As a buyer I don't trust Paypal. They use dark patterns to try to get me to sign in, then make it hard to sign out, and for whatever reason my account is wedged and even though it has the correct payment details, the payments all fail. The UI is antiquated and the embedded version that has the animated progress bar GIF is sketchy at best. The Venmo app (which Paypal owns) is jammed with crappy ads and an often-broken UI.

Nah I thought I liked PayPal as a customer until I found out that they favor large merchants against the consumer. I had a problem with a product and the company was playing games with the warranty. I only had it for 3 months and it was already falling apart. I made a complaint with PP and it was auto denied.

I will never use PP for a large purchase again.

Yeah, any subscription I can push through PayPal, I do so, because I can cancel it directly on their end. I don't need to go through a ten click justification process with the merchant.

I don't trust either one.

And as a consumer, I especially hate PayPal because they always try to screw me with their currency conversion rates by hiding the toggle button (and it happens that I sometimes forget to toggle over to my bank's currency conversion)

And only once have I ever won a payment dispute there (and that was as a merchant, not a buyer... lol)

States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.

Quite true. Or honestly, it's really barely about direct financial bribery anymore[1] - all the recent ones have just hinged on incredibly naïve (and easily manipulable) readings of how a merger might affect culture war / red vs blue partisanship.

For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.

Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.

[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!

>If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.

3DS2 is the solution to that problem.

Not true. Visa and Mastercard don't make the bulk of the commission. When a merchant pays a standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee on a credit card transaction the issuing bank gets roughly 1.5-2.5% for interchange, which is the bulk. The processor or acquirer gets anywhere from 0.2-0.5% and the card network gets only about 0.1-0.15.

Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.

Wero has a for merchant/commerce part that integrates with PSPs. For instance Adyen: https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/wero

But we aren't there yet.

I don't think vendors can offer Wero yet. I think it's part of the merger with other European companies.

Wero is essentially iDeal. iDeal is great.

What is the regulatory capture? Visa and master card have contract terms that ensure retail capture. That’s a private moat not regulation.

Back when selling online tech courses was viable (pre-AI), about 30% of transactions in the US were from folks using PayPal on the platform I used. There's a huge of people who use PayPal, it's even more outside of the US.

Zelle was built to preempt FedNow. The banks saw what was coming and wanted to own instant payments.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

It's actually pretty common for local payment systems to exist, it's not just Brazil. I've seen such systems in Europe, Asia, Africa and I'm sure they exist in other places I've never been to

PayPal is sort of the Facebook of digital payments: they stopped being directly relevant years ago, but own many of the things that you or someone you know continue to use. Venmo being the obvious one, but also Braintree, Xoom, Honey, Bill Me Later, etc.

and their oligarch financiers