I thought you were going for direct bank to bank operations.
I think these are currently the most practical and promising way to get out of the credit card duopoly's influence. It is more onerous on KYC check, but that sounds like a smaller price than a paid service just not existing at all.
I imagine few banks are staffed and teched to replicate payment processors’ anti-fraud systems.
Baking it into the payment processing warps the whole situation.
Look at it from this angle: why is VISA or Stripe the arbiter of disputes between you and Netflix ? If Netflix made you pay a fee that is not part of your contract or you didn't initiate, you should be able to retrieve that money without asking a racket business to cover you.
And while banks handle fraud issues, arguably they shouldn't be the one reading your contracts and deciding how to interpret it. Some customer agency or small claims court should be more fitting ?
Perhaps you're in a place where that just wouldn't work, fair enough, but the issue should be on why you don't have these laws or institution, not why there's no private middle-men fixing the deals.
Anyone else will be slow/inefficient (courts) or biased (Me or Netflix).
I find it interesting to want speed in deciding who should get screwed in a transaction.
There are economic advantages in people giving around their payment information, but the social impacts (the very existence of Visa/Mastercard and their influence on businesses or prices) aren't worth it IMHO.
IMHO people should be responsible of how they handle the keys to their money, and better tools should be given to secure and manage that, instead of a Big Brother like middlemen.
I mean, you don't pay cash at a restaurant with a string stuck to your money so you can pull it back three months after, because arguing with the restaurant feels too inefficient.
Allowing customers to claw back money unilaterally opens the door for customers to make a purchase, receive the product, then fraudulently take their money back.
There needs to be a third party in the middle to determine if a chargeback is fraudulent. Chargeback fraud already exists, and what you're proposing makes the problem significantly worse.
In the US, this is effectively non-existent these days.
Best case, now rare, there isn’t an arbitration clause in the EULA, so you have individuals suing companies in small claims.
The problem there is scale.
A company can screw over a lot more people than people will spend time pushing back against a company. Because fundamentally, a company doesn’t give a shit about maintaining a relationship with an angry customer.
The benefit of using payment intermediaries to run arbitration is that the company does want to continue having a relationship with them and is therefore incentivized to care more about the case than they would otherwise.
Granted, there are a lot of ills from payment processors too! But waving a wand and suggesting bank to bank transfers alone fixes the issue is naive.
Paying with crypto is still not very usable but you can still do it directly which limits the degree of extortion that can be applied. I think it will get better as it ceases to be 'interesting' and people develop tools that just work rather than try to revolutionize your life.
You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.
I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:
The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.
Edit: typo.
But you're right about the outcome from this. Most people don't know the difference, were only exposed to the post-2015 scams, and just assume all cryptocurrency is a scam.
So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology?
Unless you're saying crypto created the problem at this scale and can do nothing to stop the problem it created...?
I think you have a misunderstanding of the technology.
Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?
And here we have a neat example of how this site, called "hacker news" of all things, can sometimes take on a absurdly idiotic hive-mind approach to some technology X where brainless hostility combines with laughable ignorance to reject something without knowing the first thing about it, even when the thing is emphatically a practical solution to a widely discussed problem.
(I hate to defend the crypto space. I don't want the crypto bros to win. I really hope it doesn't come that far and it's the only option left...)
But your basic thesis is correct, it's not apples-to-apples. Debit vs credit is a significant difference. Another major issue is that while the regulations for any one of the alternatives on my list aren't particularly onerous, I imagine the superset of all the regulations/contracts might well be.
All it takes is for RBI to say “This kind of content isn’t allowed” and you’d have the same effect. Here in the US, we didn’t build an IMPS like system until way too late in the game.
The fact they are so essential should give the nations all the leverage - "Your service has become too important to the function of our nation, so we are nationalizing your company and making it a public service."
Time to stop being afraid of doing that - if a private company is THAT important to the continuing functioning of your society, then that company has lost their right to be a private for profit business and needs to be nationalized, at least partially to keep them in check and make sure they are following the laws of the nations they operate in.
We, as societies, should have never allowed any corporation to become more powerful than their governments.
Such as different middlemen having their own agenda.
Since we don't actually need visa or mastercard, but they make it damn convenient to buy stuff.
Similarly blockchain got their equivalent of this.