This is a very US-centric take. In the UK, EU and Australia, interchange rates are capped at more like 0.2/0.3%.
In the U.S., many credit cards bundle short term credit, rewards, travel benefits, insurance etc. This bundling is why merchants can pay up to 2-3% in fees.
The payment clearance and settlement parts are much cheaper. That's why many countries are able to build domestic payment rails (e.g. Pix in Brazil) that process transactions at low cost.
Government doesn't always mean worse.
Certain individuals, such as Susan Collins and Tom Davis, who were the largest names behind the 2006 law to force this on the USPS, were clearly doing it in an attempt to make the USPS fail/become less competitive. PACs affiliated with FedEx, UPS, etc gave more than $192,000 to Collins’s campaign / PAC from 2000 to 2004. FedEx’s PAC has given Collins more donations than any other congressional candidate in that PAC's history.
There is a huge chain of evidence suggesting members of congress don't want the USPS to succeed due to self interest.
Tangent, having lived in 5 states, the USPS workers have always been nice and courteous, even when there are lines out the door during the tax season. And in general, like DMV or other licensing agencies.
Which I'm hoping will find its way back to our wallets but which I doubt will happen
Why do we need my bank to send money to your bank via Visa or the Federal Reserve or any such thing, instead of having my bank send money directly to your bank? All they need to do is both support the same openly specified protocol for transferring money.
From NETs in singapore to girocard in Germany, Alipay to UPI.
Singaporean here. NETS is a shitshow of a dinosaur trying to stay relevant. They started as more of a debit card system like EFTPOS [1], but now lean more into merchant acceptance for both credit cards and QR codes. (Singapore is huge about credit card rewards, so few people want to use a debit card with PIN entry and no rewards these days.)
I think the problem with them, and many companies that focus solely on a tiny market like Singapore, is that their organisations tend to be full of comfortable dinosaurs that don't stay up to date with financial software engineering practices (I've lost money from government site transactions that were a hassle to get back), and there's a captive market because of their duopoly.
The biggest reasons they still exist are because they're a joint venture between the big 3 local banks, and our government likes their initiatives to have some competition to emulate a free market.
Pix, from its Wikipedia page, sounds like a bank account aliasing system, just like PayNow in Singapore.
It's not something irreplaceable but it's not trivial either.
It seems like the primary thing they actually do is currency conversion, which a) isn't strictly required (e.g. plenty of small US merchants might hardly notice if they only accepted payment in US dollars), and b) could just as easily be transparently provided as an optional service by either of the card issuing bank or the merchant bank for cardholders or merchants who expect a non-trivial number of foreign currency transactions.