Slashdot Mirror
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.
I smell some antitrust concern here...
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.
So the company I won't do business with because I don't trust them is being sued by the companies I'm stuck with because the ones I won't do business with won't share enough of our data with them?
So, we're fucked then -- the megacorps have utterly won the privacy and financial data battle, the advertisers know everything you do because of it, Google and everybody else reads your email, and the government can collate the whole damned thing if they declare they Need To.
Dammit, the tinfoil isn't working any more. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
MasterCard already has access to personal data from the card issuing side (they can know everything your bank knows about you, which is considerably more than what a merchant might know). The issue here is that PayPal is acting as a screen so MasterCard/Visa cannot be sure of the nature of the downstream merchant (this is the data they are not getting from PayPal). This has monetary consequences for MasterCard because some of their fee structures differ by industry, but more significantly they track chargeback and loss rates by merchant industry. 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.
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
<quote>I've always wanted the ability to painlessly send someone money</quote>
Please do! Here is my IBAN number: CH14 0025 5255 F665 2263 0
Thanks.
Actually, they'd love to know about a lot of your spending. For instance:
- If you buy a gun: Then they'll know who to search if/when they decide to confiscate them.
- If you buy gold, silver, or other long-term store-of-value commodities: If/when the dollar weakens they can make those illegal to possess and confiscate them to try proping pu the failing dollar and heading off a competing currency, forcing people to stick with the printing-press fiat money. (They already did that with gold during the Great Depression.)
- If you buy a bunch of long-shelf-life food or other "survivalist" supplies. It's stuff to raid in a crisis and an indicator of who the non-sheep are.
- If you buy political literature of a non-mainstream nature.
I could go on for pages.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
In Europe (at least in Belgium and the Netherlands and probably in other countries as well) VISA, MasterCard nor any other credit card company will know what you used your card for.
They will see where you bought it, but not for what.
So if you pay with it at a supermarket, they will not know if you bought only alcohol or baby food or condoms.
In Belgium it is even illegal to do any analysis of what type of stores or how you use your credit card. So no analysis if you spend it in other countries, online, at gas stations or just for getting cash from a machine. (In the Netherlands this is allowed)
This all because of privacy and protection of the consumer and other communist shit. Yet those companies still make money.
So if Europe can do it, so should the US be able to pass a law for the people to not let credit card companies know this kind of detail (or any other type of company).
Also when I pay with my card, the company that I do my payment is not allowed to do anything with it. The companies I worked for were not able to do any analysis on credit card sales, because we only had the transaction number, the last four numbers of the card and some other stuff to make it possible to identify the sale, but not enough to link different sales to one person even when done with the same card.
Oh, and while you are at it, change to using the chip reader like the rest of the world. It is so much safer (not perfectly safe). If the rest of the world was able to pay for the change, I am sure you could bare the cost as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.