New Payment Systems ?
 

In Australia there is a thing called a TAB Account. Hundreds of thousands of people have them - they are used for phone betting and payments in and out of your TAB account for gambling purposes (TAB stands for Totalizer Agency Board - its an old acronym which sticks locally). Typically a TAB card costs virtually nothing for the owner to operate and it's easy to place funds into it using phone banking or other more direct methods.

Trying to get my head around these new VISA regulations is fucking with my brain. People forewarned, when I was much younger and the Auto Teller and Plastic Cards such as BankCard started to appear, that one day we would become enslaved to the companies which owned the system. It appears that this is the case.

The point about the "TAB Card" mentioned above is that when people want to avail themselves of services they will often be happy to adopt VIABLE alternatives to credit cards or cash. However is there enough interest , do we as an industry have enough business acumen to develop a transparent, open and international payment system ? Just as open source software is gaining a foothold and competing against proprietary software, could open banking do the same to the banks and card cartels ?

The new Visa rules are only a problem for paysite owners. From the surfers perspective, they won't have any idea what is going on with Visa, and as long as they can still use their Visa card to signup to paysites they wont give a crap about any problems paysite owners have with Visa. So they have no incentive to use some other payment system to get the porn they want.

Did you know that Wal-Mart is heading up a class action lawsuit against Visa right now? Do you think Wal-Mart customers care? Probably not. If Wal-Mart started using some other payment system that customers could choose to use instead of Visa, do you think they would use it? Probably not. As long as they can still use Visa, they will use Visa.

Lots of people cannot obtain VISA cards , some with poor credit history can get VISA debit cards which work the same, however for each person who can get a card of some sort there is probably one who cannot.

What I am pondering here is a completely new leap of thought, a completely open international payment system which can be used for anything ... not just porn ... and is accessible to almost anyone.

I don't have the answers, just thinking aloud, perhaps others have ideas.

True, some people can't get credit cards.

I did read recently that debit cards have overtaken credit cards in the amount of spending.

I believe the future is debit cards, and eventually we will see some kind of biometric identification being used when buying online and in stores. Like providing a fingerprint scan when buying something with a CC that verifies the owner of the CC. That would make chargebacks obsolete because you would have proof that the person did in fact use their card to signup to the site.

By the way, the Walmart thing is about costs, Visa has different costs for card swipe vs. pin based, thats the issue on that. The vendors are already getting around it with software, note when you swipe a card at some terminals it will ask you for a pin like it or not? Thats why, the interchange fees the visa system is charging.



There is a new product that allows a cc swipe from a floppy drive.
You get the hardware, register it with an aquirer, swipe the cc and the hardware has a chip to verify, process and then send the transaction via software to the cc network. The network can't tell the difference between a card terminal and a home PC.

The inventors are looking for a company with the capitol to give away the HW, then they will clean up on the software and fees to send the transaction.

I think this technology has a better shot at making it into homes than biometrics. I got a laser hand authentication system for a time clock and it was $$$$$$.