India's UPI for example, incredible.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

In US also... but here in US, my bank (Bank of America) would print a check, put it in an envelop, send it to the other bank (e.g. US Bank). So, it is not instantaneous, but it is still free.

The drawback is when the US Bank office down the street that hosts the account closed for water damage, it stopped receiving the checks, and it took forever to bounce, so I had no idea that I was not paying my HOA... And this happened in San Francisco, California where the Bank of America and the US Bank are on the same street, a block away...

I cannot wait for FedNow or anything trying to fix this mess.

You mean the thing that launched in 2023 and that is still not widely deployed ?

My BoA still prints checks and mail them to the US Bank across the street when I have to pay my HOA. So yes, why not FedNow... BoA and USBank ?

Its been interesting how much of a nothingburger fednow ended up being.

Lack of adoption probably because it seems to function just as a faster ACH, without any of the UX improvements systems like Pix, UPI, blik, etc have...

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