alt Hacker NewsVisaNet & 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-Commis...
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Yes. 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.
It seems Visa revenue is $40B/year. You shouldn't compare that to the amount of economic activity they enable - you should compare it to how much it could cost to run a system like theirs.
The 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.
> VisaNet & friends make the modern consumer world go round.
I mean, as opposed to what? You could apply this to any infrastructure cartel like with AT&T in the 90s or Comcast or 100s of historical examples. The alternative to a bridge troll is not ”no bridge”.
Well, in Germany the "girocard", the local card network, is the most popular form of payment. So I guess, citation needed?
You 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.