Maybe we hear about it because, it's right in the US' backyard and the biggest country there is Brazil from which pix comes from. All these payment systems threaten visa and Mastercard but pix is the largest in the US' backyard because the country it comes from, Brazil, is the largest there.
If you break up the Visa and Mastercard cartels, does this San Diego pizzeria then have to decide what cards to accept on a bank-by-bank basis?
The European Union caps consumer card interchange fees at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...
Broadly, the interlocking restraints set and maintained by the defendants have forced merchants that accept any Visa and Mastercard credit card to accept all such cards, regardless of cost, thereby eliminating any incentive for issuing banks to compete by lowering their fees, the suit says. The lawsuit claims the challenged restraints have also prevented merchants from being able to steer customers to lower-cost payment options—for instance, by surcharging based on a customer’s use of a particular card. These and other restraints have prevented competition among issuing banks and other credit card networks, allowing the financial giants to raise their fees every year “without consequence,” the case alleges.
So the hope is that new or one of the other brokers step up and hopefully their ethics are better.
and don't pretend like it's not possible, it's obviously possible: take the system and lower the fee to something proportional to the price of providing the service
if credit card rewards programs have to go to make it economically viable -- awesome, that would be a second win.
somat•45m ago
I guess the point being there is probably a better reason for the high fees than the company trying to be anticompetitive, Or perhaps better said as a better reason for being anti competitive than high fees. Monopolistic lock in? Regulatory Capture? The problem is, that this blames the government instead of the company.
armada651•42m ago
> A class action lawsuit alleges Visa, Mastercard and some of America's largest banks have conspired to artificially inflate merchants' credit card transaction fees.
If they didn't conspire together and actually competed then they wouldn't be able to charge such high fees as they would surely try to undercut each other.
2OEH8eoCRo0•30m ago
majorchord•30m ago
Any new competitor could spell the end for them, so making it astronomically difficult to onboard enough people is so far working out for them.
SaltyBackendGuy•31m ago
Both are true though right? The company needs to be held accountable for price collusion by the government. Government not acting due to lobbying (i.e. bribes).