The army of middlemen with their hands out is the worst part, where you also have fees paid to the merchant bank, the iso/payment service provider, and a chain of agents. In disfavored industries like adult content, this can reach 15% or more, plus thousands in annual "high risk" fees (even if chargeback rate is good). It's a huge anticompetitive racket, and the sooner US can shake off Visa/MasterCard, the better off we'll be.
Add an extra fixed fee if you need 3D Secure (and equivalents). This should be covered already by the assessment and interchange fees to begin with.
Card networks' moat is their network effect. If you need to take a payment from someone around the world, cards are very convenient. Unless Pix and friends get to interop globally, cards will always have a place.
EU regulations limit those interchange fees to 0.2% for debit card transactions and 0.3% for credit card transactions so total costs are much lower for businesses. Cards have replaced cash even for small transactions in most European countries.
All should be free. Imagine if government decided to impose 3% revenue tax, yet these companies get a free pass.
If these networks cannot run this for free, then they should be nationalised and tax payer should cover it. It will be cheaper (because it will become non-profit) for everyone and better.
Many banks already require monthly or annual payments for keeping an account with them. They also use the money from deposits to lend it at high interest rates. It is not like the banks are not extracting much more than a fair share of revenue from a captive market.
The banks and the payment processors are the real customers of the payment networks and they all do better when they can squeeze more money from the end users - the cardholders and the businesses. Pix cuts out these middlemen and that’s an existential threat to their business model, ergo an “investigation” by the Trump admin.
Many countries do, it's really more common than you might think. The problem is international payments and things like tourism. Want to order something from another country? Want to go there for a week and not have to use cash? In most cases it's either Visa or MasterCard.
PSD2 is merely a framework for an uniform access to banking, same APIs everywhere. While you can send money through it, it's still through the same means as normal.
Many of the european countries have their own "Pix", but there's no European-wide alternative. The ECB wants to make one (tentatively titled "digital euro"), but it's going to take a long time to come out.
Yes but this is merely an abstraction of SEPA Instant transfers to not have to write an IBAN when sending money.
The issue to solve is payments, Portugal for instance has its Multibanco payment scheme, but it's only used in Portugal.
I assume eventually it'll be cobranded with Wero like it happened to Netherlands' iDEAL and eventually fully replaced.
Exactly and if you think 2-3% is a small number you should keep in mind that that is effectively half of what the market returns over the long-term at 7%.
Visa charges only a Assessment fee the majority goes to Issuer Bank +PSP.
E.g: Interchange fee (0.8-1.8%): Paid by acquirer to issuer (card-holding bank)
Assessment fee (0.1-0.3%): Paid to card network (Visa, Mastercard)
Acquirer margin (0.3-0.8%): Retained by merchant’s payment processor