Comment by havaloc
6 hours ago
I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.
Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).
This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.
They’re more like taxes than rents. It’s a constant cost applied to all goods because of the ubiquity of use means we pay with or without playing the credit card/payments game.
This is fundamentally looking at it the wrong way.
Why do we need my bank to send money to your bank via Visa or the Federal Reserve or any such thing, instead of having my bank send money directly to your bank? All they need to do is both support the same openly specified protocol for transferring money.
That's what Brazilian pix does and the reason visa/Mastercard and the US government want to kill it
Listen to the Visa episode of The Acquired Podcast, and you'll change your mind.
We used to call those checks!
It's not a government problem, it's a competition problem. Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud. Merchants would rather the cost be free, and banks may want a larger slice of the pie, but until someone comes up with a better way of paying money for both sides this is the best we have. If government got involved all that could happen is fees would increase and then we'd miss out on future efficiency improvements and savings.
> Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud
This is a very US-centric take. In the UK, EU and Australia, interchange rates are capped at more like 0.2/0.3%.
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0% because it’s a service that’s so obviously should be provided by the government is better.
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Or Apple Pay can just be like Google Wallet is on Android? The alternative is not multiple apps.
There is already apple wallet where i can put any of my banking cards…
Not "any". The bank themselves need to partner with Apple Pay and presumably pay Apple the percentage cut from the article.
if apple wallet works on android and I have a choice, that's competititon
if apple wallet requires apple phone, and google wallet require android phone, that not competition.
competition is good. no competition should be regulated out of existence.
I have used both but I dont know the difference
How does it work on Google Wallet?
Article says Google wallet works just like Apple Pay, except they don’t charge a 0.15% fee.
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Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.
> is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.
Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.
The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)
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That is much better, but you're still paying visa/mastercard some percentage fee for a service which should be provided by e.g. the central bank.
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yea, feels like tech giants do not have access to this already? they know where you are and what you do every second of every day, keeping away from ( while they know I was a target ) what was the amount on my receipt is really giving it to them :)
A possible compromise is to allow Apple Pay to be a monopoly as long as it doesn't charge any fees.
How about I do you one better compromise: create a payment network that don't rely on private institutions rent seeking behavior, like Pix in Brazil.
How about Chase continues to eat shit on that 0.15% extra profit they really want to capture, but aren’t owed… and everyone else goes on with their day?
Remember CurrenC? The thing a bunch of them tried to make that failed horribly during test with no consumers liking it? If I remember a description it involved using an app where you had to scan a QR code, and then the point of sale terminal had to scan a QR code on your phone or something like that.
It was all so hilariously badly designed compared to tap and pay.
I took great joy in watching its downfall. It also only worked with debit cards, meaning you didn’t get the buyer protections you use from buying things on a credit card.
CurrentC was designed to collect all your transaction info so that its owners could analyze your buying habits. I’m delighted that not-CurrentC won that war.
(I personally use Apple Pay, but my understanding is that Google Pay has the same privacy advantages for end users. Both of them are light years ahead of the other boondoggle.)
Yeah, but it meant they didn’t have to pay credit card fees. And isn’t that what’s really the most important thing here? Lol.
As far as I know, the current Google Pay is identical to Apple Pay: it’s just EMV tap-to-pay. So it would be the same protections. Samsung pay too.
It was kind of neat that Samsung had that thing for a short while that would somehow trick the magstripe reader in a POS terminal by blasting magnetic fields at it to think that you had swiped your card.
I think there was a different one before that that was not, but I’m also pretty sure that’s long gone. And I think it was more like Apple Pay on the web, where it was really for paying in a non-card environment. But I’m not an android person, so I’m not sure.
Now do developers.
I don't really care about any of Apple's business partners being upset about their business terms with Apple. Developers want a bigger cut, banks want a bigger cut, Foxconn wants a bigger cut.
My interests as an Apple user are aligned with Apple. But even if I wasn't an Apple user, market forces determine what the "fair" cut is for everyone.
granted i am a bit of schadenfreude at the thought of poor poor megabanks having to pay....fees...
Ultimately it comes out of their customers’ wallets.
Probably, but there is an upper limit on what people will be able to tolerate, everyone is aware of it and capitalism is trying to make products that meet it.
So, it’s not unlimited cost here.
The fact right now is that handling cash is more expensive than handling card- even with the fees, which is why Sweden, Estonia etc; are essentially cash-free countries.
At some point the fee’s will make you break-even I guess?
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Another argument for turning finance into a public utility. Instead we have different factions of rentier capital competing for who gets to parasitize us.
>Another argument for turning finance into a public utility
There already is a public option in the US, FedNow. In EU there's SEPA instant.
Not quite. FedNow is public payment infrastructure for institutions. Apple Pay is consumer-facing.
I would use my non-profit credit union Wallet if it meant less fees on their end.
"My short term convenience trumps all" is why everything sucks and we have far worse short and long term convenience and efficiency in everything. Thanks for that.
I won't use $bank-wallet either but that's a seperate issue which is that the bank is not really any better than Apple or PayPal or anyone else. The only reason they "fight" Apple tax is because they want to do $bank tax.
Walmart only relented because they finally broke through the final missing link of the contactless issue. They got customers conned into giving their phone numbers at checkout, just like it's the grocery store.
Cards get linked to accounts automatically behind the scenes based on first6/last4 card number tracking, then everyone else self-selects to punch their phone number on the screen.
Same reason Walmart Radio is such gruesome auditory cancer, it's part of the data collection and advertising vehicle.
That could be part of the reason, but also I think insisting on chip all this time just really slows down a store that doesn't really spend on cashiering all that much. Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction (ever been behind someone in the store who finally pulls out their wallet, finds the business end of their card, inserts it, waits 20 seconds...).
Millions of transactions a day, over thousands of stores, it can make a huge difference in time saved.
This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.
Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.
I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.
> Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction
I don't really get how this can be possible. A person can definitely get their card out of their wallet in less time than it takes the cashier to finish scanning their items.
Obviously if the customer is confused then it can take arbitrarily long, but how is a phone less confusing than a card? People don't get to the register only to realize that their card's battery is run down or it's the first time they've used a phone for payments and then they want to stand there for 15 minutes in front of you trying to set it up.