And there was always the fear that your phone dies and you can't take the subway or purchase everything. It doesn't happen often but on some long days you really don't really want to be tracking the battery of your phone super closely.

NFC payments can work offline (although this is pretty rare) and can be authorized from a small plastic card that has no battery, no internet connection and is pretty robust including being completely waterproof. Plus 100% of the time I tap my card or phone on the merchant's terminal. No alternate UX option. Plus if you are using your phone for payments (which is a very convenient option) you don't need to open any app beforehand (WeChat is like 3 taps to get to scanner or code) and I found quick NFC reading to be more reliable than scanning a QR code where the lighting conditions and state of the QR code are not always perfect (it was almost always possible to get it to work within a handful of seconds, but often took a bit of fiddling around. NFC is reliably just tap and it works).

I still keep a few large bills in my wallet in case the card networks are down, flag my transactions or whatever else. But having this immutable payment card that is incredibly reliable and easy to use is way better than the phone-based QR systems I have seen.

What I would love to see if we bring phones into the system is a way of approving the transaction (including the amount) on your device. So for example 1. Tap phone 2. Review amount on screen and approve 3. Tap to commit payment. This is more steps but is far safer. That being said the number of times this has been an issue for me is 0, so it is probably better to just rely on the banking system to correct any mistakes rather than add extra steps to the payment flow.

If you want to do account-to-account payments you can show the customer the account/routing number, amount & invoice ID - but obviously that's high friction and the customer needs to login to their account and send a payment with lots of manual data entry.

Making yet another app, adding a financial intermediary, requiring you to link your bank account - these aren't solving the friction points.

We already have bank apps, when I scan a QR code in an industry-wide format it should ask me or confirm which bank app to open and pre-fill all the payment information.

So from my perspective, the problem is that FedNow in the US, and Open Banking in the UK - they could have just dictated "Banks must support EPC QR, or EMV QR code scanning and deep-links", and QR code payments would happen very quickly - even with NFC/RFID you can do passive scanning to achieve the same thing.

* Choose Account * Confirm details * Press send

That's about as easy as you can get for push payments, with a real industry-wide standard for communicating payment intents via NFC/QR. But both FedNow and UK OpenBanking are structured in a way which requires friction, and onerous regulation, through their clunky APIs - meaning you can't actually solve that problem on your own.

American Express leverages the fact that most consumers don’t care what the merchant is charged

So instead of competing on merit by improving the value offered to merchants, your concern is to become connected enough to have the merchants switch to you in spite of "dubious value"??

I’m pretty sure the main reason Apple/Google/Microsoft haven’t done this already is because they would be directly competing with the US government. The idea must get shut down pretty quickly by powerful people.

I agree that both parties need a reason to adopt a new payment method... But the reason can't be only that there's a lot of merchants/customers that have it ... If there's benefits for enough participants, reach can drive adoption for those who don't care about the benefits, but you've got to have some material benefits to get people started.

It's got to have a good experience, too.

But from this rant, it seems like they were trying to be a middle man for instant bank payments... I don't see the value of that as a purchaser when I can use a debit card. For the merchant, running a debit card takes a small fee, but anything that needs someone to scan a QR code takes a lot of time.

It's typical to estimate the cost of handling cash anywhere from 4% to as high as 15% depending on takings and size of transactions.

I haven't used cash in my home country for the last two decades, at least. I mean, CC works even on parking meters when paying half a dollar (equivalent) for a few minutes of parking, and I can use a card in flea markets and even some garage sales.

Oh, I forgot: A lot of shops, restaurants, and other establishments have stopped accepting cash, even if it's illegal to do so (legal tender etc). That's because handling cash costs them MORE than handling credit/debit cards. In other words: It appears that using cards LOWER the costs for the merchant, not the other way around.

EditAdd: I presume a lot of the cost saving is that paying by card is 100% electronic, just tap the card (add the pin code if it's expensive enough), and the transaction goes directly into the shop's account. With cash it's way more cumbersome. Way, way more.

(Mind, there's no such thing as signing by hand anymore. If there were paperworks involved it would be different. But there aren't any, not in Europe and not in Japan anymore either)

This is what Australia is looking at currently: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-15/rba-credit-debit-merc...

Visa/Mastercard/BNPL/Klarna etc. all have negotiated discounts for consumers, paid for by the merchant.

I'm skeptical that merchants would lower prices (stepping away from $x.98, etc) instead of pocketing the higher margins themselves.

Cash, credit (discover is dieing, but amex/mc/visa compete a bit), debit (several networks and all US cards have to be on at least two), I've seen PayPal as an option ocassionally, some merchants take Zelle, FedNow could if a good UX comes around (I don't think many merchants want to give out their routing and account numbers, and it's tedious to input them into my banking app anyway). Some vendors take checks and deposit them later, some take checks and process them immediately, etc.

People respond to incentives though. If merchants charge the same regardless of payment method, I'm going to use a rewards card that costs them more. When they add a line item credit charge, I'll consider cash or debit.

EU has actually solved this with interchange fees for consumers being 0.3% which to me sound reasonably close to that 0.1%.

That aside, I only use lightning with my Bitcoin-friends to settle stuff for fun. I live in a city of 300k people, and there are 3 restaurants that accept Lightning payments. Right now it is in its infancy, but I see Lightning as the only solution to actually enable web micro-payments (which failed as a standard because no credit card can provide .10 to .20 cent payments due to high fees)

This leads to a number of positive outcomes, such as not worrying at all about sketchy or online purchases, and "American style" payment at restaurants (where we just toss our card on the receipt, and eventually it gets picked up, processed, and returned without further interruption).