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beejiu 3 hours ago

In Europe, the max interchange fee is 0.3%. In the US, the average is 2%. So the relative impact of fraud is much higher.

mercutio2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Huh? Your conclusion does not follow. A large fraction of the interchange fee is kicked back to customers.

The size of the pie being so much bigger means the issuer’s tolerance for fraud is much larger, but it’s orthogonal to whether there’s actually more fraud. In practice credit cards fraud actually impacting customers is vanishingly rare at this point.

lxgr an hour ago | parent [-]

A large fraction, yes, but I believe in absolute numbers, US issuers still retain much more interchange than European ones.

The numbers are even public: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

If you take a look at some of the more "expensive" cards, interchange is often higher than 2%, yet issuers often pay as much only on certain categories, and flat cashback cards usually pay 1.5% (2% is relatively rare).

Compare that difference to a total interchange of 0.3% in the EU.

SkiFire13 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is also an additional (usually pretty high) fee for getting chargebacks.