We Indians take it for granted, but UPI[1] is a brilliant system. We make payments for something as small as ₹1 if needed. Transaction of ₹10[2] for a cup of tea is a very regular and ordinary happening.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface</a><p>2. ₹10 is roughly $0.12 (as of today).
I'm still disappointed every time I try to order something at a webshop and they don't support iDeal[0]. That's how online payment should work. Of course it's only a Dutch system, so it's not going to be supported by all international webshops (although Steam does), but if anyone has the scope to introduce a more secure form of online payment, surely it's Visa and MasterCard? Why don't they introduce an iDeal-like payment protocol that the whole world can use? Why do I still have to type those 16 numbers into a web form, when the banking app on my phone already knows what those numbers are? Why does anyone else need to know those numbers, and why are those numbers enough to authorise payment?<p>Everything is wrong with that system, and yet credit card companies don't seem to have sufficient incentive to fix it. And yet they have too much power outside Netherland for anyone to introduce a better alternative.<p>[0] Lego! Why do you not support iDeal? If Steam can do it, so can you.
In Poland, we have this wonderful system called BLIK. You provide nothing except a single-use 6-digit code, then you confirm the payment in your bank's mobile app. It works in online payments, physical stores and ATMs, it supports bank transfers using just a phone number, and recently it's been upgraded to support contactless payments as well <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik</a>
Seems like this article is only about United States without being aware of it.<p>Many countries in Europe and Asia have much better payment solutions than the states.
> "The security of your card details is only marginally improved"<p>Please don't be ridiculous, I understand you have to instill fear in the people reading this for them to use your service, but the security of what you described before to today has improved by orders of magnitude:<p>- I'm going to guess no HTTPS 20 years ago (it was formally specified 22 years ago).<p>- Merchant employee has access to the raw data of your credit card. Lowest paid one probably, since it's manual data entry.<p>- Send this data using email, which is not secure neither at the sending point, receiving point or transportation.<p>- To the ordering service, again a lowly paid employee with access to the raw credit card data.<p>- In none of these points, except the first, the payment amount was confirmed/verified by the client.<p>- At none of these points the author of the order is verified to be the legit owner of the card.<p>Today, sure it's still complex, but we basically have 2FA, card tokenization, client verification of payments, forced HTTPS, etc. which remove all of the insecure points mentioned above.<p>Disclaimer: I recently joined Stripe, opinions my own though ofc
No surprises here.<p>Cards should've been deprecated as a payment method long ago.<p>Brazil's Pix, Netherlands's iDEAL, Poland's BLIK, etc, are all better payment methods that follow a push model (i.e., the customer actively confirms the purchase on their phone) instead of pull model (i.e., I send my card details to the store and it forwards it to the card network).<p>I really hope the EU gets its shit together and moves forward with TIPS[0]. I would love for this to become a requirement for all banks in the Eurozone.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...</a>
The government can always make it worse. The EU removed my prepaid card simply because I refused to get a phone for it which was expected to receive some sort of permission for each transaction.
Unpredictability of international online card payment is painful. Up until March, most if not all the transaction to Japan were working. Two out of three cards I regularly stopped working on March, and one card still works, except it get flagged at EVERY SINGLE instance of these purchase that I actually have to call the issuer to get it unblocked for transaction. (Doesn't matter where it is, doesn't matter how many times I've made purchase from the same vendor.)<p>It seems like this is something to do with changes in 3DSecure; what's frustrating so much is that noone can provide me information what's going on, it's simply doesn't work.
I’m still not sure what the author thinks sucks about wallets like ApplePay or GooglePay. They are the most convenient options both online and in-person.<p>Unless I missed a paragraph, the author never describes and ideal alternative.
If a website only offers me to put my Credit Card number, CVV, password, then it is a failure<p>Stripe would have been good in the first years of internet commerce, now it is outdated, worse, it's dangerous
If only there was an instantaneous, nearly free (cost per transaction), opensource, anyone-can-access, infinitely scalable, infinitely interoperable, payment rail that we could start building solutions on top of...
Of course they do, but then again, I may not know, since I have not done ONE in about 6 years, when Paypal lied to me, and they suck worst of all. No more. Thanks.
For a comparison, spend $5 or $10 that was gonna go to a lotto ticket or starbucks coffee and instead, buy an NFT. Just experience the UX of the web wallet system. It's weird, for sure, and unfortunately it's wrapped up in crypto (because of the emotional baggage people have with crypto), but the UX is interesting. Some lessons from there could be applied to online card payments and traditional banking to make them suck less.
If card networks, issuers, acquirers, processors and gateways used bitcoin as their settlement layer, most of the current issues would be automatically solved. They could focus engineering resources on creating better user experiences, anti-fraud, etc.<p>Consumers can keep using their tokenized credit cards, debit cards, etc, but their money would be moved using the bitcoin time chain, instead of hundred of CSV files.<p>Why haven't the W3C participants even mentioned bitcoin for standardizing web payments? I believe it's because of politics and business. Bitcoin can't be controlled and manipulated and it's not an easy truth to swallow. I hope this changes.