| Imagine this potential future with me. At first, it's just Amex. Then, to remain competitive, other major card vendors do something similar. Most of us (developers) still use something like Stripe for simplicity, but libraries start popping up that abstract away the vendor-specific APIs and make it easy to use them. Long term, though, as more and more payments are handled electronically and online, this opens the door for a more competitive credit card market. Now, to compete with Visa or Mastercard, all I need is to get my API into those popular libraries and merchants can accept my card just as easily as theirs--except I charge a lower rate. You'll start seeing cards that are virtual only--allowing them to cut fees below what companies handling physical cards can do. With the payment process being decentralized, now even requiring a card number is unnecessary. Users specify the ways they'd like to pay for things in their payment client (browser? phone?) and this is negotiated behind the scenes with the payment types the merchant will accept. Users and merchants can directly decide between more traditional payment means (centralized / fiat currency) and upcoming ones (decentralized / cryptocurrency). The limiting factor is no longer what the PoS (point of service) machine will accept, but what the popular payment processing libraries support (and the merchant has configured them to allow). I don't expect we'll see Visa or Mastercard do this, but this could be a key first step toward a more competitive payment processing market (which has had the same entrenched players for decades). |
However - I don't think you'll see a proliferation of new payment methods. The biggest problem here would be fraud mitigation, so it'd need to be a payment provider the merchant deems trustworthy enough.
Interesting times ahead. Amex are just doing the bare minimum to keep up here.