alt Hacker News>in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments
That's not what the article says:
>High-income consumers with high FICO scores benefit the most from reward credit cards compared to mid- and low-income consumers with high FICO scores. At the lower end of the FICO distribution, however, this pattern is reversed. On average, net rewards are far more negative for high-income consumers with low FICO scores than for middle- and low-income consumers with low FICO scores.
>Or, to put that another way: if there is redistribution happening, it necessarily includes redistribution from unsophisticated high income customers to sophisticated low income customers.
While it's true that wealth customers with low FICO scores are getting hosed, it's not clear whether that is enough to cancel out the effect that richer people (presumably) have higher FICO scores on average
To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account.
The only way I can put these things together is that at the high FICO end, both wealthier and poorer consumers get hosed a lot but wealthier consumers not quite as much. On the other hand, lower FICO band doesn't get as bad of a deal overall but it is worse for wealther people (plausibly because they have high interchange fees and don't use their rewards).
It's complicated, but... this is not a wealth transfer right? It is a transfer mostly just from consumers to credit card companies that provide them a service.