Don't FedNow payments come directly from your bank account, like a debit card? Credit charges have the advantage of protecting you from fraud - the money is still in your hands; you don't have to fight to get it back.
I've run a SaaS in the past. About 10% of all US customers were cc fraud, by far the worst rate by country in my data.
I've lost about ~7 dollars on any transaction that went through and then got refunded. I never had any fraud issues with any other payment method.
For me accepting credit card was a pain and costly, but you are telling me for customers this is painless?
My solution for property taxes has been to just set billpay every year to send them a check at the expected intervals.
Precisely why credit cards are a hidden parasite on overall economic activity. They incentivize customers to use to get rewards and then take a ~4% cut of the payment from the merchant. So that's why merchants charge you extra fee they need to make up that 4% cost somewhere and it's either fees or raising prices even though you might not realize it.
For your local purchases with trusted entities, you can still use cash.
It also goes the other way. Go and try to purchase something from any business on credit when you don't have the money right now. They will always say no, even if you've been shopping there for decades. Visa and MasterCard always say yes.
People love to rail against the CC companies, but if you actually clear your mind and think about it, their payment systems are incredible.
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/22/fednow-instant-payments-cre...
> Interchange fees — the swipe fees paid by merchants when customers pay by credit card — reached $100 billion in 2022, per Matt Schulz of Lending Tree. That's more than $800 per household.
> In a world where goods cost the same regardless of how they're paid for, it's entirely rational for consumers to pay with credit cards and then collect their kickbacks.
> There's no particular reason why this kind of financial intermediation should be a $100 billion industry, rife with inefficiencies.
> "The shift to instant payments is inevitable," writes TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg in a research note, "though it will take time."
(work at a fintech payments-adjacent, thoughts and opinions are my own)
You mention BNPL, but those systems AFAIK are much worse for the merchants, with very high fees. I'm not sure I understood the insurance per purchase part, but if the vendor is going to scam you, he for sure is going to scam you on the insurance as well. Who sells this insurance and how?
> There's no particular reason why this kind of financial intermediation should be a $100 billion industry, rife with inefficiencies.
What are the inefficiencies really? As a customer, paying by card deducts the money from my bank account instantly. As a merchant, card sales are paid into my bank account the next day.
> You can extend credit instantly to someone with a deposit account like you would with a credit card (with the "overdraft" being the issued credit, lots of ways to skin the UX around this).
I apologize, but I didn't understand this part. How will the merchant instantly open an account for a customer? How would this be as fast, secure and convenient as swiping a card?