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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Payment processing alone is worth somewhere in the region of 6trillion USD annually

This seems unlikely. Is this a top-line number? Why aren't existing VISA/MC processors the largest companies in the economy? The number you just gave is orders of magnitude higher than Apple's profits.

A couple minutes Google searching suggests that being a card issuer puts you in a relatively low-margin business with absolutely enormous network effects.

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It's a number I found some time ago that on further investigation appears to be quite wrong as you say. It seems it's closer to 1tn USD annually, which would rank around number 16 in world GDP tables.

Edit because HN isn't allowing a reply: these numbers are industry revenue, not profit.

    https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/financial_institutions_pricing_global_payments_2014_capturing_next_level_value/
    http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2013+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc

That huge number also does not square with the 2014 profits of the largest issuers. Look at Amex and Discover, both of which have relatively pure issuer/payment processing businesses.

Now it decides I can reply.

It's revenue, not profit, because I'm coming at this from the perspective of money (potentially) wasted. It's all in the first link.

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