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Comment by lhl | Hacker News Reader

I think it's about equal for utility - Japanese Suica/Pasmo cards are also usable in every single konbini, at all the stations stores, across most regional transportation and taxis, and at maybe half of Tokyo shops/restaurants (it's a default option in AirPay and other PoS systems). A lot of vending machines accept Suica, and I use it at grocery or drug stores. You can even use it at some other types of shops like Bic Camera, although for high ticket items you're going to hit the Suica balance limits... https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/suicamoney/shop.html

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Most, but not all. Wikipedia has a hideously convoluted diagram showing the complex web of interoperability or lack thereof:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...

The complexity is largely limited to monthly passes at this point, as far as I understand. Per the diagram (and my, very limited, personal experience), stored-value rides are supported across most systems, as there is a shared set of keys and station identifiers.

The funny thing about Japan is they have this wonderful universal IC card, but not everywhere accepts it, some accept only it, some only accept cash, some only cash or physical credit card, some only QR (PayPay), so you end up needing to carry several methods, and one of them is paper and coins!

It's amazingly fractured actually. In my home country every store pretty much has the same exact model of a card reader that takes all contacless payments and credit cards with chips. In Japan it's a coinflip wether a credit card reader can take contactless credit cards. And if you do it with the chip, it's always a fun process of the clerk not understanding you need to insert a pin or select a currency, so they sometimes abort the process in confusion.

Needless to say, I prefer to use cash in Japan.

Variety is good! The fact the USA only has Mastercard and Visa and that they've colluded to keep all other forms of payments out is why their fees aren't lower.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

Japan has competition in payment systems. Paypay, D-Pay, Meri-pay, Line Pay, Rakuten Pay, etc... Each tries to entice both customers and retailers by offering discounts and bonuses.

Also I'm happy to pay cash as it's private.

USA has Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx. Each of which try to entice their customers by offering better rewards programs. Though AmEx isn't taken everywhere (notably Costco) and Discover is hit and miss as well.

It's funny, because the Costco credit card used to be AmEx. IIRC Costco Canada only takes Mastercard, which is funny since the US Costco credit card is Visa, so you can't use the US Costco CC to pay in a Canadian Costco.

You actually can use the Costco US Visa at Canadian Costco, they’ve got a special exemption for it. (And vice-versa, you can use the Canadian Costco Mastercard at American Costco.)

Japan has all of those as well and about 30 more

The rewards programs are the anti-competitive lock-in.

Visa and Mastercard charge high fees because their dominant market position forces merchants to accept them. Then they use part of the fees to bribe customers with rewards programs.

A new payment network doesn't have leverage against merchants so can't charge the same high fees and therefore can't offer the same rewards programs, but then they can't get consumers to use their card, which is what they would need in order to get any leverage.

The rewards programs are a grift. The price of everything goes up by 3% and if you get a rewards card you get 1-2% of it back, therefore you get one. Then you're still out the other 1-2% you wouldn't have been if the market was competitive, the people who don't get one get punished by being out the entire 3% (which inhibits competitors with lower fees), and Visa and Mastercard suck billions of dollars out of the economy into their Scrooge McDuck money bin because consumers have been defrauded into thinking this arrangement is to their advantage.

This is a great argument for forcing network interop. Akin to net neutrality, allow card companies to transit over the network for reasonable rates. This removes any networks ability to squeeze things like this

It depends where the division is, I guess. It always feels a bit heavy-handed to force private companies to interoperate within their infrastructure. That being said, I don't really know a better way to do it.

Having terminals be more universal would be good, but good luck replacing old ones and convincing entrenched market participants to offer them..

The newer generation of products like BNPL are even worse; they often contractually prevent merchants from charging a surcharge commensurate with the cost of accepting that payment method.

Even being aware of all that, I don't feel I've been defrauded. I don't have to carry around a wad of cash that can be lost or stolen, and on the rare occasions that I need to I can get the help of the credit card company in recovering money when I actually get defrauded.

None of those things have anything to do with interchange fees or rewards programs.

The majority of the fees go to the issuing bank (as the entity providing credit), not the card network.

It's the card network using their excessive leverage as a result of a lack of competition that allows the issuing bank to charge such high fees. Because if you accept Visa, you have to accept every Visa.

Australia was the first country to widely support chip/pin and then tap/pay.

Even here cash is coming back into vogue as costs are pushing small businesses to evade taxes.

I was in Tokyo last week and it was similar businesses i.e. mostly smaller and in lower margin industries.

>Australia was the first country to widely support chip/pin

Do you have any source on that? I find it rather surprising.

I don’t know if it’s that surprising. It’s easy to migrate over small markets and the population of Australia is extremely geographically concentrated.

Australia wasn’t the first, but it did have the second highest adoption rate of contactless payments in the world at one point, behind New Zealand.

In Australia, it helped that there were only about five POS acquirers of note (the big four banks plus Tyro), who owned pretty much all the terminal hardware.

On my shotengai there are many cash only shops and some cashless shops right next to it. I've also seen a lot of shops that are cash except for PayPay (presumably incentivized, or maybe they can support it without additional hardware). While it's a bit annoying, it's still better than the alternative (payment monopolies). The only thing that does irk me a little is that JR stations only support swipe, not touch pay for credit cards. I'm a bit undecided if that's just due to legacy hardware or as a subtle nudge to get people to use Suica instead.

For Japanese payments, what's far worse is that so many shops and chains continue to have point systems that require their own point cards (and even the ones with apps seem to have awful slow UIs, at least on my iPhone).

I seem to have managed to live in the only place in Japan where you can’t use suica/pasmo for transport: Tokushima. Still works in convini though.

Tokushima Bus is apparently introducing IC card support next year.

You can even use them at international chains like Starbucks, IKEA, and McDonalds.

Thailand and Malaysia also do this (not sure about IKEA, but definitely McDonalds and konbini, and probably Starbucks too)

In Istanbul I think you can use the transport card to pay in some supermarkets, and of course it works on all transportation modes, including ferries. (As an aside, they also have a QR-code based system specifically for restaurants, which I think is used mainly by companies looking to compensate their workers lunches, but you can also use it in Ininal app to get a discount)

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