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by closewith 336 days ago
> Credit cards give me cashback, worldwide acceptance and peace of mind.

That's because you (and everyone else in Switzerland, even those paying cash) is eating a 2-3% merchant fee markup. In the civilised world like the EU, where credit card interchange fees are capped of 0.3%, those cashback benefits (which is, again, your money you've just paid) don't exist.

> worldwide acceptance

For now, at a huge economy-wide cost. That skimmed 2-3% is what Trump is trying to protect.

> peace of mind

That's also country-dependent. In many countries, credit card transactions have no additional protections and chargebacks aren't the magic bullet they are in some.

> more convenient, safer, faster.

Pix is more convenient, safer (much, much safer and lower risk of fraud), and faster than credit cards. Cheaper too.

1 comments

Switzerland has interchange fees of 0.4% for consumer credit cards (by contactless, only slightly higher by chip+pin): https://www.visaeurope.ch/content/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unite..., https://www.mastercard.com/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/.... And yet banks offer 0.33% cashback cards: https://certo-card.ch/one.

And let's not forget that cash acceptance costs an order of magnitude more than this anyway; if anything businesses should charge surcharges for accepting cash, not the other way around, and given the social constraint of no surcharges, cashback is a fair mechanism to reward efficient payment methods.

> Switzerland has interchange fees of 0.4% for consumer credit cards

Only since Wednesday of this week due to COMCO action, so no-one knows if cashback will persist, but it will be a lot less than .33%.

> And let's not forget that cash acceptance costs an order of magnitude more than this anyway;

In the EU, it's .5% for cash vs .3% for cards, but the situation falls back into favour for cash once fraud is accounted for.

> Only since Wednesday of this week due to COMCO action

That Visa fee table is dated July 2023?

Right, but prior to this week, the merchant account providers just raised scheme fees to compensate.