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> I can't read the rest of the article but they mention the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard (and I guess Amex is the only other issuer?) causing a stagnation.

Diners Club is also a thing.

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Yes, but can you get a new Diners Club card in the US? When they last offered consumer cards it was just a co-branded MasterCard (which did have chip and pin, which was cool, but otherwise it was just a normal MasterCard)

And Discover, though those two are far less common than Visa/MC/AmEx.

Yep, although I'm interested to see what'll happen with card schemes if Open Banking in the UK/EU allows direct peer to peer payments.

These two are the same network now, so if a vendor accepts Discover, they accept Diners Club and vice versa. Discover bought out DC in 2008.

My understanding is it's pretty tough to compete with the big guys in this market because you need to build out a huge network of vendors who accept your card for it to be useful to customers.

I previously worked at a company that provided card payment terminals to merchants in the UK. IIRC around the time I was leaving Discover/DC were offering us financial incentives to support their scheme across our network of merchants.

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