Comment by abdullahkhalids
4 hours ago
Banks and Visa/Mastercard probably love that you fill out your CC details on an online store, and next time you can just 1-click pay. Probably causes a big jump in revenue/profit. That's why they never innovated much.
Of course, it is incorrect, and digital payments everywhere (on a kiosk or online) should be intentional pushes, not pulls.
I want many payments to be pull-based (at least I'd go crazy having to positively sign off every utility bill and subscription), but the ideal user interface for pull payments shows who exactly is pulling what, with a few days notice, and a one-click way to cancel any standing authorization.
That still works. There are three entities: customer, bank and merchant.
The merchant should never be able to pull from your bank account. However, the merchant can send an invoice for a payment. Either the customer manually pushes the payment, or delegates to the bank that each invoice from merchant X should immediately result in a payment push [1].
The difference from the pull system is that the customer can at any point end this automatic push payment, but in the pull system the customer can only beg the merchant (eg. the gym) to stop charging their account.
[1] Or even better in an ideal world, delegate this pushing to their local finance app. So the bank can't put roadblocks for a customer cancelling a subscription.
Something something capability-based finance something something
You could still have this 1-click experience with another system.
Like you could set some rule like “this vendor is approved for charges below $50”. We don’t need the legacy system for that.
(I don’t know if any payment systems can do that atm, just that if we wanted we could make them do that)
Visa seemed not to care too much about fraud though so at some level they do prefer ease of use over security