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What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
- hungryhobbit 7d agoThey tax our entire economy at X rate, while maintaining their infrastructure only requires Y cost ... and X is significantly higher than Y. From the actual article: > The payment processor keeps 0.35% ($0.35), then pays 2% ($2.00) to the cardholder’s issuing bank and 0.15% ($0.15) to Visa. The 2% is the interchange fee, commonly known as interchange. The 0.15% is the network assessment fee. 8 In other words, they get 0.35% of every transaction ... and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network.
- superxpro12 7d agomiddlemanning is the most american of business ventures
- einpoklum 7d agoI thought that title belonged to bombing campaigns and coups by shady guerilla groups.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- gloryjulio 7d ago> and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network. If it's so easy to disrupt visa/mastercard payment network, they wouldn't be able to charge this much. Payment is a highly competitive business. We witnessed so many payment companies went under or were bought out, but these two stay for years and are still profitable. The truth is their moat is considered very durable and hard to build. A global n banks to n banks payment network is not as simple as how people thought.
- cassiogo 7d ago> If it's so easy to disrupt visa/mastercard payment network, they wouldn't be able to charge this much If they have the US government behind them its much easier https://thepaypers.com/payments/expert-views/pix-hits-a-wall-trump-administrations-opposition-to-its-us-expansion https://thepaypers.com/payments/expert-views/pix-hits-a-wall...
- Aspos 7d agoIf someone owned all the highways, building an alternative would be difficult as well.
- carlosjobim 7d agoVisa and Mastercard do not own the internet cables or the wavelengths. Anybody is free to compete, and that's why they have many competitors. It is very common for businesses to accept a variety of unrelated payment methods. There is no monopoly here.
- warkdarrior 7d agoWhy hasn't Alipay completely replaced Visa and Mastercard in US? Everyone has a smartphone to scan a QR code.
- Aspos 7d agoI struggle to understand how is this relevant. Alipay is closer to paypal than to VISA/MC
- notpushkin 7d agoAlipay the wallet app is closer to PayPal. But they also have Alipay+ which connects a lot of different wallets and banks: https://www.alipayplus.com/mobile-payment-provider-list/ https://www.alipayplus.com/mobile-payment-provider-list/
- 8note 7d agohave you not seen what happened to tiktok?
- UltraSane 7d agoCredit card companies are mostly parasitic middle men but I have a credit card that I use for most payments and pay off the balance every month and effectively get 2% cashback with no interest costs.
- losteric 7d agoThe actual rates charged to merchants are variable, and typically higher for rewards/cashback cards. Basically, other people are subsidizing cards with higher benefits/cash back (of course as people shift, the merchant raises prices to compensate for the higher average fee, or just charge an additional Z% higher than your cash back)
- warkdarrior 7d ago> other people are subsidizing cards with higher benefits/cash back Ripping off other people is the American way.
- tialaramex 7d agoThat 0.35% feels more reasonable in 1976 or even maybe 2001 than it does today because technology changed so much. But maybe I'm wrong about that If you're an American that 2% is a much bigger problem for your society. That's a direct funnel from the poor to the wealthy, it's not as a obvious a problem as "Trump gave the ultra-rich a tax cut" but it might structurally be more significant.
- tonymet 7d agoGoods (and services) are priced at what the customer is willing to pay. In this case, the alternative is cash or cheques, both have much higher loss rates. That’s why vendors are eager to take visa over cash.
- hgomersall 7d agoNo, the alternatives are any number of other solutions that are not given a look-in to the very lucrative duopoly. The network effects are prohibitive for upstarts.
- tonymet 7d agoCan you give an example ?
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- techdmn 7d agoI remember reading a comment here a while back about merchants being offered a discount on the processing fee if they also transmitted detailed data about the purchase (essentially the data that would be on the receipt). That data could then be resold on to advertisers. Does anyone remember this or have links to more data? (Not having much luck with search, maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing.)
- mikeweiss 7d agoI would love if it was transmitted to the bank for my own use so I can easily remember what I purchased or run budgeting software against it! Obviously wouldn't be excited about it being resold tho.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- ctkhn 7d agoIt's crazy it is resold but we don't even get it for our own use. Budgeting with credit card statements would instantly become so much more useful with less effort.
- kccqzy 7d agoIt does, at least in some cases. When I book flights directly from an airline, the bank knows the name of the passenger, the date of the flight, the origin and destination airports, as well as the cabin class. For one bank (Chase), the information is printed on the statements; for another they have a web lookup tool.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- collabs 7d agoIn my opinion, the only solution is everyone (individuals as well as corporations) gets a direct account with the federal reserve as long as you can associate a taxpayer identification with the account. Using it is voluntary but it is free of cost, paid for by taxes, and moving money to and from accounts is free of cost. Depositors would get the same overnight interest rate that banks do, and this interest is added every day. I think if we could make this happen, the chokehold of Mastercard and Visa can be greatly diminished. The disintermediation of commercial banks, the loss of credit card perks, and the added cost of customer service should be an acceptable cost of removing the parasites visa and master card from our economy. most importantly, this opens up a lot of money that the federal reserve can hold directly, something that will become more and more important as bond yields go sky high.
- Bratmon 7d agoHow are chargebacks resolved in this situation? This is an important question- most of the costs of a credit card providers come from dealing with fraud and chargebacks. That's partially because, under US law, credit card companies have to eat fraudulent charges if they can't get the person or company that did the fraud to do so. (Funnily enough, this is one of two places where protections for average people in the US are significantly better than protections for average people in Europe). But credit card companies can keep their costs low by making a business decision not to renew the accounts of frequent chargeback-ers or chargeback-ees (even if they never officially found those individuals at fault). If the government had to make a payment system for everyone and take on all responsibility for all fraud, that would create an incentive with massive second-order effects.
- toomuchtodo 7d agoCustomers can pay the credit card fee to get their chargeback insurance, if they choose, while others who can pay with cheaper instant payment rails can opt out. This is trivial with merchants able to surcharge credit card payments, as many merchants are starting to do (US mobile phone companies, US internet providers, Meta ad purchases, restaurants, etc).
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- kburman 7d ago[deleted]
- nosioptar 7d agoThe answer to that is to "donate" to about 270 congress critters. Buying 5 motorhomes for supreme court members could work too.
- 9cb14c1ec0 7d ago> The answer to that is to "donate" to about 270 congress critters. Not too far off. You gotta ask why such a lucrative business has a near monopoly, and the answer is not that potential competitors don't notice their profit margin.
- tonymet 7d agoDon’t forget arbitrage, which is the withholding of transferred funds for 7 days while the capital remains in visa’s accounts for “investing” / speculation. It’s like if you gave your buddy $100 to give to his room mate, and he decides to wait a week and gamble it on Kalshi
- nonethewiser 7d ago>It’s like if you gave your buddy $100 to give to his room mate, and he decides to wait a week and gamble it on Kalshi Or treasuries. Its actually a minor part of rheir business. And frankly who cares given that its a sustainable system. I pay on credit and then someone else pays. I dont give a shit of they are betting on how many times Al Roker says Trump on New Years Eve.
- tonymet 7d agoThe merchants , who need that cash flow
- throw1234567891 7d agoYou better don't look into how banks make money on your savings.
- erfgh 7d agoYou better don't look into how banks created your savings by creating loans that were used to invest into companies and thus pay salaries.
- throw1234567891 6d agoI looked. I know. It's not me who is surprised.
- 1970-01-01 7d ago>The merchant pays 2.5% The best way to pay for poor services already rendered and move on with life is to simply pay via card. Didn't like that haircut? Terrible food at the restaurant? Hold onto your cash and slip them the card.
- tonymet 7d agoJokes on you. Merchants prefer credit cards because there is less loss than cash. 2.5% is nothing compared to 5-10% loss at the register. Plus easier and more accurate accounting.
- 1970-01-01 7d agoIf you're expecting 10% loss at the register and have terrible service, that's a 1-2 punch for bankruptcy.
- aand16 7d ago90% of cash I give to restaurants goes in the pocket, not the register. Bad service = card always.
- nonethewiser 7d agoAre you saying servers keep 90% of what you pay? Tip and otherwise? What country? How do you know? How could a business possibly operate in this reality?
- dmoy 7d agoNot necessarily servers, just not into the register as a tracked transaction. Tax fraud, essentially. E.g. you go to the Minnesota State Fair, merchants may offer to not charge sales tax if you pay cash. It is shockingly brazen sometimes. > How could a business possibly operate in this reality? Extremely lax enforcement on the part of the specific US state's department of revenue
- Onavo 7d ago
- 3pm 7d ago> The issuing bank keeps 2% Is this why the best cash back credit cards give 2%?
- dmoy 7d agoUS Bank for a brief period opened up a 4% card, but then closed it so quick that obviously the numbers didn't work out there. 2% seems to be a local maximum of cashback cards. There's a lot of 2% cards, and only a handful above that. Makes sense?
- pverheggen 7d ago2% is just an example figure, the actual rate varies
- nonethewiser 7d agoIn the US. Not in Europe because interchange fees for consumer cards are capped at 0.3%
- fallingbananna 7d agoI've seen cards with 1% chargeback in the EU though. How does that work? And it wasn't just a temporary marketing promotion. I've used such a card for many years. (It was issues by a big bank that had almost no presence in my country... so maybe they were eating the cost just to build up a bigger presence and potentially enter the country?)
- w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 7d agoYes usually it's promotional.
- will_occam 7d agoYes that intuition is correct, though the reality is much more complicated. The actual share to the bank is roughly proportional to the risk of the transaction/ tied to the type of credit card https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-reimbursement-fees.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-in...
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- bob1029 7d agoVisaNet & friends make the modern consumer world go round. The fees they extract are a drop in the bucket compared to the economic activity that they enable with their networks. Many businesses simply couldn't exist without something approximating this. https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Commissioned-Study-Estimates-Migration-to-Electronic-Payments-Added-Nearly-300B-to-GDP-Across-70-Countries/default.aspx https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Commis...
- 9cb14c1ec0 7d agoYes. As a merchant it's pretty cool that the money just shows up and I don't have to chase down as much bad debt. The processing costs easily pay for themselves.
- kiririn7 7d agounfortunately those processing costs actually dont need to exist.(or atleast should be 10x smaller)
- 9cb14c1ec0 7d agoA lot of people would be really mad if their card rewards disappeared.
- pennomi 7d agoThe problem is not that the tech is bad, it’s that the industry is a cartel with no viable way to disrupt the established players.
- rednb 7d agoYou are literally linking to a page published by Visa's Investors Relations Department. The problem is that like all cartels, they hold progress back. Things could be even more efficient than the current state of affairs. For example we could have open standards with thousands of local players, much faster settlement times etc... There are also aspects such as the fact that due to this concentration of power, the whole world is subject to US sanctions, such that a EU citizen sanctioned by the US is effectively cut off from civilization.
- shevy-java 7d agoEuropeans really need to stop handing their money over to Trump-Visa and Trump-Card here. Canadians learned that lesson already. Why do european politicians not learn anything? Leyen even signed a surrender treaty where european taxpayers lose money that goes into the USA. I say stop it with the proxy-control from Washington.
- FabCH 7d agoEuropeans have alternative payment networks already. For example, CH has Twint. They are actively being unified into a cross-border payment network. Of all the things to complain, this is the one where they are actually doing something…
- toomuchtodo 7d agoDigital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647444 - June 2026 (376 comments) European Parliament committee backs digital euro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645468 - June 2026 (2 comments) Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415217 - June 2026 (235 comments) Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments) Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments) Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments) Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/ https://www.werotracker.eu/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
- ranguna 7d agoAs someone from an EU country: the only place where I use visa/MasterCard is at Amazon. Everything else I use my country's payment system, which is now joining with Italy's own and probably more in the coming years.
- ale 7d agoAside from the technical aspect I strongly encourage everyone to also read about VISA’s founder Dee Hock, still a very underrated figure in leadership and finance.
- losvedir 7d agoI play the credit card "game" because I hate feeling like I'm leaving money on the table, but I really wish I didn't have to. Some degrees of fees make sense, to run the network, and handle fraud, but it's ridiculous that people have this sense that shopping should somehow fund your vacation. Where I am it's increasingly common to see credit card fees when checking out. I get it, because merchants are being charged 3-5% of their total revenue. I wish there was a low fee credit card network that merchants didn't charge a fee for, so I could continue the simplicity of digital payments but opt out of this crazy Visa Infinite rewards accounting boondoggle.
- socalgal2 7d agoThey wouldn't be charged 3-5% if Visa and Mastercard weren't a duopoly. In countries where they aren't there are 10-20 competitors that charge way way less.
- ianhawes 7d agoThere is, it's called debit cards, but Stripe et al. "simplified" pricing by charging a percentage regardless of card type instead of the traditional interchange-plus pricing. Merchant banks "used to" make money by tacking on fixed fees, i.e. a set-up fee, terminal fee, monthly fee, etc, but then Stripe came along and provided (1) a better dev experience, (2) better onboarding, and (3) simplified pricing.
- jimbob45 7d agoYou have to wait for the investigation to complete to receive compensation if you’re hit by fraud on a debit card. Credit cards don’t share that issue. If you’re poor or living paycheck-to-paycheck, debit cards are potentially a risk to your livelihood.
- seabre 7d agoAs someone who has been hit with fraud on a debit card and a credit card, the process to recover money from fraud on a credit card is so much easier and more hassle-free than a debit card. The big difference is that with a debit card, it's your money that is hit by fraud. The debit card is basically just a proxy. You have to go file a police report. You have to hope the bank will give you the money back. When the credit card gets hit, it's the credit card company's money and they will seemingly chase the fraud to the ends of the earth to recover it.
- maelito 7d agoWell I don't really know what they do, but what I know is that Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €. All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way round ? This is an insane amount of money. They killed micro-transactions, they killed the business model of the Web in favor of ads, the only popular way to do microtransactions right now.
- thomasahle 7d agoThey charge you 23%? I thought in the EU the maximum interchange fee for consumer credit cards is capped at 0.3% of the transaction value.
- maelito 7d agoPlus fixed fees. I don't want to put responsability on anyone, I don't know who takes what in the chain, but I see the fees in practice. I took the cheapest PSP I could find in Europe... Stripe is way more expensive, taking 25 cents of fixed fee !
- fallingbananna 7d ago
- maelito 7d agoRelated : GNU Taler. You can apply to a fund to implement this system. https://nlnet.nl/taler/ https://nlnet.nl/taler/
- wuming2 7d agoHas the characteristics to implement the digital Euro. Plus guarantees anonymity of buyers. And should be extremely cheap to operate. But is not under bank’s control.
- TheGoodBarn 7d agoIf anyone is interested in this topic from a historical standpoint, the Acquired episode on Visa is phenomenal: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visa https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visa
- dzonga 7d agoin short they're TRUST networks. which is also why crypto bros get confused.
- montenegrohugo 7d agoSome light self-promotion but also longer term thoughts: A large part of the promise of crypto and stablecoins was to displace Visa and Mastercard rent-seeking. This didn't seem to happen. Most modern neobanks, our own included (https://peanut.me https://peanut.me), actually seem to EMBRACE Visa and Mastercard. Almost all offer an actual Fiat card within their app, instead of boldly saying "No, pay with crypto, the future of money!" This is somewhat disappointing in the short term, but longterm i believe it offers a clear transitory path to full decentralized money adoption. Already today we're seeing a growth in direct peer to peer payments in peanut, and merchants slowly starting to adopt it as well. I imagine the same is happening across the industry. In a competitive economy, the better currency (read: crypto, stablecoins) wins and eventually absorbs adoption. my 2 cents
- gwbas1c 7d agoThe problem is that bitcoin (and similar) are so computationally intense to run, that the transaction cost is much higher than Visa's. Furthermore, a currency needs a government (or similar kind of body) to manage its stability, by printing (and buying) money. Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin.
- simonmales 7d agoTrue on the main chain of Bitcoin. Bitcoin payments on the lightning network are not computationally intense.
- topranks 7d agoHahaha haven’t heard that one in a long time. Cracked me up.
- dfish 7d agoguy who doesn't know what peer-to-peer technology is, laughs at man who does! please stop using the internet! it might be slow and expensive to run! it requires insanely big cell towers and submarine cables! it won't scale!!11!! kind of guy
- mococa 7d agoIn brazil we have pix with 0 fees.
- missedthecue 7d agoBetween individuals it is free. For commercial transactions, there is a fee between 0.22% and 0.33% per transaction, which is actually ~2x the fee of the Visa network (0.13%)! Visa is extremely efficient at moving money anywhere in the world. Credit and debit card transactions have higher fees because unlike Pix, there is chargeback risk, and the the merchant and acquiring banks party to the transaction are compensated for the risk they assume in those transactions. Pix on the other hand is digital cash. When you spend it, it's gone. Unlike with chargebacks and disputes, there is no reliable mechanism to recover funds for goods not delivered.
- fallingbananna 7d agoI could imagine that Pix is still better for merchants if that is the final fee. With Visa and Mastercard there are usually many additional actors that also take their share and drive the final fee up.
- arifitworld 7d ago[flagged]
- hacker_88 7d agoNow try security of bitcoin
- 6thbit 7d agoIf AI becomes a true commodity do you think OpenRouter/Stripe will evolve into this type of network that visa/mastercard represent today?
- citizenpaul 7d agoCredit cards are the OG of rent seeking for the 21'st century. They recognized upfront that no one would pay their ridiculous middleman fees so they backdoor-ed the fee with the merchants and had them pass it on in price. Its on of the most insidious extraction engines ever made, Jesus would definitely flip their tables lol. Now they do all kinds of accounting tricks to pretend that they have thin profit margins because they split up every part of the business into hundreds of 1-3% chunks of the profit. To sidestep regulation that already barely exists.
- tflinton 7d agoNetworks like visa and Mastercard don’t seem evil. If you’ve ever had to dispute a charge and got your money back easily or relied on the fact that even if their computers are down they’ll still take the risk and allow you to take money out of your account you’d find the fees they charge pretty minimal. Now the issuer bank… that’s where most of the fee and why most banks now have reward cards because the issuing bank can ask for whatever additional fees on top of what visa/mastercard does.
- citizenpaul 6d agoHow does every form of evil have some sort of apologist on the internet. I was near certian that even before AI there were very active automated or low paid workers astroturfing for companies anytime malfeasance is brought to light. In the age of LLM's I now know for a fact that its happening. I guess I found one. OPERATING MARGIN (FY 2024 / 2025) Payment Networks: Visa Inc. (V) 67.2% Mastercard (MA) 57.8% Major Card Issuer Banks: JPMorgan Chase 33.5% Capital One (COF) 24.1% Bank of America (BAC)26.8%
- sanjeevverma1 7d agothis article doesn’t do a good job of simplifying. the vast majority of Visa’s revenue comes from one thing called the ISO 8601 / ISO 20022 message, which is the name for a Visa’s authorization. the core service is transmitting this message between an issuer (cardholder bank) and an acquirer (merchant bank). all other revenue streams are basically a microservice on top of this core message transmission service.
- LoganDark 7d agoISO 8601 is just a timestamp format. Surely Visa must be using timestamps internally, but that couldn't possibly be their service. ISO 20022 looks more like it.
- vavooom 7d agoI like the vibe and overall writing style of this blog! Keep up the short little segments. Charcoal Grill and Doing Things Ten Times are my favorites: * https://tautology.town/2026/02/14/learning-charcoal-grilling.html https://tautology.town/2026/02/14/learning-charcoal-grilling... * https://tautology.town/2026/04/03/ten-times.html https://tautology.town/2026/04/03/ten-times.html
- Jzuckerman 7d ago[flagged]
- kriskrunch 7d agoHow much do interchange fees increase prices in the US?
- cemoktra 7d agoAccurate summary. Had been working on issuing side for almost 5 years. Some of the issuing providers offer really good APIs, some of them are really bad. But overall the card networks are easier to implement than parsing banking data directly
- aa_is_op 7d agoTL,DR: They steal from businesses that take card payments with giant commissions. You're welcome!
- halilBB 7d ago[flagged]
- 1a527dd5 7d agoThere used to be an account on Twitter that was heavily involved in this industry. Every now and then I'd glean some slightly useful information from their posts. My favourite one being "the name verification isn't a thing - you can enter anything". So I've been doing that ever since and it's _always_ passed.
- chao- 7d agoAt least in the US, and as of a few years ago (when last I tested), address verification can also be a bit flaky. Zipcode/postalcode is solid, but street address matches don't reliably account for the various ways people can colloquially write them. It's not awful, just not good. We should re-test it some time, but as of a few years ago, street address checks were not a major improvement in fraud prevention compared to just Zipcode and CVV checks.
- mainde 7d agoAddress verification only ever checks the numbers in the address, nothing else. You can pretty much skip all the words that don't spell numbers and it should be the same iirc.
- potato-peeler 7d agoThat’s because there are more than 200 other parameters used for risk analysis during authentication. Worked in payments industry. Some banks don’t place high priority to name but some do.
- w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 7d agoThe Set rules and handle disputes chapter is really interesting.
- gatestone 7d agoI find this interesting as a technology, as a business process, and above all as a system for managing trust on a global scale across different jurisdictions. In a sense, the credit card system accomplishes something that even the UN, international law, Interpol and military mights cannot do: it enables individuals to enter into trustworthy global agreements with minimal effort and risk, and at very low transaction costs.
- carlosjobim 7d agoIt's simply incredible, when you look at it soberly - just as so many other things. But unfortunately many people have their minds in a spiritual prison and only know how to complain, without having any kind of perspective on the world.
- alwaysmrno 7d agoVisa and Mastercard are legacy companies providing a service that is outdated in the modern world. China generally doesn't use Credit cards because when they "Modernized" there was new technology and infrastructure so you didn't need a nosey middel-man to handle the transaction. Instead they use apps. Scandinavia is hopefully moving away from these card-providers soon. They have the bankaxept system that works flawlessly in their area and have started introducing Apps for payments and microtransactions. For some reason some of the apps require a debit-card, but i hope they will drop that requirement soon. I just hope these leeches on society will sone go bankrupt.
- perlgeek 7d agoJust came back from a vacation in Denmark and Norway, paid with debit card everywhere. Heck, paying with card is the default, if you do pay cash, the cashier sometimes has to cancel the card payment before accepting the cash.
- trymas 6d agoIn Sweden I saw Swish app QR codes everywhere. In every store, cafe, museums and even for donations (e.g. volunteers maintaining trails, independent museums, etc). I had no issue paying with a card everywhere, but it was interesting to see those QR codes everywhere. Though after spending 15min trying to set it up - I eventually made a conclusion that it’s impossible for non Swede (or someone without Swedish bank account and/or mobile phone number). Could be wrong, but did not delve more. Had to skip couple donations - as they only accepted Swish app.
- ThunderSizzle 7d agoWhat happens if you don't have a phone that supports the App, or if you forgot your phone or lost it (aka stolen)? How are you allowed to function if the App is missing?
- pjc50 7d agoYou also can't make a card purchase if your card is stolen ..
- refurb 7d agoThe error that people make when criticizing card fees on merchants is that customers pay the cost. That’s not necessarily true. There are benefits for merchants to accepting credit cards. More impulse buys, buying more per transaction. An owner may choose to absorb the merchant fee because the increase in sales (even at the lower profit per unit) means higher profits overall.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- mhw11 7d agoI used to use credit cards to save money, but they ended up making me spend more
- cute_boi 6d agoAnd, there are middleman like apply pay which takes 0.15%..... These things are getting out of hand.
- eMpHaSe 6d agoMy favorite fee is the "VISA Network Defense Fee". Fits into today's world situation...
- subset 6d agoIn Australia, the Reserve Bank is finally [banning surcharges](https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of-retail-payments-regulation/2026-03/conclusions-paper/faqs/ https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of...) from October 1st. We also have the EFTPOS network, but the payment rails change depending on the card payment method. Over the years, the "hidden fees" were accumulating, and card surcharges could hit 1-2.5%. Now, _most_ places don't have any fees (with some food places charging weekend surcharges and some egregious places adding unsolicited tips).
- cmoski 5d agoMaybe not for taxis unfortunately. That is determined by the states. They used to charge 10% card fee!