> 2.5% is not that much when it means you can sell to people without worrying about if they can pay for it.

Is that not how these other payment providers work? Would they let a transaction through that won’t be settled afterward?

QR is not ideal but as long as Apple keeps such a tight leash on NFC payments, it's the only "open" option. It's ironic that by trying to keep NFC payments so secure, they've instead caused the wide proliferation of far less secure alternatives.

Physical card issuance is too high-friction for new entrants. It's much easier to attract new users with "just install our app" than "enter your home address and wait days for a card to arrive then put it in your wallet and remember to use it"

> QR Code base system is slow, have security risk and will not work without smartphone. Proliferation of hundred of QR Code based payments system is not a good thing, you need one that works across all countries.

Agree on some security risks. But the cost of creating, printing or sharing a QR code is very low compared to NFC hardware cost and availability. I don’t know what you mean by slow, because it takes about 10 seconds to complete a transaction. QR codes are quite common in cities and towns in India because of this reason (and the other is that Apple, though a tiny player in the market, hasn’t opened up NFC completely for others to use). You can pay another person or a merchant by scanning a QR code on a cheap Android phone. You can pay for a metro or bus ticket by scanning a QR code. You’d likely see restaurants having a QR code for menus instead of paper menus, and many more.

what's the security risk with QR systems? I've recently come to use one and it relies on software for both parties having connectivity.

Meanwhile all of Asia, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, India, increasingly Japan run just fine on QR.

In Europe we don't often have recurrent bonus, and they're much smaller, but we still have banks giving you up to ~200€ to open a bank account and use it to deposit your wage, or other banks having cashback. Right now I'm having 10% cashback on everything (up to 70€/month of cashback) + 50€ for opening an account with ing. All I have to do is keeping a balance of at least 100€ for 1 day before 2026.

Other banks are starting to finally adapt to other countries and give interests on the liquidity you have in your account

It’s kind of how it should be. Otherwise people not paying by credit card are subsidising people who do. It might encourage the card companies to lower their fees.

In the US, they are getting replaced by ACH. The seller gets to receive payment at near zero cost, with no chargeback risk.

A 3% credit card surcharge is enough to make me switch my insurance/mobile network/home internet/utility/property tax transactions to ACH to avoid losing money on a credit card transaction that I am never going to need to chargeback.

Except the networks are not forcing their morals onto anyone, they are not payment processors.

Visa's fee in the US is also only 0.3%. Most of the interchange fee goes to the issuing bank and is used for cardholder rewards/benefits.

*Revolut is not a registered bank in many regions. Other financial institutions (i.e. actual banks) also provide no addition exchange rate fees in foreign currencies, and some have the full feature set described.

Must be nice, I’m in the class that gets $0 back a month. $600 would definitely help.

But hey, I forgot HN is overindexed on overinflated big tech salaries while field tech workers get shafted on the low side.