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Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand what this article is actually advocating for.

Direct Debit, he's one of the founders of: https://gocardless.com/

This is the sort of thing that Square Cash provides, correct? Send money directly from one checking account to another through your debit card.

Is he forgetting that these are credit cards? People need/want credit.

You can do Direct Debit transfers from credit/overdraft accounts.

It's actually obvious really. He says that Apple Pay is an added layer on top of the:

  credit company -> bank/merchant account -> seller -> user

pipeline.

Instead of that he proposes we cut the credit card companies (and their fees), and have payments directly from our bank accounts.

Instead of our payments going through the credit card company, banks would have to be networked between them and with the next-gen payment system, so that we can buy from a store / seller regardless of the specific bank we have an account in.

Which is sorta confused. V/MC have a very small take (despite having organized one of the most impressive networks in the world). Almost all the fees go to the card issuer.

So instead of using the existing interchange services that work completely awesomely, and have really low fees, we should develop a new thing that will eventually work just as well once all the work is done on it?

Debit cards already allow me to make payments directly from my bank account, and do so for a very low fee.

I see no advantage to this, nor why he's targeting Apple Pay as some nefarious waste of resources (other than click bait).

More Paypal clones, I think.

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