I've noticed recently indie (non-franchise) merchants being much more brazen about charging extra fees for accepting a credit card payment. This includes counters at my local farmer's market, two local cafes and a sushi restaurant, and my city's public electrical utility.

All of them are happy to receive cash or interac (Canadian debit infrastructure) or even e-transfers in some cases (Canadian venmo). But they'll say an extra $1-2 charge if you want to pay by credit card.

Maybe I'm just remembering badly, but I don't remember encountering this twenty years ago; back then the rules were clear that you either didn't accept credit payments, or you did and it was the same price as cash.

The real thing consumers get is fraud protection, and the ability to charge back when merchants become intransigent. Let's not pretend other systems (even the ones prominent in the US like Zelle) offer the same protections.

Its limited to about $1000 a day.

The QR is a URI with the ID, amount and maybe other stuff. It's a client-side implementation.

RuPay sure "works within the system" but is pretty much useless for international payments/subscriptions. Not really a VISA/MasterCard replacement.

In russia there is СБП (translated as FPS = "fast payment system") using the same mechanism, also free for individuals and relatively cheap for businesses

> “Also, credit card fees are not 4%, they're 1.5-3.5% with an average of around 2.3%.”

And they’re much lower than that in the UK and EU. Even the smallest UK retailers can pay as low as 1.6% or 0.8% + £0.02. The big guys who are running billions of £ are paying 0.5% or less.

(These apply to in-person transactions, accepting cards on the internet typically costs more).

Well, that definitely creates a powerful pull from customers to make vendors accept Wechatpay for transactions.

And no doubt they’ll find a way to spend it in the app considering you can manage almost all aspects of your life within it.

Revolut works similarly. You don’t pay any fees on transfers to other Revolut accounts, but you do for other bank accounts.

There is already the EPC QR code, which contains all the data required to initiate a SEPA credit transfer. This code is supported by practically all banking apps (at least in Germany). The standard is public and free (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code)

The merchant's system displays this code, you open your online banking app, scan the code, select "SEPA INST" (here's the usability catch!) to make the payment instantaneous, and confirm. Within 10 seconds, the money is transferred to the merchant's account. Either the merchant's bank or a third-party Open Banking API immediately informs the merchant's system (e.g. by push notification or webhook), and a receipt is issued.

Everything is already here, but since this system would be virtually free to use, nobody really has an incentive to push it. It costs money to educate the public, and there is no money to be made. Instead, everyone gets paid handsomely by the card mafia.

There is always opportunity in FinTech.

How did Venmo and Cash app get any traction? After all, we already had PayPal. There was already a way to transfer money to your friends.

How did Robinhood get any traction? We already had Etrade and other online brokers.

Probably not worth it, given that the EU caps the credit card fees at 0.3%, 0.2% for debit cards.

You're putting the cart in front of the mule. The important thing is not what merchants want, but what customers want.

What I want is being able to pay stablecoin from my side and be able to esentially get a virtual card of payment.

The only way which has worked for me was actually using g2a with their crypto provider to get a 10$ gift card of rewarble and activate it.

Does your app allow something like this? can I convert any crypto to payment provider which can be accepted from the other side or am I reading it wrong because you do mention PIX, if it can work with PIX, does it work with VISA/Mastercard cards too?

Uninvolved companies wouldn’t bother, but outlaw such fees and lenders would still build this kind of infrastructure so they could make money charging people interest.

It's weird how this works. Saw something similar when working for a bus company. After reaching a minimum amount of sales for a bus route, everything after that is basically pure profit. However, how do we get those last sales? Well, by bidding higher on people searching for transfer between those two cities. Let's say the ticket was $20. We could end up for instance accepting to bid $10 for an ad that would lead to a sale. So for every $10 of pure profit we then got, Google also got $10. In a sense it was a good deal for both parties, but it's also kinda insane that in the end, Google made as much profit on our busses as we did.

If they're running on 9% net margin, then card fees are pretty down on the list of problems. They're vulnerable to any kind of fluctuation.

You might be surprised to hear that my small business sometimes sees fees at 11%.

We blocked that card processor, obviously. But the % is very much not constant across e.g. Visa, often every purchase in a day is slightly different, and we can't even tell people what the rate is for their purchase due to a couple layers in between (still figuring out if we can fix that). It's vile, and probably should be illegal to not pass through the cost visibly.

There are a few cards that offer 2% cash back with no annual fee. No chance their fee is 1.5-2%