Fed’s new instant payment system could be trouble for PayPal, Venmo::The Fed’s goal is to connect 9,000 financial institutions nationwide.
Run by the feds…yea what could go wrong there.
Honestly, once it reaches critical mass. It will mean the end of PayPal, Venmo et al AND the credit card industry as a whole.
I doubt it will hit the credit card industry that much. We have something like this in Canada, Interac, and credit cards are alive and well. They may actually prefer this, because people who keep zero balances may be less inclined to use credit cards instead of debit cards and there may be a larger market of businesses with card-processing capability to cater to those who have debit cards but don’t have the credit to obtain credit cards.
I think between rewards and actual credit, credit cards will probably be fine, but I’m curious if you think this solves for either of these use cases.
Credit card rewards are really not worth it. These programs are largely funded by the fees that are charged to merchants which are ultimately passed on to you at time of purchase.
I would much rather have reduced costs of goods rather than have paltry credit card reward programs.
Ok, but if this new payment model takes over and there are no fees to merchants, I’m very skeptical those savings will be passed on to buyers. I think at this point credit card processing is pretty well priced in.
I can see it going either way. I think it’s gonna come down to apple and Google getting on board. If they adopt tap to pay with this system vendors will have less incentive to accept credit card fees. If they don’t, it won’t become ubiquitous enough for any store to get away with not allowing it and consumers will look out for their own interest to keep taking the credit benefits. (I realize collective action would make that argument void, I doubt true collective action is possible in any senecio.)
That said, I cannot see a world where the banks let it get that far. This system relies on the banks cooperation and it wouldn’t be the first time they bought a law.
Processing transactions with credit cards incurs fees from middlemen and unnecessarily complicates the merchant-buyer relationship. The merchant ends up paying these fees and ultimately passes this cost to the consumer in the form of a 3-5% or more markup of goods. In some cases, even cash customers are paying the hidden markup as well.
With FedNow, this has the potential to bypass all of this messiness and severely undercut debit and credit card processing networks. Thus slowly bleeding them out of market share.
I can definitely see a new market segment of payment processing which disrupts the existing status quo. Could very easily cover expenses of running the operation on a shoe string budget, charge 1-2 cents per transaction, and become profitable in just under a year (assuming high adoption).
In the end, smaller merchants are able to compete or in some cases undercut bigger stores since they are saving money on CC fees. Consumer has the benefit of more competition in the market and getting that better price. Overall decreased cost of living.
Most of this doesn’t address my specific question, but this sounds a lot more like you expect a diversification/fragmentation of the credit card industry rather than the “end” that was posed originally. Regardless of transactional fees, credit cards would continue to provide their basic function of providing access to credit and people would still desire it.
Thank god. I very much so dislike having to use 3rd parties to transfer e-bucks. Always have to do the ‘I have x, do you have x?’ dance. Been using cash fairly often since it’s just easier.
This is wild. Here in the UK we just transfer money from bank to bank in an instant using the banks own app.
What bank do you have that charges $35 for a transfer?
I transfer between b of a and chase bank, both known for having decently high fees, without any of those fees.
The $35 amount I’ve only seen with overdrafting. Do you overdraft every single transfer?
Here in the US it’s only instant if it’s coming out of your account.
If it’s coming out of the bank’s account
Can you please explain the difference here, because that doesn’t make sense to me. When am I ever transferring money out of the banks account instead of mine?
In Australia we’ve had free next business day transfers for as long as I can remember. Decades.
The transition to transfers that clear in seconds was happened gradually as bottlenecks were removed from the infrastructure one by one. Some transactions were instant a couple decades ago, but it’s only in the last few years that most transactions are instant here.
These days, Visa/Mastercard are basically the slowest way you can pay someone. It’s still the most commonly used option though, since it has the best fraud protection.
Same in Poland. That, and Blik system which let’s you send money to a phone number (if it’s also registered with Blik) and it’s actually instant. Not “next transfer window” like Elixir transfers, instant.
And yes, completely free.
It’s been a while since I did it but you can authorize it so all e-transfers are automatically accepted and deposited. I can’t think of a scenario where that would be a bad thing.
