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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Most of the replies here are a great example of a filter bubble. Living in San Francisco or New York you just assume everyone has a credit card.

Not so.

A quarter of US households are unbanked or underbanked and primarily rely upon cash for payments.

That's why Walmart introduced shop online and pay in person. Only 15% of Walmart's in-store customers pay via card, from surveys they found that two-thirds of their online customers would prefer to pay in cash.

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That's actually quite interesting. It reminds me that Japan as a whole has very low credit card penetration as well, and the primary mode of transaction is cash, even for items costing hundreds of dollars (or tens of thousands of yen, to be precise). Use of 10,000 yen bills (~$100) is routine.

People still have latent mistrust for handing over credit card information online. Virtually all courier services have a "pay upon arrival" option which allows you to pay for the cost of the item + the shipping when you receive the item. The courier then pays the retailer for the item cost.

edit: It may also have to do with the fact that the financial services industry there is even more sales driven and more scammy than its U.S. counterpart, and hence the public has a mistrust for all financial "products" that are anything other than super conservative.

I remember building my first EC site in Japan. The payment processor gave us an API to use that included all the fancy options of paying at a convience store, COD, Bank Transfer and credit cards. It seemed really weird at first, but then I noticed how nice it was for people who did not have credit cards.

It was always fun to know that the payment notification handler on the server would get hit when someone goes to 7-11 and pays their bill.

I forget the percentage, but most orders were not using credit cards.

That's really quite interesting. Could you share the processor for curiosity's sake?

Pretty much all Japanese payment processors support payment at convenience store.

http://www.gmo-pg.com/ and http://www.paygent.co.jp/ are two examples.

What sort of credit card penetration do other parts of the world such as Western Europe/Eastern Europe/Middle East/SE Asian Countries/Australia... other places.

Where do you get the information that you wrote about? I'd be very interested to read into it further. Anybody know any relevant works off the top of your head that you could share?

Where do you get the information that you wrote about? I'd be very interested to read into it further. Anybody know any relevant works off the top of your head that you could share?

Unfortunately this is from anecdotal experience. I was living and working in Japan for some time so I saw first hand what services are offered and how people behave.

Credit card penetration is pretty high in Australia.

Its a few years old, but as of 2009 at least 65% of Australians have credit card debt. http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Fe...

From my experience in Nepal credit cards are pretty much non-existent....apart from the local cards which only work within the confines of Nepal & India.

"unbanked" and "underbanked" are a great illustration of the way one can misapply terminology to create an artificially negative view. I would suggest that most who would be considered "un[der]banked" by the banking and commerce industries are quite happy with their status.

We should try not to proliferate terms that imply a negative accusation just because someone chooses to do or believe an innocent thing that's different from what some other people do, believe, or want others to do or believe (particularly the word's inventors).

Your reply here has limited applicability to Affirm. Max is using a user's digital identity to assure them credit- he'd never be able to do that with an "unbanked" customer who by definition would have quite a limited history.

Do you have a source for that? I'd be interested in reading more about it. I never would have guessed credit transactions would be that low at Walmart; I grew up in a poor, "redneck" area and knew a lot of people (my family included) that depended on the "float" you get with a credit card to give a little flexibility over their normal paycheck-to-paycheck existence. But I'd believe the data, if it exists for public consumption.

I'm curious what searches have you done to find such data. Companies like Netspend (just acquired this week by TSYS) and Greendot exist almost exclusively to serve this market. American Express has their own offering called Bluebird card to compete in the same market. There are lots of articles discussing these companies and the target market of the "unbanked" when looking for info on these public companies. The only reason I hesitate to post links to specifics is because I'd rather not taint your approach to finding such information, but it is pretty easy to find, if you are to search.

Is Affirm willing to extend credit to those people?

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