alt Hacker NewsWouldn't high fees be competitive? A lot of incentive to compete there. Anticompetitive would be setting the fees too low to compete with.
I guess the point being there is probably a better reason for the high fees than the company trying to be anticompetitive, Or perhaps better said as a better reason for being anti competitive than high fees. Monopolistic lock in? Regulatory Capture? The problem is, that this blames the government instead of the company.
Replies
>Wouldn't high fees be competitive? A lot of incentive to compete there. Anticompetitive would be setting the fees too low to compete with.
Canada has a debit card network called Interac. Last I checked, the transaction fee was typically a flat $0.10 CAD (~$0.075 USD). There are shops that do debit or cash only, but it's not the norm (typically restaurants and niches with high chargeback risks). I am curious what keeps credit card acceptance high in Canada, despite a very widespread mature card network. I assume part of it is that consumer debt increases spending volume overall, but that can't be the primary reason I feel.
I mildly investigated this as it is clear merchants want to get out from under the thumb of CC companies, so they would probably be a helpful ally.
However, starting up a credit card company from scratch is, extremely capital intensive, extremely bureaucratically heavy, and all the helpful finance players are in bed with or are the institutions you would be upending.
Merchants would probably help, but inevitably would take ownership and steer the ship into their harbor (not consumers). A system where merchants own the payment system would probably be even worse.
>The problem is, that this blames the government instead of the company.
Both are true though right? The company needs to be held accountable for price collusion by the government. Government not acting due to lobbying (i.e. bribes).
The way these deals are structured (including things like requiring a merchant to accept all cards), the business accepting the card cannot use price (or anything else, really) to signal to the person picking which card to use. The incentives are all from the issuer to the consumer in the form of various kickbacks.
This means that the issuer can manipulate the consumer into doing things bad for the business, and the business has no way to respond to the very high fees it is charged.
You've got it backwards, their anti-competitive practices is what allows them to charge such high fees:
> A class action lawsuit alleges Visa, Mastercard and some of America's largest banks have conspired to artificially inflate merchants' credit card transaction fees.
If they didn't conspire together and actually competed then they wouldn't be able to charge such high fees as they would surely try to undercut each other.