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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

The best players to disrupt Visa Mastercard duopoly would rather be a consortium of payment processors such as Shopify / Stripe / Google Pay / Apple Pay and banks taking in sandwhich Visa and Mastercard (where the money is stored, where the money is spent)

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Stripe has pay-by-bank they are pushing with Stripe Link, by making it users’ default payment method. They get terrible conversion, though if they could it would make them massively profitable. Shopify has ShopPay which means they take home a good portion of the fee on every transaction.

Apple Pay takes a higher cut on payments than Visa does (.15% vs .14%). They don’t bother with pay by bank, though, probably because of the underwriting.

All of these companies ARE competing on payments

Pix, UPI, etc have definitively shown that Governments are the best players to disrupt the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.

There might be survivorship bias here. One could also argue that Governments are the best players to get and maintain a monopoly or duopoly (:

Well, that's definitely true, and it's also how the MasterCard and Visa monopoly remains dominant. Just look at the extreme backlash of Trump's administration against the Brazilian Central Bank's plans to sell the Pix protocol abroad.

There’s a geopolitical reason for this. Ability to print a world reserve currency and apply sanctions to control capital flow are among the primary tools of American power.

Yes, I'm aware. The dominance of the dollar and the US financial services corporations is no accident.

This further reinforces that it's a government that's maintaining the Visa/Mastercard duopoly and it will be governments that break it.

I agree, and I hope initiatives like the Digital Euro [0] will have success soon.

[0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

I do not think that it will fix these issues, but I gurantee you that in this present box some additional things will be brought to you ;-)

Would not the best stakeholder to have on your side be companies like clover or toast, aside from ecommerce? I think the most concrete foothold one could have is brick-and-mortar POS acceptance, and now that places don't have to run their own registers this is probably easier than ever to push out to the masses.

I'm hoping steam builds their own.

They could probably make decent money with card graphics. I'd probably pay a couple bucks for a Gaben or an R6Siege card. Much more interesting than metal cards.

My previous bank already offered this: for 5 bucks extra you could get your own image printer on your debit card. They are one of the most popular banks around here, yet I rarely see anyone with one.

I've seen it as well, but for me, it'd be better to have premade images, and Valve can make images that interest me and aren't too cringe.

It's not a massive business, but it's probably good side money since many banks offer it. It probably costs 5 cents to print on it, and you can easily get me to give you 2$ for it. Up to 5$ if I really like it or you catch me in a moment of weakness at 2 AM.

And they can probably try to make it a big business. They managed to get people to spend stupid money on skins, levelling Steam accounts, etc, so there are probably whales who'd collect cards. For example, if you get a special card skin unlock once you 100% a game, or you just add rarity to them. The chances aren't huge IMO, but I'd have never guessed people would pay the money they pay for skins and levels anyway, so..

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