[vacri]

and they're universally free for the payer.

Not quite. Vendors can now legally add a surcharge to cover the cost for payments from a credit card. Some vendors traditionally refused Amex when they had to eat the charge, since Amex was something like a 4-5% cost to the vendor as opposed to the 1-2% costs of the other cards.

Why, in a small, stagnant market like ours, do we fare much better than the US system?

We have strong banking regulations, apparently. I heard somewhere that during the GFC, there were only ten banks of that kind globally that hung on to their AAA credit rating, and all four of the Australian big banks were in that ten.

[bloopletech]

Credit card transactions do sometimes have fees attached; specifically I was referring to EFT, which for person-to-person has no fees at all, and doesn't attract fees to the payer at the POS (whereas credit cards can).

Yeah, the real question I was getting at was, given the Australian market is even more insular and stagnant than the US, why do we have much better systems?

What you're saying sounds plausible; a comparison of the US and Australian regulations on deposit banks would be interesting.

[mhenr18]

I never realised how good we had it comparatively in Australia. I always just thought that Eftpos was something that "just worked" and that everyone around the world had (or at least an equivalent). No fees, no credit, no monthly payments, no bullshit. Just a card that you use to pay for things out of your bank account.

No processing times too :)

[wildfire]

Actually EFT does have fees. Typically between 10c - 25c / transaction.

They are minimal, but they are there.

Plus the fee for the terminal of course. Which varies significantly between banks in AU.

[bloopletech]

Sure; I could have been clearer here.

Specifically, you can do an EFT transfer from a bank account to any other bank account in Australia via online banking, and it's free (at least in all the times I've used it).

In the case of ETFPOS terminals, EFT is always free for the payer (the customer), and credit cards are usually free for the payer, but do sometimes have a fee for the payer (certainly AMEX and Diners).

As I've now been corrected on, both types of transaction have a fee for the payee (the merchant).

The fee for the terminal itself is definitely true - I was mainly thinking of fees in terms of payers, i.e. the customer, not the merchant.

Though given there are alternative methods for credit/debit payments (i.e. alternative terminal types, like the swipe thingy that plugs into iPhones) it'll be interesting to see if people keep the combined EFTPOS + credit/debit card terminals, or abandon the EFT side, as the number of non-debit bank/keycards dwindles.

[icebraining]

We have strong banking regulations, apparently. I heard somewhere that during the GFC, there were only ten banks of that kind globally that hung on to their AAA credit rating, and all four of the Australian big banks were in that ten.

Our bank regulations are a joke (in the last few years, we just nationalized a fraudulent bank for €2.7 billion and re-sold it for €30 million), and yet we have a similar system, plus free virtual CCs, plus an award-winning ATM network that doesn't charge any fees for usage/withdraws.