendor pays the 3% not you (through increasingly vendors try to charge this fee to you as well). If you as the consumer had to pay 3% extra every time, do you still agree?

not every transaction is risky enough to need chargebacks. it should be unbundled.

If chargebacks were guaranteed, I might agree. But if you clickjacked with an instant checkout button, be ready for some scumbag to refuse to cancel your order, try to get you to agree to restocking fees, your card company to make you send them the same emails and complaints multiple times, and multiple phone calls...

"Tech Giants Are Nothing But Middlemen, with Tim Wu"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcoeYU8Ks_s

Tim Wu, The Age of Exxtraction (2025)

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/402/

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Age_of_Extraction.h...

https://princeton.overdrive.com/media/11688143

Tech has been about disintermediation.

Replacing low quality intermediaries with superior automated ones at massive scale with all the associated benefits.

This is the story of obsolescence and human history.

The coming end state of which has led to this transformation from the "big data" to AI paradigm.

Now so called "knowledge work" is itself being disintermediated. No need to worry about "bullshit" desk jobs anymore. They will be gone. It turns out a stochastic sentence guesser is superior to the average knowledge worker. This will only improve and become further operationalized, with accompanying safeguards and adversarial checks. At a certain point the value is already gained. The founders have taken their massive exits. Soon it's not so special anymore. In short, intelligence becomes a utility.

The end state of all of this is the same dichotomy our earliest ancestors had already forseen: apocalypse or utopia. In the same way that credit cards were once a cool idea, now they are trite and their continued privatization is merely a private tax on almost all transactions, and as such is rather undesirable. So turn it into a utility. Just like if we all survive the coming wars, the future will be one where compute based intelligence is a public good.

You say Visa etc. payment infrastructure is a core government function that the government has abdicated. Abdicate means to willingly give up. When did the government give up this power to Visa, for example?

The United States government already interferes on behalf of Visa and MasterCard to maintain their duopoly across the globe.

Look at the tension between United States and Brazil on this issue with their nationalized payments system.

The fact is the most important relationship Visa and MasterCard have is the one you left unsaid - their relationship with the United States government.

It doesn’t have to cover everything. Put international to one side, just make a system for domestic payments. Like much of Europe has.

SEPA?

So take the cost of electricity + compute and add 3% markup for the US and 0.3% for everywhere else, and there you have the actual cost of AI.

My province has privatized DMV services, and services have been pretty consistently worse than any place I've lived with publicly-provided DMV services.

it's not offtopic at all. visa and mastercard are middlemen in the transaction between two parties. the comment is about middlemen and suggests they don't add value.

edit: just seeing now you're complaining about things being offtopic multiple times in this submission, without ever adding anything yourself. perhaps you could be part of the change you wish to see?

Many people are attacking you here but I suspect you're right. Here in the UK, we have infrastructure for digital direct bank to bank payments (e.g bypassing Visa & Mastercard). That should mean as long as you have a bank that's willing to work with a service that sells adult content you're OK but:

- Many banks are not OK with that

- Even if you find one who does, finding an Open Banking provider to be that middleman is a nightmare

Short of working with the financial conduct authority to be your own financial institution, it's makes getting paid a pain if you want to accept adult content (even if you have all the safeguards and comply with all UK law!). I can't see anything but it being indirect pressure to censor, and to push smaller players out of the market - such that it's easier to regulate the industry.

They aren't even my fellow citizens, I'm from Europe and mostly buying content from Japan. Yet those American companies still keep getting in the way.

> It's not Google's job to name bodies of water

It kind of is.

If the US executive branch published an order renaming every street in America to "America Street", I suspect Google would not update Google Maps to reflect that unless the government compelled them to do so.

Google has made a choice about where they're placing the bar for voluntary action.

> They more or less have to given the public/private relationship and who is responsible for what. It's not Google's job to name bodies of water, it's not a credit card company's job to censor.

They don't have to but they can, but monopolies and oligopolies don't have to and don't play by the same rules and they tend to have a lot of political and soft power. Especially in Google's case, it's not a stick a floating in the river and going wherever the current takes it. Brin and Page are (allegedly) sentient human beings and they still control the majority of the company. Maybe they couldn't pull of exactly what Musk is doing but there is a huge amount of space in between that and doing nothing.

Increasingly people are so deep on abstractions from the essential issues that they have lost sight of reality. People who are pro gun control get furious when the courts inevitably rule that the many legal kludges used to compensate for a lack of unity or functional societal give and take. There’s a genuine sense that the kludges are necessary rather than a sloppy shortcut to bypass the democratic process they feel has been corrupted.

Naturally the “other side” feels the same and returns the favor, so we end up in this death spiral of ignorant people reacting emotionally to complex issues they lack the patience to work through as a society.

Tl:dr there is no shortcut to changing society, any such victories will be short term and costly.

> abused their ownership

Can you quote the specific part you're referring to?

I think this is a fair request given the 15,000+ word length of the thing. Do you mean a particular abuse of the list contents (e.g. putting someone on it for revenge) or do you mean the overall pressure-campaign to get companies to adopt the list to prove they aren't Badguy Sympathizers?

I can't see how the linked article supports the accusation.

LOL.

https://theconversation.com/white-supremacists-spin-a-justic...

Then religious institutions should be taxed.

If "the power to tax is the power to destroy" justifies insulating religion from government financial leverage, then the power to financially deplatform should raise the same concern for speech.

Assuming we're talking about performing this transaction in a jurisdiction where prostitution is legal, how is it any different from any other business transaction? I don't think anyone is particularly mad about payment processors refusing to process illegal transactions, it's the refusal to process legal but morally controversial transactions that is problematic.

If I pay a masseuse, and I try to do a charge back because I wasn't satisfied with services rendered, what happens?

Thus far, you have posted three separate comments in this thread lambasting other commentors for being "off-topic" for discussing payment processors in a thread about payment processors.

Elaborate with specific examples of how the commentors in question are being "off-topic" and what you would consider topical for this thread, or please cease spamming actual off-topic meta-commentary quips.

I'll refer you to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

IIRC it was religious bodies targeting / lobbying / infiltrating them as a way to push their censorship beliefs? Perhaps someone else knows better

Approximately zero people, reasonable or unreasonable, believe that they payment processor has anything to do with the business. You can see this because whenever a business is caught doing something naughty and people try to cancel it, no one ever says "this is all VISAs fault - they're next!"

It's not different, many countries already have their own version of it, you just don't hear about them. India's UPI has more users but you don't hear about it.

Maybe we hear about it because, it's right in the US' backyard and the biggest country there is Brazil from which pix comes from. All these payment systems threaten visa and Mastercard but pix is the largest in the US' backyard because the country it comes from, Brazil, is the largest there.

And it's also government run, dun dun dun. The us hates anything that is government run. That's why they hate china and communists and socialism so much.

UPI mandates are not wildly annoying to deal with. I’d pay 2.9% for someone to manage them for me.

I think the problem is that merchants hate the card networks and consumers generally like them and there are a lot more consumers than merchants. If you are a politician, which block of voters are you going to side with?

It is the difference between Credit and Debit cards.

I could see Debit Cards being replaced by direct transfers.

The issue is what happens if who you pay too does not provide the srvice or just runs off with the money.

Under UK Law the customer can deal with the Credit Card issuer and get their money back with a direct payment it is npot always possible.

For debit cards I think the issue will refund if fraudelent but might take a battle. With direct payments the customer has a much harder job.

I've noticed growing use of similar options in the UK already, like Payit and truelayer (often shown in checkout via "Pay by bank"). Ebay and Whetherspoons are examples of places providing these options.

I have only listened to the visa episode, I'll queue up those three too. Any other recommendations?

It has been awhile since I dealt with credit card networks, but the parent comment confuses me as well. Before, most of the fees go to the issuer, the network takes about the same as the acquirer (roughly):

Network gets swipe fees, and a percentage of the interchange Issuers get majority of interchange, and carrying interest and fees Acquirer gets the markup plus whatever admin/maintenance fees

Here's what I found for a reference: https://cmspi.com/back-to-basics-card-network-models-and-glo... which tracks with my experience.

I'm open to be corrected though.

I don't think payment processors like Stripe are colluding, they just have a difficult task. Card and bank payments are very complicated and regulation-heavy. I do get the feeling that credit cards and banks are colluding.

Let's use Stripe as an example, there fee is 2.9% + 30 cents.

That 30 cents - is what's often ignored but makes up a disproportionate amount of the fee.

On a $30 transaction, paying 30 cents is equivalent to a 1% fee.

So Stripe on a $30 transaction is effectively 3.9% in fees (on a $30 transaction).

Interchange (which goes to the issuer), would only be approx 1.75% (of the 3.9% fee charged by Stripe).

It's one of the claims in the attached news articles.

The top comment here does, but it's stupid and off topic.

Hmm... I thought as much but then I learned that handling cash does incure non-zero cost (actually it's quite expensive and annoying to boot).

All in all after this change I saw adoption of card payments skyrocket and it's possible to pay virtually everywhere (even in the weirdes most rural places)

As far as I know the card networks do insure the transaction in cases of fraud so the merchant is still paid. The same per swipe fee for $2 does not make sense for $2000.

I know in practice the merchant is left holding the bag with charge back fraud, but it is a devil's advocate point.

Well, right now each member state already has its mobile payment scheme which they started colaboration under EMP and Spanish Bizum and Italian Bancomat already support trans-border transfers with more to come.

What's more, said Bizum is the driving force behind ENP to integrate all those payment systems: https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/european-network-for-pa....

Wero is... tiny.

Reminds me of how the cardholder agreements used to all prohibit adding a credit card surcharge to cover the fees. Some of the fees go back to the customer as rewards, so customers especially had no reason to use cash. Now that practice is illegal, and many places are 3-5% cheaper with cash, which is in line with the fees and usually much larger than credit card rewards.

That sounds a lot like they want to be able to say which banks cards they want to accept (the "forced merchants that accept any Visa and Mastercard credit card to accept all such cards" part).

So yes - the shop owner will get to decide which banks' VISA cards he will accept.

Fundamentally, I agree with the lawsuit. Logistically, this seems like a bit of a nightmare. No longer will it be "CC purchases will have a 2% extra fee." Instead it will be "If you have a Chase Spark card, the fee will be 4%. If you have a Costco Visa card, it will be...".

And the US already capped debit card fees back in 2010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment

This is explicitly about credit card fees.

Can the courts cap fees? I thought that would have to be something congress does.

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Handling cash isn't free, either. Mistakes, theft, the labor of managing the cash box, frequent trips to the bank or fees for cash transportation services, etc.

Depending on which sources you believe, the cost of handling cash can actually exceed credit card merchant fees.

Many cashless businesses, including bars and restaurants, do it specifically because handling cash is expensive if you actually do a full accounting for it.

> A waitress at another cash-only restaurant told me, worse than customers who hear they won't take credit cards are the apple pay folks. "They really get annoyed when they don't get their apple pay"

I get what she's say, but it is kind of a weird comparison, because Apple Pay is more-or-less payment network agnostic. You can pay via credit, debit, or transportation card (and possibly others that I haven't used) on Apple Pay.

In the US you even have Apple Cash which is pretty close to digital cash equivalent... not really workable for a business with the $2k/week limit though.

Every store has to make its decisions.

The reality is that for most businesses, accepting credit cards, with their fees, results in more revenue overall (more customers).

If your business is low volume, cash only makes more sense.

I think there is a different reason some small restaurants are cash only.

>A lot of small restaurants are cash-only because of all this nonsense.

A lot? Not sure about that.

>I think he does do a few phone apps.

Not if he's cash only he's not.

I like rewards programs and disagree that it would be a win. Your suggestion puts me in an objectively worse position.

IMO They (Visa et al) have been desperately clinging to the outside of their speeding gravy train for way too long, and it's only a matter of time before they run out of track underneath them, so they're trying every trick in the book to keep things running.

Any new competitor could spell the end for them, so making it astronomically difficult to onboard enough people is so far working out for them.

Exactly. Courts will ask why they can charge high fees and not lose customers. The answer will be that they are anticompetitive or behaving as a cartel or monopoly would.

I think it's a combination of two things. Historically, credit card companies agreements with retailers disallowed them from passing on fees to customers, so effectively anyone paying with cash or debit was subsidizing the fees of credit card customers. Those agreements were made illegal in 2022, but retailers seem to be reluctant to actually start charging credit card users so far.

Then, credit card companies take some of their profits and give them back to customers in the form of reward programs.

So we all end up paying more for nothing, but the incentives make it a difficult collective action problem. I don't know why retailers don't take advantage of their right to pass fees through to customers. That would solve the problem. I guess it would make some stupid people angry. And maybe there is some other pressure the credit card companies are using.

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You can, though it requires you to make a zelle account and for both banks to participate.