My question is: How does the average Jane and Joe benefits compared to Debit and Credit Cards? Privacy, they do not care. Being anonymous, they do not care.
So a dead initiative?
So a dead initiative?
So not replacing MasterCard/Visa especially as that requires a lot to be able to accept payments.
Young people in particular care way more about privacy that us older people. In fact, young people feel way more anxiety around things that are tied to your identity.
But even despite them, I feel like even in my extended family privacy issues are increasingly very important to people. Everybody knows somebody who has been scammed.. even lost a great amount of money.
Your average user is caring more and more about security and privacy.
Re: being anonymous, I don't know. I suspect the anonymity part is more related to privacy for most people.
The other benefits of this of course is that you can make your own payment system and integration, and you won't need to be dependent upon VISA/Mastercard for your payments. Cheaper transaction fees ultimately helps lower product prices, enables microtransactions and more - I wouldn't discount how much of a big deal this would be.
I'm sure once they've finalized the whole thing, Misa/Vastercard will have employed their lobbying powers to the fullest to inject themselves into the final spec, but here's hoping.
I know at least one person employed in banking who thinks it’s insane that Visa and Mastercard get a 2% cut of any transaction.
They don't. In the EU, the intercharge fees is capped at 0.3%. Even in the US they only keep a fraction of the fees, the rest goes to card issuers.
Now, would they swap cash this solution? I doubt it... Privacy is a reason but not the only one.
I have a strong memory of going to a cafe next to my hotel in Berlin and ordering a coffee and being completely shocked I couldn't pay for it by card. I hadn't even considered that I might need cash. After some conversation the nice lady in the cafe told me keep the coffee and to come back the next day with the cash. They really hate card payments for some reason.
On the other hand in Poland I've been unable to use my card in a couple of places because they only take mobile payments/Blik. The contrast is wild.
Cash only is not really about card fees...
Edit: yes I am familiar with the various 'sending money to people' systems in Europe, but they don't rely on a debit card for the most part, rather, your bank account
What do these 'sending money to people' systems do more than that?
To buy something online using blik your bank's app generates a 6 digit one time code which is valid for something like 2 minutes. You enter that on the website of whoever you're trying to pay rather than give them your card number and cvv. This is nice because in addition to being a lot shorter to enter than a card number a nefarious person can't reuse the code to perform more transactions at a later date (since they don't have your card number).
The phone number is an id into the bilk system.
With bank transfers both parties do not need to be register with an app they just use the id that they have already for other reasons the bank sort code and id. So needs less extra infrastructure but the user interface is more unfriendly (people don't remember their bank account number).
Now if banks linked your phone number to the account number and sort code.....
There is no separate app for blik (at least as far as I'm aware) the functionality is integrated into my bank's app.
I do know why it is not in US as giving bank account details to others allows other to withdraw from your account.
This is not true in the UK so why no similar system here?
As a former resident of the UK my feeling is that the lack of such system there is because most bank apps have traditionally been shit. Its probably better today but back in 2015 (when Blik launched) I would not have expected to do anything useful with my bank's app.
For something like blik to work well you need every participating bank to already have a decent mobile banking app and for them to be willing to put in some time/money into integrating the new functionality with that app. Blik started because a bunch of the biggest Polish banks got together and between them founded a company to launch the service. Its really hard for me to imagine the 6 biggest banks in the UK getting together and doing that.
Poland's banking industry also skipped a bunch of "cruft" that we have in the UK because it started after we'd already progressed past those things being relevant. My Polish bank card doesn't have a "sort code" to identify my home branch (because who the hell cares about that in 2024), Poland briefly had cheques but stopped having them in 2006 because everyone was already using cards. In tech-industry terms the UK banking system has a bunch of "technical debt" it has to work around.
But the bank never had any branches and was phone only from the mid 1980s and then had a web front end I think in the 90s.
Thus they knew what people needed before they wrote the app.
My bank is First Direct - which is owned by HSBC.
However the website functionality was always better than HSBCs 9I do have an HSBC account as well)
not to mention online micropayments such as donations which could allow people to just send 1 dollar without fear of fees taking up most of it
Credit cards are terrible. One has to share a few secret numbers with the merchant and the merchant then takes money out of the cards account. It relies on fully trusting every single merchant to have perfect honestly and security.
Plus credit cards have a transaction cost that is paid to foreign companies. It’s quite ridiculous that a Dutch person buying online in Germany ends up paying a tiny transaction cost to a third country.