Comment by dozerly
4 hours ago
I’d be more than happy to use a secure, fraud-safe payment system that does not give me airline miles if it meant everything was cheaper to begin with. Part of the problem with CC companies is they do many things that are tightly coupled and are positioned well to profit on them.
The problem is the ‘fraud safety’. Your ‘safety’ is likely to be some else’s inconvenience (or vice-versa), and credit cards are all about ease-of-use. Fraud-related costs are also one of, if not the largest single contributor(s) to payment processing fees.
Seems like payment processing would do well to be a public good instead of a for-profit venture to me.
Every level of my government has been defrauded of a significant amount of money (relative to their budget,) in the last five years; I do not support their losing more of my money to fraud.
Certainly, once you have a world government. Are you sure that a world government will be aligned with your interests in other areas than payment processing?
FedNOW is open for public use and supported by a number of major banks, so it’s not clear what the additional thing you’re proposing here is.
Other countries solved this by doing payments in ways that fraudsters can't simulate, such as a cryptographic handshake with a chip on the card.
This doesn't help with payments which take place without a card present, such as online and phone payments, which make up a large (and growing) proportion of transactions.
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