Comment by m101
15 days ago
The only way to solve this is to have the user of the credit/debit card pay the fee. Sure, you can do an EU thing of 0.2-0.3% or whatever it is, but this might still be 0.2-0.3% more than it could be in a competitive market.
Australia tried this, but it led to a different problem of payment processors being able to gouge card payers because merchants were allowed to pass on whatever their costs were, and consumers didn't really have a real choice of paying the fee or not. Also since the fee had to be stated before the card was presented for tap and go payments, it didn't solve the OP problem: debit cards and premium cards all got hit with the same surcharge.
Interesting. I guess one would then ask why was it not the case that the merchants were not also behaving in a similar way and looking for the cheapest payment processors (as long as they were also asked to eat their own side of the fees).
Perhaps forcing everyone to just implement free payments between any bank accounts, like pix, is actually the only viable solution here (and i just accept that this is one of those market failure things).
Handling cash is expensive too, so what EU does is probably beneficial (as in cheaper) to the society as a whole.
I wonder if true transaction cost even reaches the 0.2-0.3% or could be further lowered.