I also actually _like_ having a physical card that I can use with NFC so that I'm not fecked if my phone dies/breaks or anything. Physical cards to me are a feature.

Yeah, as someone who just took a trip in China where QR payments are the most popular form it was clearly inferior from a UX standpoint from NFC. The most notable was a data connection. Cell service was pretty good overall but there were a few cases where we were struggling to get the payment through. Some merchants also have the ability to scan your code (which seems to be generated offline) but that leads to this confusing UX where you never know if you will scan (and should have the scanner mode ready) or be scanned (and have the QR code open).

And there was always the fear that your phone dies and you can't take the subway or purchase everything. It doesn't happen often but on some long days you really don't really want to be tracking the battery of your phone super closely.

NFC payments can work offline (although this is pretty rare) and can be authorized from a small plastic card that has no battery, no internet connection and is pretty robust including being completely waterproof. Plus 100% of the time I tap my card or phone on the merchant's terminal. No alternate UX option. Plus if you are using your phone for payments (which is a very convenient option) you don't need to open any app beforehand (WeChat is like 3 taps to get to scanner or code) and I found quick NFC reading to be more reliable than scanning a QR code where the lighting conditions and state of the QR code are not always perfect (it was almost always possible to get it to work within a handful of seconds, but often took a bit of fiddling around. NFC is reliably just tap and it works).

I still keep a few large bills in my wallet in case the card networks are down, flag my transactions or whatever else. But having this immutable payment card that is incredibly reliable and easy to use is way better than the phone-based QR systems I have seen.

What I would love to see if we bring phones into the system is a way of approving the transaction (including the amount) on your device. So for example 1. Tap phone 2. Review amount on screen and approve 3. Tap to commit payment. This is more steps but is far safer. That being said the number of times this has been an issue for me is 0, so it is probably better to just rely on the banking system to correct any mistakes rather than add extra steps to the payment flow.

You haven't experienced UPI. Its a breeze. Everything works with everything else.

I couldn't get a wallet app to work with GrapheneOS, so for me, QR codes are better, but they feel like they have different use cases. I like QR codes in mail invoices (very common in CH), I'd like NFC in a shop if I could use it.

Anyone is free to use discover and it works for most merchants in the USA.

American Express leverages the fact that most consumers don’t care what the merchant is charged

I don't think it's due to regulations. It's just a natural monopoly due to network effects. Any new entrant has to convince hundreds of payment processors and retailers to accept their cards before anyone even has them. Regulations are a trivial barrier compared to that.

I think that was parent’s point. That the US does not have as free a market.

They absolutely allow you to pass the fee on to the customers... as long as you phrase it as a cash discount from the posted price, instead of a credit card fee on top of the posted price.

I'd argue that the problem is that QR codes shouldn't be an 'app' problem, and yes there's a chicken-egg problem with PoS terminals verifying incoming bank payments but that's a separate issue.

If you want to do account-to-account payments you can show the customer the account/routing number, amount & invoice ID - but obviously that's high friction and the customer needs to login to their account and send a payment with lots of manual data entry.

Making yet another app, adding a financial intermediary, requiring you to link your bank account - these aren't solving the friction points.

We already have bank apps, when I scan a QR code in an industry-wide format it should ask me or confirm which bank app to open and pre-fill all the payment information.

So from my perspective, the problem is that FedNow in the US, and Open Banking in the UK - they could have just dictated "Banks must support EPC QR, or EMV QR code scanning and deep-links", and QR code payments would happen very quickly - even with NFC/RFID you can do passive scanning to achieve the same thing.

* Choose Account * Confirm details * Press send

That's about as easy as you can get for push payments, with a real industry-wide standard for communicating payment intents via NFC/QR. But both FedNow and UK OpenBanking are structured in a way which requires friction, and onerous regulation, through their clunky APIs - meaning you can't actually solve that problem on your own.

I'm hoping steam builds their own.

Pix, UPI, etc have definitively shown that Governments are the best players to disrupt the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.

One way to solve this problem is to have a certain commodity require the new payment method. If AWS for example created a new currency/payment method and made it the sole accepted way to pay for servers it could very quickly catch on as others adopt. Look how “Sign in with Google” became the default.

I’m pretty sure the main reason Apple/Google/Microsoft haven’t done this already is because they would be directly competing with the US government. The idea must get shut down pretty quickly by powerful people.

> It is very much a chicken and egg problem. Merchants have no reason to adopt it if there aren't very many customers that use it, and customers have no reason to adopt it unless there are a lot of merchants, or at least some important frequently used merchants that use it.

I agree that both parties need a reason to adopt a new payment method... But the reason can't be only that there's a lot of merchants/customers that have it ... If there's benefits for enough participants, reach can drive adoption for those who don't care about the benefits, but you've got to have some material benefits to get people started.

It's got to have a good experience, too.

But from this rant, it seems like they were trying to be a middle man for instant bank payments... I don't see the value of that as a purchaser when I can use a debit card. For the merchant, running a debit card takes a small fee, but anything that needs someone to scan a QR code takes a lot of time.

And other countries don't have chickens and eggs? They didn't use to pay for things in the past in those other jurisdictions that have adopted modern payment systems?

trackpad?

It’s worse on business cards. I negotiated a bank contract for our corporate card program earlier this year and we get 3.5% cash back from purchases. It incentivizes us to pay every vendor invoice by card too as ACH / check actually cost us money.

Not sure how prevalent this is now, but a few years back I was seeing a lot of "cash price" advertised for stuff that was lower by whatever the merchant didn't have to pay in fees so sometimes cash may not be subsidizing the credit industry.

Are you saying that even when I pay for something in cash or using debit, because of the possibility I'd use my credit-card the merchant had +3% their price?

Handling cash costs more on average at least for smaller businesses than typical card fees.

It's typical to estimate the cost of handling cash anywhere from 4% to as high as 15% depending on takings and size of transactions.

And some businesses (that consumers want) just don't exist because they can't be made to fit the card pricing structure. Ex: journalism (subscriptions only)

Still, most consumers don’t care or notice it (we are not most consumers), so this doesn’t refute the original argument.

The incentive for merchants to accept cards for payment is that it'll increase number of sales. And it does. In principle this should even out over all sales.. but cards do make it easier for consumers do purchase stuff, and I'm absolutely sure that I personally spend money way easier with a card than without (not that I spend more than I make, mind). The total number of sales go up.

I haven't used cash in my home country for the last two decades, at least. I mean, CC works even on parking meters when paying half a dollar (equivalent) for a few minutes of parking, and I can use a card in flea markets and even some garage sales.

Oh, I forgot: A lot of shops, restaurants, and other establishments have stopped accepting cash, even if it's illegal to do so (legal tender etc). That's because handling cash costs them MORE than handling credit/debit cards. In other words: It appears that using cards LOWER the costs for the merchant, not the other way around.

EditAdd: I presume a lot of the cost saving is that paying by card is 100% electronic, just tap the card (add the pin code if it's expensive enough), and the transaction goes directly into the shop's account. With cash it's way more cumbersome. Way, way more.

(Mind, there's no such thing as signing by hand anymore. If there were paperworks involved it would be different. But there aren't any, not in Europe and not in Japan anymore either)

> I think it's close to impossible to "fix" Visa without government intervention (e.g. limit fees to a fraction of a percent), but I'm still grateful to anyone who tries.

This is what Australia is looking at currently: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-15/rba-credit-debit-merc...

The price is the same if you use cash or card. Really, after reward points, card tends to be even cheaper.

Visa/Mastercard/BNPL/Klarna etc. all have negotiated discounts for consumers, paid for by the merchant.

I'm skeptical that merchants would lower prices (stepping away from $x.98, etc) instead of pocketing the higher margins themselves.

There might not be robust competition between payment systems, but when I go to a store, I've got options to pay:

Cash, credit (discover is dieing, but amex/mc/visa compete a bit), debit (several networks and all US cards have to be on at least two), I've seen PayPal as an option ocassionally, some merchants take Zelle, FedNow could if a good UX comes around (I don't think many merchants want to give out their routing and account numbers, and it's tedious to input them into my banking app anyway). Some vendors take checks and deposit them later, some take checks and process them immediately, etc.

People respond to incentives though. If merchants charge the same regardless of payment method, I'm going to use a rewards card that costs them more. When they add a line item credit charge, I'll consider cash or debit.

All business costs are either paid for by the VCs or the customer. Even the VCs end up getting paid by the customers in the end.

OP wasn’t defending VISA policies, they were just realistically describing how taking on CC circuits with this premise is a risky approach that tries to fix a problem potential customers don’t have. What you are saying is in a completely different domain. Personally I think you’re right, but the only way to solve that is regulating the payment giants as a public utility, not picking a fight against a business model that is a lot of things, but not broken.

Decision makers and regulators have been bribed in many places.

EU has actually solved this with interchange fees for consumers being 0.3% which to me sound reasonably close to that 0.1%.

Credit cards are a huge benefit to customers because of purchase protection, chargebacks, and being able to spend money before you earn it that month. The merchants pay the fees because it gets them sales they wouldn't otherwise get.

It might be one motivation, doesn’t mean it’s a good one as per the original comment if consumers don’t care.

It sounds like all merchants in the US have been able to offer lower cash prices for over 10 years now. I rarely see it though.

It isn't - using cards, with fees, is cheaper than cash. I realized that when shops started to refuse cash (even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash). The argument? Cash is too expensive.

That’s an acceptable fee for the consumer protections I receive.

I do not think most people are even slightly familiar with what transpired this year with regard to stablecoins. The biggest players that move money are going forward with it. This means Amazon, Walmart, and numerous other big players. They don't like paying credit card companies, and why should they. It's going to be a game changer.

Mostly because it is still innovated upon. Async payments (offline receival) and trampoline payments are in the pipeline, allowing true self-custodial wallets on the smartphone.

That aside, I only use lightning with my Bitcoin-friends to settle stuff for fun. I live in a city of 300k people, and there are 3 restaurants that accept Lightning payments. Right now it is in its infancy, but I see Lightning as the only solution to actually enable web micro-payments (which failed as a standard because no credit card can provide .10 to .20 cent payments due to high fees)

Living in the UK, I didn't realise rewards were such a big deal in the US. I'm shocked at the resistance though, to me,, its a no brainer to just be charged less in the first place rather than have to keep track of some silly reward system to get back the extra money that they charged me. It's the same reason I prefer Aldi to all the other supermarkets, that make me keep track of some silly reward scheme, plus use my data to sell me more stuff to boot.

The problem of paying 1-3% of every purchase to credit card companies, causing everything to cost 1-3% more.

To duopoly exploiting customers? Europe knocked down transfer fees to 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit card. All fees for the merchant sum up to something around 1%. So anything on top of that, that Visa customers pay in US is pure exploitation. And US government isn't doing anything so people see alternate solutions for this problem.