alt Hacker NewsSince when were payment networks latency sensitive? It’s usually 2 or more seconds to even get a payment up on the card terminal from the merchant POST system, then 2-5 seconds more from card presentation to getting approval back.
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>Since when were payment networks latency sensitive?
Apple Pay is extremely fast from my experience (at least the web version). There is a high percentage of market loss if payments take long or fail. Im sure there must be a graph for where it plateaus with diminishing returns when it comes to speed but faster payments definitely help with sales.
> Since when were payment networks latency sensitive?
Since the advent of e-commerce, POS-networking and fraud detection systems in 1990's-2000's.
User-facing and authorisation path are highly latency sensitive. It includes tap-to-pay, online checkout, issuer authorisation, fraud decisioning, and instant payment confirmation – even moreso for EFT payments.
> […] 2-5 seconds more from card presentation to getting approval back.
This is the mid-1990's level QoS when smaller merchants connected the acquirer bank via a modem connection, and larger ones via ISDN.
Today, payments are nearly instant in most cases, with longer than one-second card payment flows falling into the exceptions territory or inadequate condition of the payment infrastructure.
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I’m fairly certain that’s a POS issue, not the payment network.
I’ve heard anecdotally that it’s < 140 ms for payment networks.
Anyone, please correct me if you know better.