[silvestrov]

For countries which have good customer protection (), use of credit cards online can be reduced to just a transfer between 2 bank accounts.

That should be a lot cheaper than current fees, especially for large amounts, as you cut out a lot of expensive middlemen. It will be interesting to see if Stripe or Apple does this first.

It seems like 2 opposing fights are going on:

1) Mastercard and VISA tries to be the only methods of payments by trying to get rid of all national payment cards.

2) EU seems to want to reduce payment fees, but doesn't want customers to know the fee. I don't think they are ready to want the fees to be much lower.

Nice fees also allow for nice lobbying.

() e.g. in Denmark business's are not allowed to draw money from card before the goods are shipped

[mytailorisrich]

Good customer (or rather consumer) protection does not necessarily make getting money back straightforward. It just means that if you sue in court you should get a slam dunk ruling against the seller.

A card chargeback may be easier than going down that route, and you know you're going to get paid if they find in your favour, which is not guaranteed if a court finds in your favour...

[anon589]

the Fed Reserve has been working on FedNow real time payments for a few years now.

That could be a great achievement for replacing ACH and debit.