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I've noticed recently indie (non-franchise) merchants being much more brazen about charging extra fees for accepting a credit card payment. This includes counters at my local farmer's market, two local cafes and a sushi restaurant, and my city's public electrical utility.

All of them are happy to receive cash or interac (Canadian debit infrastructure) or even e-transfers in some cases (Canadian venmo). But they'll say an extra $1-2 charge if you want to pay by credit card.

Maybe I'm just remembering badly, but I don't remember encountering this twenty years ago; back then the rules were clear that you either didn't accept credit payments, or you did and it was the same price as cash.

India's UPI for example, incredible.

The real thing consumers get is fraud protection, and the ability to charge back when merchants become intransigent. Let's not pretend other systems (even the ones prominent in the US like Zelle) offer the same protections.

Its limited to about $1000 a day.

The QR is a URI with the ID, amount and maybe other stuff. It's a client-side implementation.

RuPay sure "works within the system" but is pretty much useless for international payments/subscriptions. Not really a VISA/MasterCard replacement.

In russia there is СБП (translated as FPS = "fast payment system") using the same mechanism, also free for individuals and relatively cheap for businesses

Well, that definitely creates a powerful pull from customers to make vendors accept Wechatpay for transactions.

And no doubt they’ll find a way to spend it in the app considering you can manage almost all aspects of your life within it.

Revolut works similarly. You don’t pay any fees on transfers to other Revolut accounts, but you do for other bank accounts.

the "2% cash reward" and "miles" etc. is common here in US because our cards charge the merchants already a lot. So sure we all overpay everything in US because of the credit cards, but we get a small piece back.

Now, would it be nice to not overpay at the first place. Technically we could re-implement the whole thing (instant payout, fraud detection, etc.) like Brazil or India did. It would bring more than $100B back to the US consumers every year, that could be spent elsewhere.

> Sure, but merchants are raising prices overall together with all their competitors, or charging more when using a card. Credit cards aren't taking away 12% of merchants' profits that they'd keep otherwise.

That depends on the market. Suppose you're selling something which has a substitute available for the same price, so the customer will buy whichever one costs less by any amount, but the substitute is in a different market where the payment is in the form of a bank transfer or it's a tax deduction etc., or the substitute is paid for in time rather than money.

Then none of the sellers accepting credit cards can raise the price because otherwise the buyer would go to the substitute.

And all markets are like that to some extent. For some the seller can't raise the price by a cent without losing 100% of their sales. For others, raising the price would "only" cost them 5% of their sales... but that's still 5% of their sales gone, and all the same fixed costs to cover. And, of course, in the cases where the price goes up, now it's the customer eating the fees, which is fairly nefarious when it's being subtly hidden from them.

> Also, credit card fees are not 4%, they're 1.5-3.5% with an average of around 2.3%.

Stripe is 2.9% + $0.30. For a $10 transaction, that's 5.9%. For a $3 transaction it's 12.9% -- of revenue, not profit.

> But what's missing here is fraud protection.

"Fraud protection" is is independent of the fees. You're making the case for that yourself -- if 86% of the fees go to rewards programs then they could be reduced by 86% without affecting "fraud protection", and the rewards programs are a wretched thicket of dark patterns and unpaid interest scams taking advantage of people who are bad at math or too short on time to configure them efficiently, on top of a tax on lower income people who don't qualify for them.

It's also not clear why "fraud protection" should cost anything. The bank has no meaningful way to investigate a low dollar amount he-said she-said and the high dollar amount ones should be going to the actual court system, so why should they have anything more than a set of rules (e.g. which transactions are eligible, how long you have to file a dispute) under which you can make a request to have them flip the bits back in their computer for free?

> “Also, credit card fees are not 4%, they're 1.5-3.5% with an average of around 2.3%.”

And they’re much lower than that in the UK and EU. Even the smallest UK retailers can pay as low as 1.6% or 0.8% + £0.02. The big guys who are running billions of £ are paying 0.5% or less.

(These apply to in-person transactions, accepting cards on the internet typically costs more).

There is already the EPC QR code, which contains all the data required to initiate a SEPA credit transfer. This code is supported by practically all banking apps (at least in Germany). The standard is public and free (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code)

The merchant's system displays this code, you open your online banking app, scan the code, select "SEPA INST" (here's the usability catch!) to make the payment instantaneous, and confirm. Within 10 seconds, the money is transferred to the merchant's account. Either the merchant's bank or a third-party Open Banking API immediately informs the merchant's system (e.g. by push notification or webhook), and a receipt is issued.

Everything is already here, but since this system would be virtually free to use, nobody really has an incentive to push it. It costs money to educate the public, and there is no money to be made. Instead, everyone gets paid handsomely by the card mafia.

There is always opportunity in FinTech.

How did Venmo and Cash app get any traction? After all, we already had PayPal. There was already a way to transfer money to your friends.

How did Robinhood get any traction? We already had Etrade and other online brokers.

Probably not worth it, given that the EU caps the credit card fees at 0.3%, 0.2% for debit cards.

You're putting the cart in front of the mule. The important thing is not what merchants want, but what customers want.

What I want is being able to pay stablecoin from my side and be able to esentially get a virtual card of payment.

The only way which has worked for me was actually using g2a with their crypto provider to get a 10$ gift card of rewarble and activate it.

Does your app allow something like this? can I convert any crypto to payment provider which can be accepted from the other side or am I reading it wrong because you do mention PIX, if it can work with PIX, does it work with VISA/Mastercard cards too?

Uninvolved companies wouldn’t bother, but outlaw such fees and lenders would still build this kind of infrastructure so they could make money charging people interest.

It's weird how this works. Saw something similar when working for a bus company. After reaching a minimum amount of sales for a bus route, everything after that is basically pure profit. However, how do we get those last sales? Well, by bidding higher on people searching for transfer between those two cities. Let's say the ticket was $20. We could end up for instance accepting to bid $10 for an ad that would lead to a sale. So for every $10 of pure profit we then got, Google also got $10. In a sense it was a good deal for both parties, but it's also kinda insane that in the end, Google made as much profit on our busses as we did.

If they're running on 9% net margin, then card fees are pretty down on the list of problems. They're vulnerable to any kind of fluctuation.

You might be surprised to hear that my small business sometimes sees fees at 11%.

We blocked that card processor, obviously. But the % is very much not constant across e.g. Visa, often every purchase in a day is slightly different, and we can't even tell people what the rate is for their purchase due to a couple layers in between (still figuring out if we can fix that). It's vile, and probably should be illegal to not pass through the cost visibly.

There are a few cards that offer 2% cash back with no annual fee. No chance their fee is 1.5-2%