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MasterCard Forcing PayPal To Pay Higher Fees
iComp sends this quote from El Reg:
"PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit. The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for intermediated payment processors. This change is on the grounds that such processors don't share transaction details, which the card giants would love to get hold of as it can be used to research buying patterns and the like. Companies such as PayPal allow payments between users, so the party (perhaps a merchant) receiving the money doesn't need to be registered with the credit-card company. PayPal collects the dosh from the payer's card, and deducts a processing fee before passing the cash on to the receiving party. MasterCard would prefer the receiver to be registered directly so will apply the new fee from June to any payment that is staged in this way."
Perhaps if Mastercard and Visa hadn't allowed PaypaI to usurp what they could very well have done themselves, long ago, they wouldn't be in this situation. I've always wanted the ability to painlessly send someone money, directly, and it's idiotic that paypaI (and other 3rd party wallet services) are the only way to do it. Completely redundant.
Guess end users will be seeing a fee increase coming our way. Awesome.
You remember when credit cards used to have annual fees? They didn't just forget about those costs, they just found new ways to make money off you!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Paypal and Mastercard are both horrible companies. I suppose I should side with the company trying not to share my personal data, but Paypal is incredibly sleazy and dishonest in its own right.
Saving up to buy a nice widget used to mean something, now everyone just buys junk after junk with no planning, all while accruing enormous debt. This house of cards is just waiting for the right wind to knock it all down.
Quite frankly we deserve it.
Just pay cash for stuff.
Your solution to your credit card number being vulnerable to theft is to give away your bank account number instead? Brilliant!
I would be fine with this except Visa and MasterCard are already acknowledged as a single Monopoly
And heaven forbid that the we regulate any monopoly or finance company in a meaningful way. Thanks to one of the most absurd SCOTUS decisions ever, they can charge interest rates that would embarrass Louie the Loanshark. Even worse may be the transaction fees, which even without the "special rates" for PayPal, etc. are something like 3%. Ask anybody with a small business that has to take CC's to stay in business, and see what they think of it. In organized crimes cases this is called skimming, but apparently it's ok if you're incorporated. In Australia the fees are regulated to 0.5%, and the credit card companies still do just fine down under.
Your concerns are noted and ignored. The goverment would also like to know who is sending money to who. Since they can't know, they'll have no problem with extra being charged instead. For now. Eventually it will require disclosure of all paypal transactions.
The excuse trotted out will be one of... Drug dealers, Terrorists, Or tax evasion. Maybe all three.
Bet.
I think this is less about monetizing purchasing data (though there is certainly an element of that) and more about scaling their fee structure to known loss paterns.
If that were the case, they could scale the PayPal fee structure according to the aggregate PayPall loss rate.
Nope. Looks to me like it's about profit from monitizing the customer data and trying to replace that revenue stream because they were unable to get the data from the PayPall transactions.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way