Comment by Glyptodon
6 hours ago
I do think we're getting to the point that middlemen don't have much value add. Economics even suggests they don't add value I think. Possibly neutral markets, payments, and logistics should just be a public service.
6 hours ago
I do think we're getting to the point that middlemen don't have much value add. Economics even suggests they don't add value I think. Possibly neutral markets, payments, and logistics should just be a public service.
The fundamental service of performing payment processing doesn't seem complex, but these services do perform valuable work behind the scenes. I don't think it's worth what we ultimately pay for it, but there are a few parts to this worth considering:
1. I would like payment processors to have the resources and capacity to adapt to threats and maintain highly resilient infrastructure. This is expensive and requires a lot of ongoing investment.
2. If payment processing was turned into a public service, the complexity of international integration and necessary relationships, standards, etc. would become a public service burden. I'm not sure that I trust my provincial or federal government to handle this adeptly.
3. There is a lot to this that we're probably unaware of.
I'm not trying to protect banks in the slightest, but it's a baby and bathwater situation. I'm not confident in my country's ability to create its own payment processing platform that I would trust to be a reliable, sustainable, value-generating system operated by public servants. I don't mean value-generating in the profiteering sense, but in the "this is worth operating on public funds because, ultimately, it is more than worth what tax payers put into it".
I think some things are an awesome fit for public services, but a lot of places are probably not equipped to take this kind of task on safely and competently. My country is more likely capable of regulating these institutions, not replacing them internally.
We tried to make a COVID-tracking app and spent $59.5 million, and it was an abject failure. How much would we spend on a broken payment processing platform?
> I'm not confident in my country's ability to create its own payment processing platform
You live in Canada, which already has better options than the U.S., though the sittuation is getting better in the U.S.
For example, Interac is free for most people and very easy to use.
Debit payments often cost merchants less than 10 cents per tap. The local gelato place only takes debit or cash; if you don't have either, they're happy to accept an Interac payment, and do so more often than you'd think.
Part of the problem is that the incentives are misaligned. People want their points systems. Merchants want customers, but they also want lower transaction fees. Most customers have debit cards that would be much cheaper for merchants, but choose to use their credit cards, because they want the "rewards."
While the 3% or so that a bank charges might seem low, if you look at this from a low-margin business, that 3% may actually be much higher percentage of their net profit.
Regulation concerning rewards systems could go a long way towards shifting the system to be much less costly for businesses.
There's not much hope of real change here; Canadian banks are very profitable, and are a cornerstone of our economy. It's very unlikely that politicians will do anything to risk that.
There are other problems with debit vs credit cards as well (depending on country a bit). If someone fraudulently uses your credit card can generally just report it and you aren't on hook for it nor out of money while it's being investigated. If someone fraudulently uses your debit card you are usually out of the money until matter is resolved. And you won't necessarily get the money back via bank, you might need get it from merchant. In CC case merchant would need to sue to get the money if they still believe you actually made the transaction.
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> Most customers have debit cards that would be much cheaper for merchants, but choose to use their credit cards, because they want the "rewards."
I bet most people paying by credit are really using debit cards, but pick "credit" at the register because they don't want to enter a pin. Partly for security, but mostly because credit is faster/easier.
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Unless you're 100% profitable, its always a higher effective %. If you're running somewhere closer to 10% (remember that it needs to be after all costs/paychecks/etc), that's nearly a third of your profit.
Anything optional that skims off the top cuts into profits extremely quickly.
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$59.5 million seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the rent that these middlemen are taking. And was the COVID-tracking app an abject failure because it didn't get public adoption or because the technology wasn't fundamentally sound. Because if it failed because of the former, then simply regulating companies to use it (or even just putting it out there as a cheaper option to outcompete Visa) would solve a lot of those adoption problems.
It is a drop in the bucket relative to what middlemen are taking, definitely. I wasn't meaning to draw a comparison in that sense though, so much as I was trying to say "look at how simple this problem was, how expensive it was to fail at solving it, and how much worse it could be if we took on something truly challenging".
The app itself was deficient in testing, had security issues, wrongly told thousands of people to quarantine, was not as accessible as it should have been, and was overall very mediocre software. If that's what my federal government can deliver (albeit through contractors and middlemen all the way down), I don't want them anywhere near my finances.
Public adoption was mandatory for a time, so that aspect couldn't have failed.
And of course, the Canada Revenue Agency is clearly able to manage people's taxes and aspects of finances safely and securely, but that has decades of effort and tremendous financial investment behind it. A greenfield effort seems a lot less safe, and I trust the public service much less to execute on that coherently, consistently, and effectively enough to deliver something better than we presently have.
Because damn near everything to do with covid was a massive fraud and crime, too
Countries can build payment networks. It's doable. They already run central banks that facilitate payments, you use them every time you write a check. In Japan, they turned transit cards into a payment network. India and Brazil built smartphone payment apps and they're the most popular form of payment in their respective countries, to the point where USTR is shitting its pants about it.
The underlying issue is not if we can build the network (we can) but getting people to actually use it. For example, if we wanted to repeat the Japanese success of IC cards here, we'd run headfirst into the problem that our public transit networks aren't big enough to be a credible Visa/MC alternative:
- Most public transit systems large enough to issue their own fare cards and readers are also regional monopolies, because there's not enough transit demand to sustain multiple companies with different routes. If I'm in Pittsburgh, all the buses and trolleys are run by PRT. In the Wasatch Front, it's UTA. Those agencies have little interest in becoming banks; they operate the fare cards mainly to keep fare payment easy, and they don't need to coordinate with anyone because everyone already joined into a single large transit agency.
- Metro areas with multiple transit agencies often have political differences that make coordination difficult. For example, in Long Island, NY, Nassau County's NICE bus system had legacy Metrocard fare payment that wasn't upgraded to OMNY until a month or two before Metrocard was completely ripped out and shut down. A rare exception to this would be the San Francisco Bay Area where there is an insane amount of political fragmentation and somehow they all wound up taking Clipper.
- A lot of Americans just never touch trains or buses enough to actually need a transit card.
- A lot of transit agencies are just surrendering to Visa & Mastercard and taking credit cards now anyway, even though transit fares are exactly the kind of microtransaction that is ill-suited for those networks.
Ironically, the best bet for an American-run payment network would actually be to nationalize E-ZPass[0]. In fact, in 2008 Congress passed a bill specifically mandating a unified toll payment system, but nothing came of it because the bill had no actual teeth. The main problem with this idea is that E-ZPass transponders won't fit in your wallet; you'd have to launch a separate form factor for an "E-ZPass Card" and at that point you run into all the same problems I just mentioned with making a unified transit fare system.
[0] E-ZPass is an RFID transponder system for toll payment that is very well-adopted along the east coast.
> In fact, in 2008 Congress passed a bill specifically mandating a unified toll payment system, but nothing came of it because the bill had no actual teeth.
E-ZPass now has interoperability with the Central United States Interoperability Hub (which reaches as far west as Colorado and as far south as Texas). We're much closer to the point where you can drive anywhere with a single transponder than we were back then. The main thing missing now is California cooperating with anyone else.
I like the idea of my toll road account also being useful for public transit, if nothing else. But it's difficult to imagine toll road operators and public transit operators seeing a big incentive to cooperate in that way. Even though they're both "pay for transit," their intended/typical users are very different (people who can't/won't drive vs. people who not only drive but are privileged enough to pay for less traffic).
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I mean there are options. It's not like people in Brazil or Europe can't make electronic payments. That said, I do think the US is very prone to public services being made worse and poison-pilled on purpose.
Wallet/Qrcode payments in many countries are roughly free. Visa/MC/Banks charge roughly 3-5% when you account for all fees (ie: Stripe). The security angle is also BS because these costs are hidden from consumers as they are thrown on merchants who will average them out again on consumers.
They are draining/milking the cow. At some point, they had significant value in quick information transmission when the internet and smart phones weren't really a thing. But now the only advantage is chargebacks/refunds which coincidentally, the experience there is being made shittier.
Still, not worth the 3-5% premium. Glad many merchants are starting to charge for credit card use and push back.
> I don't mean value-generating in the profiteering sense, but in the "this is worth operating on public funds because, ultimately, it is more than worth what tax payers put into it".
Very sure the amount those companies make yearly is worth saving.
> We tried to make a COVID-tracking app and spent $59.5 million, and it was an abject failure.
and then we just…kept letting those people stay in charge of spending our money.
and there’s a story of very expensive incompetency like that every quarter at minimum.
On that general note, I think the comparison point to look at for 'state of the art' in the subject would be India's just plain excellent UPI system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface) and all its supporting infrastructure. It's seriously great in a way that's hard to understand for people whose only context is being familiar with Western credit card or bank transfer systems. Nigh instant payment reconciliation, free and extremely convenient for individuals, operational costs small enough that it's practical for everyday micro-transactions for the poor (I'm talking on the territory of 5¢ in USD terms) which makes cashless payments extremely practical for even ordinary street merchants.
> middlemen don't have much value add
On the contrary, the middlemen in credit card transactions are providing a service whose value add is so obvious that it's basically invisible, because it's become so normal: financial intermediation. The credit card company is basically covering your debts for you until you pay your monthly bill--and shielding you from having to give every merchant you purchase from your bank account information. On the other side of the transaction, the credit card company is guaranteeing payment to the merchant, who now doesn't have to care about trying to assess the financial reliability of every customer. It's become so normal that we don't realize what a huge value add it is, as compared with, for example, trying to convince the grocery store to accept your check, which forces you to hand them your bank account information, and forces them to decide whether they think you (and your bank) are reliable enough that your check isn't rubber.
Credit card companies are essentially charging a rake on the consumer economy. They provide a valuable service, but skimming every transaction and funneling it into a handful of private companies is a net detriment for the vast majority of society. They've been at it for decades. First-mover advantage. Entrenchment effect. When CCs are integral to the transaction of money, it's essentially a tax on exchanging money. It's monopolies conducting parasitic toll collection.
Consumers shouldn't have to pay a fee to give someone money. Sellers shouldn't have to pay a fee to collect money. Security should be built into the system, not a luxury you're taxed for.
They should not be able to tithe all of society in perpetuity because they set up shop decades ago.
See also: the app store, telecoms, health insurance in the US
> Consumers shouldn't have to pay a fee to give someone money. Sellers shouldn't have to pay a fee to collect money.
As I said, the fee you're paying if you use a credit card is for financial intermediation. That's not just "giving someone money" or "collecting money". There are other things included that have significant costs to provide.
> They provide a valuable service
And that means all your rhetoric about "charging a rake", "tax", "parasitic toll collection", "tithe", etc. is misplaced, because those things all imply that there is no valuable service being provided.
If you want to argue that there are ways to reduce the cost of the valuable service, for example by competition, that's one thing. But that's not the argument you're making.
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Why couldn't this be a public service though? Governments spend so much money on producing and managing cash as a public good. Why can't we do the same for digital payment infrastructure?
> On the other side of the transaction, the credit card company is guaranteeing payment to the merchant, who now doesn't have to care about trying to assess the financial reliability of every customer.
The customer can file a chargeback in which case they win almost every time even if they are scamming.
Surely I can't get unlimited free groceries by just always paying with a credit card and then doing a chargeback, right? Like, it might work a couple times, but then wouldn't they just close my account?
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Payment networks are not an easy thing to build or maintain. The security contexts you are operating within are extremely adverse.
I understand why this makes HN so upset. To the uninitiated nerd brain, these are just pieces of information flowing in and out of some computer system across networks. How expensive could it possibly be to actually send a packet to perform an online authorization with a bank's database? We all know the actual communication is ~free. What you are paying for is the maintenance of that connection, the security around it (e.g., PCI-DSS compliance), the ability to dispute that communication out-of-band, etc.
We could cut the cost of VISA's network in half or better if we could drop the compliance piece. I don't know how that would play out for the consumer segment though. How much economic activity would be curtailed if the average consumer had to start worrying about the security and stability of payment networks? Card skimming is a great example of this. Consumers will avoid certain retailers if they perceive an elevated risk of theft.
Nobody is denying it costs money, the problem is it's not proportional to the value they add, nor their costs.
In the EU, their rake is capped by law, to an order of magnitude less than what they charge in the US. And it's still profitable. (Otherwise they would have pulled out of the market if they were losing money, obviously.)
The fraud prevention/etc you discuss benefits from economies of scale, but their fixed x% per transaction does not reflect those economies of scale. The free market has broken down here because of the difficulty for new market entrants.
> Nobody is denying it costs money, the problem is it's not proportional to the value they add, nor their costs.
The value they add is much greater than their costs. People who deny this lack a lot of imagination to ponder how inconvenient things could be without credit and debit cards.
But we don't need to imagine: If Visa and Mastercard didn't add more value than they cost, then merchants wouldn't accept them. It is still 100% voluntary for a merchant to decide if they want to accept cards or not. Which is a freedom they should have. These cards aren't legal tender.
> Payment networks are not an easy thing to build or maintain
Then why are there so many of them? I like travelling and almost every country I go to has its own thing going on, often more than one. I lost count long ago
Because they are profitable.
How do countries like India and Brazil do it then if it's so hard and challenging that it couldn't possibly be a public service?
What india and brazil have is more equivalent to Zelle in the US, not visa/mastercard. There's no viable chargeback, no international interoperability and no fraud protections.
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> We could cut the cost of VISA's network in half or better if we could drop the compliance piece. I don't know how that would play out for the consumer segment though.
I doubt the amount credit card companies charge in fees has much to do with the actual costs of running their service and are being inflated just because they can. My guess is that reducing the VISA's costs by letting them ignore security considerations would only mean that consumers get regularly screwed over while VISA continued to raise their fees every year.
> We could cut the cost of VISA's network in half or better if we could drop the compliance piece.
We could also cut the cost to merchants by notably more than half if we dropped credit card rewards.
If the fee is covering all the investments required to make it convenient, we're socializing the risk taken by customers who buy from sketchy merchants or lose their card. That insurance system is a net positive for consumers, but they don't know they are paying for it.
Vipps Mobilepay in the Nordic region already has 13 million users and is a founding member of a European network that will soon cover 13 countries.
The component parts have been up and running for years.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsxmVW7CxmA
A government run public service means:
1) The government now has a full purchase record of every purchase you make
2) There is not a competing infrastructure where you can distribute your transactions across multiple companies to avoid a full profile building up
3) The government now has an incentive to eliminate un-surveilled options like cash and checks.
4) The government is now required to consistently legislate every single "he said, she said" fraud situation. Since it requires publicly available and consistently followed guidelines, this means everyone knows exactly which sorts of fraud work well
5) The government can trivially ban payments to anyone they disapprove of (porn, bitcoin, Iranian refugee charities, anyone who has the wrong opinion on Israel, etc. etc.)
6) The government can also wield all of this as a cudgel to threaten bad actors - do what we want or else we propose you go the Non-Payment List, we reveal your porn receipts, etc..
7) I don't even want to know what this does to the complexity of trying to use a card when traveling internationally
> 7) I don't even want to know what this does to the complexity of trying to use a card when traveling internationally
Not much - Canada has debit/credit cards that use debit domestically and Visa or Mastercard internationally. They're the default type of debit card that many people get.
The government does that already. Only point 7 still stands.
Eh, there's a lot of regulations and room for whistleblowers in regards to the government's ability to get that in the USA, plus the 4th Amendment providing some pressure from the courts.
I'm not gonna say it's anywhere near perfect, but that friction significantly changes the average outcomes
The biggest thing is disputes. I have no problem with an escrow service asking for a cut if I want to use them, cause they have real costs. The creepy thing is how that escrow built into credit cards is forced on every little transaction.
> The creepy thing is how that escrow built into credit cards is forced on every little transaction.
That's essentially what a CC company does though, every transaction they're briding the timing gap between the card holder paying the CC company and the CC company paying the business. That's the core value add and cost they're bearing that they charge for.
They have risks from both sides of the transaction; on the one hand scam merchants who might get chargebacks and on the other customers who never pay off their balances (thought I guess that risk is covered by their interest charges mostly).
The timing gap is only there because it is a credit arrangement, it's not inherent in payment processing.
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As I understand it, most of the fees associated with US credit cards don’t actually go to the parties that are on the hook for disputes.
Most fees go to the issuing bank. The issuing bank is usually on the hook for customer disputes. So I think you are mistaken.
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I mainly meant the processor has to spend money handling the disputes. They may eat the cost too if it's small, but usually that's on the merchant. They're more likely to eat the cost of fraud.
I actually think this is an example of where government should be more involved - like often times if I file a chargeback, there's a solid likelihood that there should a real world repercussion to the other party because it's probably related to fraudulent or abusive behavior.
If a merchant has a pattern of disputes with customers, they can get kicked off the card networks. That's a real world repercussion.
There are fraudulent customers too, I would say even more often since they have no reputation to uphold. You can see this more in the open on Yelp.
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PayPal does this well with friends & family transfers.
Zelle is like this too. Though everything seems to be reversible in some way, not cause of disputes but because of unauthorized charges.
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Not just disputes. Also absorbing some significant part of the cost of fraud.
this process of giving out your 'secrets' (ccn, exp, ccv, zip) to tens of people a day with no other real authentication is inexcusably insecure. and instead of trying to get on top of the problem for real (like an hsm), we have this very half-assed fraud detection and chargeback mechanism that costly, ineffective, and seems to just bury the real issues behind a facade of concern. its been decades that this has been going on, I remain confused as to what incentives the banks have to continue to prop up this farce.
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Any links for this? Since the abusive practices towards their users should already eliminate most of frauds that isn't caused by the actual banks themselves.
> the cost of fraud
Fraud in modern financial systems is kind of.. funny? obvious? Local banks who know who Bob is can't make enough money due to scale, we'll scale that system to a national level with millions of participants. How will we do that? Bob is now customer 11,476,112. Oh no this anonymous number we created cheated us because we didn't know who he was, what do we do? Charge Bob and everyone else for the cost of this, our scaled up business model wouldn't work otherwise. We'll skim 3% off of every financial transaction infinitely, so that after our $100 virtual bill has changed hands 30 times it has disappeared into our coffers.
I have had to fight hard for disputes, even with “premium” credit cards like Amex Platinum. I’m not talking about “not as described” bs, but being asked over and over for the same info to wear me down.
I recently ordered some snacks from another country and after 3 months the vendor stopped responding while never having sent anything. When I asked for a chargeback, my claim was denied because I didn’t have proof they didn’t send anything! I literally had an email from them that said they are backed up and unable to send stuff.
Out of all the banks I’ve done chargebacks through Chase has been the least painful. I think only one time I had a back and forth with them. And that time I had one phone call, sent my evidence, and that was that. The company then tried to charge me again, which I also disputed, never heard from them again.
This was a moving company that insisted I should use their flat rate package and 3 movers rather than the 6 hourly I asked for. It took forever and they tried to charge me extra fees.
I've had a foreign chargeback go into the void too. I don't get the feeling chargebacks are a thing in Italy, so chalked it up to that.
Not unlike the experience many Americans have of fighting their own insurance company that they already pay a monthly premium to.
The lengths insurance companies will go just to avoid adding to a deductible are, given the circumstances, rather disgusting.
They don't seem to produce any savings. Are credit card companies much different? Why are their CEOs making millions of dollars? Is it all supposed to be because of innovation in preventing fraud?
As with health insurance companies I too have found in reality their way of dealing with these things leaves much to be desired. The way they treat it seems transparently like health insurance - add minimal value upfront, then wear you down so you never actually get the service or "value" they were supposed to provide in the first place.
That shitty service is the margin padding that multi million dollar salary. Where's the innovation?
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Yeah, I've been extremely disappointed with disputes on Amex Platinum.
I literally had a bike rental company in Amsterdam attempt to get me to conspire to report a bike stolen (which had briefly been stolen but was back in my possession), and then when I refused, charged me as if the bike had been stolen!
I reported all this to Amex, and I was never refunded, and to my knowledge, the attempt fraud was never investigated.
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3% is 100% worth it to me to be able to do a chargeback when a vendor fails to deliver what they promised.
What connection does the 3% have to the ability to do a chargeback? The card company isn't absorbing the loss, they are just pushing it back on the merchant and collect it from them unless the merchant successfully disputes the chargeback.
I have only once in my life had to request a chargeback for some random charge I had never initiated.
Where do you live or shop that you are happy to take what is effectively a 3% pay cut for the privilege of having a slightly easier option to get your money back if someone charges you the wrong amount?
Online purchases cross international borders, for example. Or even domestic online purchases. It's a whole lot easier for merchants to get sales if the customers feel safe that they can get their money back in case of fraud.
Tourism is the world's largest industry.
To a first approximation, the 3% isn't paying for disputes; it's paying for rewards to the customer (essentially a built-in discounting mechanism that gets to discriminate on credit rating), and for profit margin to the payment processor. Disputes are paid for by the merchant, and if you get too many of them you potentially lose the ability to process credit cards.
Credit cards in many regions outside the US can do chargebacks at 1/6th that cost or less.
The vendor pays the 3% not you (through increasingly vendors try to charge this fee to you as well). If you as the consumer had to pay 3% extra every time, do you still agree?
Where do you think the vendor gets the 3% to pay the network?
If I bake cakes to sell them, and have to pay 3% to a network for each purchase, then that 3% is in the price of the cakes.
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> The vendor pays the 3% not you
In Brazil, you'll typically get a "10% discount" when not paying by credit card.
Eg, it's very clearly pushed unto the consumer. I assume some law says they cannot charge more for it, so they got a default price, but always advertise a lower price with a small text "if paid via pix"
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All fees and taxes and tariffs end up being a direct cost to the consumer
not every transaction is risky enough to need chargebacks. it should be unbundled.
It kind of is, in an oblique way, for merchants with sufficient scale - e.g. grocery purchases don't need chargebacks, and I expect the bank that is partnered with my grocery store for 6% back in points on grocery purchases is unlikely to award chargebacks on purchases from that grocer.
If chargebacks were guaranteed, I might agree. But if you clickjacked with an instant checkout button, be ready for some scumbag to refuse to cancel your order, try to get you to agree to restocking fees, your card company to make you send them the same emails and complaints multiple times, and multiple phone calls...
"I do think we're getting to the point that middlemen don't have much value add."
Does this idea apply outside of the credit card industry
The middleman business, intermediation, seems to have worked well for the so-called "tech" industry
Tech has been about disintermediation.
Replacing low quality intermediaries with superior automated ones at massive scale with all the associated benefits.
This is the story of obsolescence and human history.
The coming end state of which has led to this transformation from the "big data" to AI paradigm.
Now so called "knowledge work" is itself being disintermediated. No need to worry about "bullshit" desk jobs anymore. They will be gone. It turns out a stochastic sentence guesser is superior to the average knowledge worker. This will only improve and become further operationalized, with accompanying safeguards and adversarial checks. At a certain point the value is already gained. The founders have taken their massive exits. Soon it's not so special anymore. In short, intelligence becomes a utility.
The end state of all of this is the same dichotomy our earliest ancestors had already forseen: apocalypse or utopia. In the same way that credit cards were once a cool idea, now they are trite and their continued privatization is merely a private tax on almost all transactions, and as such is rather undesirable. So turn it into a utility. Just like if we all survive the coming wars, the future will be one where compute based intelligence is a public good.
I largely agree. What V/MC became is essentially an abdication of a core government function of providing the secure means of economic activity. If the US government can print the currency in “paper” it should also provide the means of communicating that currency electronically.
There is absolutely not reason that the government should have abdicated its core function and allowed a monopoly effectively have a license to print the dollar bills and rent them out for a cut from ever single economic transaction.
Imagine if the government had suggested that in addition to all the other criminal extortions called taxes, when you use dollar bills to purchase something, you have to pay a 3% dollar-bill-usage surcharge every time a bill changes hands.
But it was obfuscated that this constant drain and fraud was being perpetrated because the whole system became extremely financially lucrative to the very people whose responsibility it would have been to stop the crime; so it has continued since. The mob was in control of the police.
You say Visa etc. payment infrastructure is a core government function that the government has abdicated. Abdicate means to willingly give up. When did the government give up this power to Visa, for example?
AI is certainly becoming the ultimate middleman at this point.
As AI compute will be within 15 years.
So take the cost of electricity + compute and add 3% markup for the US and 0.3% for everywhere else, and there you have the actual cost of AI.
Oh please. Every "public service" in the US is provided by a private entity.
> Possibly neutral markets, payments, and logistics should just be a public service.
Yes let’s give the economy to the people that run the DMV.
My province has privatized DMV services, and services have been pretty consistently worse than any place I've lived with publicly-provided DMV services.
"Value add" is the wrong framework for thinking about these sorts of services. The reason Visa and MasterCard exist is that there's value in relationships. If you want to have your accounting system available in all stores, you have to talk to Visa or MasterCard. Conversely, if you run a store and want to accept payments, you only have to deal with Visa and MasterCard. Sure, "public service", but run by who? Visa and MasterCard are cross border, good luck getting any sort of international coalition of governments to build a payments system in the current political climate.
The United States government already interferes on behalf of Visa and MasterCard to maintain their duopoly across the globe.
Look at the tension between United States and Brazil on this issue with their nationalized payments system.
The fact is the most important relationship Visa and MasterCard have is the one you left unsaid - their relationship with the United States government.
It doesn’t have to cover everything. Put international to one side, just make a system for domestic payments. Like much of Europe has.
SEPA?
Just like HN that the top comment is completely off topic and totally misses the point.
it's not offtopic at all. visa and mastercard are middlemen in the transaction between two parties. the comment is about middlemen and suggests they don't add value.
edit: just seeing now you're complaining about things being offtopic multiple times in this submission, without ever adding anything yourself. perhaps you could be part of the change you wish to see?
Comments that are not about TFA, which is about specific litigation, but just random opinions about "payment processors" are off topic. I came here to read comments about TFA and had to wade through a lot of other stuff to find any ... again, this is typical of HN where so many people don't bother to read TFA.
Since this exchange isn't of relevance, I won't respond further.