[fspeech]

> Because it already achieved that "level of digital payment smoothness" with credit cards?

Whether the two are equivalent depends on the transaction costs of the two models.

According to the Economist: "Visa and MasterCard extract over 0.10 cents of net income for every dollar of payments. Ant takes a smaller cut, of less than 0.03 cents." https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726713-ant-financi...

Perhaps more importantly I've seen estimates that Chinese banks lose $20 billion yearly in credit card fees due to the mobile payments.

[Chaebixi]

> Whether the two are equivalent depends on the transaction costs of the two models.

I don't think we're not talking about exact, feature-for-feature, cost-for-cost equivalence.

Both these systems have the same or similar "level of digital payment smoothness" from the customer perspective. At least with credit cards, those fees are on the merchant side not part of the customer experience equation.

[fspeech]

If one tries to pay when merchants don't eat the fees, e.g., paying real estate tax online where the county tax collector charges a 2+% convenience fee for credit cards, one definitely would see the difference. In other cases where merchants eat the fees, they are just passed on to the buyers, though many cards do rebate their holders part of the fees as "rewards".