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Comment by dlcarrier | Hacker News Reader

In the US, PayPal has nowhere near the adoption of other countries, for making payments directly between accounts, and Visa and Mastercard have enough regulatory capture to ensure it stays that way.

If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.

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With wechat in china, pix in south america and wero in europe, I think it's quite the opposite. All continents want to see visa and mastercard dead so they can bring back those transaction fees in house and it will work as the phone is the low friction payment method now.

Wero in the EU is fantastic, albeit still very young. Once it's mature and deployed everywhere, I see no reason to use something else in my country.

In fact, in France, the CB system endured despite visa and mastercard for 4 decades, so we know how to do it already.

A monopoly in a domestic market is sufficiently harmful to be avoided. It doesn’t have to be totally global.

>FedNow

There is no recourse if something goes wrong with FedNow, right? Like you get scammed, and the scammer just keeps the money. Seems like a pretty big difference (in theory anyway) to PayPal. Although I'm apparently not the right guy to ask, since I really don't see the use case for PayPal vs. credit card.

Regulation E applies to FedNow instant payments as it applies to payer recourse.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/navigating-...

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...

Only for unauthorized payments, i.e. for transactions you did not consent to.

This does not cover products/services not received at an online merchant, for example, just like how you can’t retroactively cancel a check. Cards do allow chargebacks in this situation.

What is the regulatory capture? Visa and master card have contract terms that ensure retail capture. That’s a private moat not regulation.

What’s stopping a new competitor to come in apart from regulations? You would expect someone already trying that given how profitable it is

The contracts with merchants prohibited them from accepting other forms of payment.

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

Yea, I think you have this one backward? it's lack of regulation that allows Mastercard and Visa to say "if you do try to use some other payment process you can't use us". Since MC and Visa own all of it, no business can take that hit to their customer base

Some other countries don't have this issue for various reasons.

Is it a US thing? In many countries there are definitely different payment systems accepted by merchants, just not card based and/or directly linked to a bank account.

Yes, it's US (and maybe EU?) thing.

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

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