The problem isn’t that they’re private, the problem is that there’s not many to choose from. Visa gets to throw their weight around, because they have a stranglehold on a huge swath of banks and businesses. MasterCard has another big chunk, and the rest go to AmEx and Discover.
If there were more providers to choose from, this would be a non-issue, but that wouldn’t be very capitalist (/s), and I doubt the big names would simply allow new competition.
The reason there’s so few is because people don’t want to have to figure out beforehand whether or not they can use the payment provider they have at the store they want to go to.
I’ve seen this happen multiple times especially in Japan when the barcode payment craze started. There were like 13 competing payment providers and now there are 2. Because people don’t want to have to carry around 13 different types of card or payment typed and have 13 different types of payments. They want one that works everywhere.
It’s why there needs to be sovereign digital payment systems that are legally enforced.
In Germany we uszally use Debit bank cards for payment (if something like a credit card isnt included).
The GiroCard is standard across all banks and usually every shop accepts that method.
Problem is: They don’t work on the interwebz.
Yeah, like what need is there for these intermediaries in the first place? I get that there was probably a need once upon a time, but that seems superfluous now
The problem isn’t that they’re private, the problem is that there’s not many to choose from. Visa gets to throw their weight around, because they have a stranglehold on a huge swath of banks and businesses. MasterCard has another big chunk, and the rest go to AmEx and Discover.
If there were more providers to choose from, this would be a non-issue, but that wouldn’t be very capitalist (/s), and I doubt the big names would simply allow new competition.
The reason there’s so few is because people don’t want to have to figure out beforehand whether or not they can use the payment provider they have at the store they want to go to.
I’ve seen this happen multiple times especially in Japan when the barcode payment craze started. There were like 13 competing payment providers and now there are 2. Because people don’t want to have to carry around 13 different types of card or payment typed and have 13 different types of payments. They want one that works everywhere.
It’s why there needs to be sovereign digital payment systems that are legally enforced.
In Germany we uszally use Debit bank cards for payment (if something like a credit card isnt included).
The GiroCard is standard across all banks and usually every shop accepts that method.
Problem is: They don’t work on the interwebz.
Yeah, like what need is there for these intermediaries in the first place? I get that there was probably a need once upon a time, but that seems superfluous now