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by t0 4702 days ago
Do you enjoy being at the mercy of the credit card companies? How hard would it be to remove them from the equation?
2 comments

They're a company that makes it easy to accept credit cards on the web. How can you remove credit card companies from the equation?
Some payment companies accept credit cards to reduce signup friction and then try to switch users over to ACH to reduce fees.
Doesn't using ACH imply giving a company direct access to your bank account? Credit cards offer all sorts of consumer protections that ACH doesn't have, e.g., the customer can be immediately reimbursed for fraudulent transactions, etc.

Not to mention that credit cards allow people to buy stuff they can't really afford on credit. If you remove that ability, you'll be losing a lot of potential customers.

It's a bit like asking how you feel about being at the mercy of Linux, or web browsers, or SSL. We work with the technology that exists.

That's a little bit facetious, but though there are lots of aspects of the card networks that I dislike (and suspect will change), they work pretty damn well for most transactions. We could devote ourselves to usurping them, but it feels more interesting to see how rapidly we can advance the state of the art instead.

Aaaaaand it's gone. The censorship is a bit high lately.