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Comment by dozerly | Hacker News Reader

I’d be more than happy to use a secure, fraud-safe payment system that does not give me airline miles if it meant everything was cheaper to begin with. Part of the problem with CC companies is they do many things that are tightly coupled and are positioned well to profit on them.

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The problem is the ‘fraud safety’. Your ‘safety’ is likely to be some else’s inconvenience (or vice-versa), and credit cards are all about ease-of-use. Fraud-related costs are also one of, if not the largest single contributor(s) to payment processing fees.

Seems like payment processing would do well to be a public good instead of a for-profit venture to me.

FedNOW is open for public use and supported by a number of major banks, so it’s not clear what the additional thing you’re proposing here is.

Every level of my government has been defrauded of a significant amount of money (relative to their budget,) in the last five years; I do not support their losing more of my money to fraud.

Certainly, once you have a world government. Are you sure that a world government will be aligned with your interests in other areas than payment processing?

I'm certain that the payment processors aren't aligned with my interests!

Other countries solved this by doing payments in ways that fraudsters can't simulate, such as a cryptographic handshake with a chip on the card.

This doesn't help with payments which take place without a card present, such as online and phone payments, which make up a large (and growing) proportion of transactions.

QR codes go brrr with pretty much anything ftom ideal to domestic payment rails in each SEA country.

We should replace payments only requiring the number. Make it so they have to use some kind of on device verification like the banks app or Apple Pay. Keep providing the old system for legacy customers but charge a “fraud fee” while the more secure payments become cheaper.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Everyone else solved it at physical locations, that should at least be a baseline.

Europe actually solved this by simply legislating how much Visa/MC are allowed to charge.

(yes, Wero, Vipps etc, but Visa/MC are still huge in Europe)

I mean really, we do know what a solution to this is; the EU caps interchange fees, without much harm to the fraud settlement part of the network. Just the crazy points programs like Amex Platinum go away.

That really is the greatest achievement of card issuers and networks: Taking a huge cut on every payment and throwing scraps to cardholders while making them feel like they're landing a great deal (whether in the form of points or the ability to do chargebacks, which is actually a legal right, not industry goodwill!) or even "tricking the system".

> Fraud-related costs are also one of, if not the largest single contributor(s) to payment processing fees.

That's not true. Fraud (counting both prevention and losses) accounts for less than a quarter of issuers' interchange revenue: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/2023-interchan...

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