What I don't understand is why my banking app does not show a "cancel subscription" button with the payment.

When I click that button, the recurring payment is automatically canceled, and the SaaS company can check that and know that I unsubscribed. Or something along these lines.

There is already a power-asymmetry between consumers and companies. This should not extend to unsubscribing. Here, the consumer should have all the power.

The reason isn't technical. This isn't implemented because the entire card-processing ecosystem is hooked on the chargeback fees (min $15 to $100). It starts becoming a lucrative revenue stream for Visa/Mastercard/Stripe/Adyen/WorldPay/Fiserv and the entire ecosystem.

Merchant's end up getting the short end of the stick in most cases.

Thats how it works in India. All authorized repeating charges ("mandates") are listed on a portal maintained by the card issuer. you can go in anytime and simply cancel the mandate from there. This is mandatory under banking regulations.

Credit cards are also required to be "tokenized" when stored at a merchant or payment aggregator - the user authorizes the bank to allow the merchant or the aggregator to "store" the card details for use later, and the bank then issues a card token, tied to the specific merchant/aggregator. They are not allowed to store the original card info at all - just this token. This makes the token not worth stealing, as it can be only used by that merchant, and is trivial to de-auth if needed, with or without merchant cooperation.

I love love love this comment.

Banks are barely running on a modern stack, let alone doing anything userful within banking, and you want them to build an api to cancel an outside service? :)?

Love this so much, most HN comment ever :)

Neobanks definitely have this feature. For example Revolut. There’s a “Block future payments” button, and once you click it, no more charges from that merchant will go through.

How would this be tooled? A chargeback, a deep link to the cancel page, an API connection between bank and subscription?

Chargeback is easy because it's under the card co's control. Deep link would require knowing the cancel page of every sub, plus handling auth factors. API connection would two way integration, with scoped auth between every bank and every service. Hopefully managed by an SI or aggregator, but the business model sounds hard (the bank doesn't mind the chargeback, the SaaS doesn't want the cancelation, so who pays?)