I remember a few years ago some hedge fund friends pitching Facebook as a digital age "value investment" because of its competitive moat and compounding returns. Idea being the more users you get the more revenue you get, and these benefits compound.
The issue with that is, as you mention, they already have most of the users they'd plan to get. To continue to grow, they need to better monetize users by 1) more ads per user or 2) higher price per ad
Seems like they tried 1) the last few years and it failed. Now maybe they are trying 2), but the best way to get higher price ads is through better targeting, which will require deeper privacy intrusions
I suspect this is why Facebook is so insistent on the "free" price point. Less from a revenue perspective than to make it impossible to stay in business long enough to compete with them.
Oh, come on. Maybe it's a US thing, but credit card is the last but one (just before a manual transfer) payment method I use (in Europe, Poland most of the time). It requires providing full credentials to every merchant you transact with on-line. It requires taking out your wallet and typing all this data in. Or taking out your wallet and taking photos of both sides in some modern apps, then checking for correctness. I actually use PayPal as my card payment gate to minimize the number of parties that see my complete set of payment authorization data. Credit cards are moderately convenient when used off-line and completely unadapted to being used on-line.
Edit: except for small transactions when 75 doesn’t apply. Also I don’t know if it’s in Poland too, but I’d guess so.
FWIW I take the same option, because it does feel nice to buy from a website without typing credit card information into some ad-hoc javascript form they came up with.
Note that this is not the same thing as making a payment from a Paypal account.
So technically speaking it is cool idea but some of us are forced to use it and if you don't, you're risking withdrawing all money really fast from your account (e-payment may be not available in small cities or in the countryside) or face risk of being eaten by fees. Cashlessness is popular in Poland but it's always good to have real money with you because you never know what may happen.
Over on the Western fringes here, we had a similar push behind "contactless" payments. We also have Apple and Android pay, but nothing as slick as this.
Apple Pay works here since June 19th, Android Pay since 2016 but since Blik was first (2015) it gained naturally more popularity. We'll see how it withstand Apple Pay as competition
• iDeal (convenient Dutch banks' system)
• PayPal linked to bank account
• I've usually paid at this point
• cryptocurrency
• credit card because it's such a pain in the ass
Why trust PayPal which has nugatory regulation and is prone to freezing account's on a whim
Venmo?
It's hard to imagine how anyone could even consider this being OK without the user being asked and being able to revoke permission anytime.
Don't ask me how I know, don't believe me, but its Wells Fargo.
> It's unclear to me what segment of bank customers would knowingly agree to anything remotely close to this.
Customers would not agree much, correct. However since credit cards are not your money, you are limited in the ways to tell the bank how and what to share or not to share with other players on the market, since its bank's money you operated with, and bank's goal is to make as much money off of lending it to you as possible. (of course I don't like; jsut so you know before you downvote)
This is in fact even right in your face. Any new card (or renewal you got in mail) has a few pages attached to it, called something like "what do we do with your information and how can you stop us", where it clearly draws a matrix table with YES/NO of what information they share, with whom, and in which example you can change their default behavior (hint: not always)
I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Wells Fargo is still asking for forgiveness in their Jon Hamm narrated Earning Back Your Trust[0] commercial. It would be incredibly stupid of them to engage in another scheme to take advantage of their customers at this time.
How would this translate to debit card transactions? That is my money. I'll tell the bank exactly what do with my money including give it all back to me, right now, so I can put it somewhere else. I have been on the fence about doing this anyways in favor of a credit union, but laziness always wins. This would be the absolute last straw for me if my bank shared anything with any social platform.
I'm asking anyway because a statement like this absolutely demands more than what you're offering for anyone to take a statement like this, in this context remotely serious.
Not even an article or something published from WF to support the claim, that the rest of us may benefit from?
Well, in theory, offering "more aligned" (eyeroll) products to users is technically 'new services', but ugh.
s/offer new services to users/increase revenue per user/
Once you've reached the levels of market saturation that Facebook has the only way to grow is value per-user, specifically in 1st world countries where there's actual value to be had.
> One large U.S. bank pulled away from talks due to privacy concerns, some of the people said.
Good for them. I wish I knew which one.
> Banks face pressure to build relationships with big online platforms, which reach billions of users and drive a growing share of commerce. They also are trying to reach more users digitally. Many struggle to gain traction in mobile payments.
That's an industry problem, not an individual bank problem. Also, credit cards are already very convenient and near universally accepted. It's hard to compete with that. Only the uninformed would use a different payment technologies with less convenience and weaker chargeback/fraud guarantees.
> Bank executives are worried about the breadth of information being sought, even if it means not being available on certain platforms that their customers use. It is unclear whether bank customers would need to opt-in to the proposed Facebook services or what other privacy protections might be offered.
It's unclear to me what segment of bank customers would knowingly agree to anything remotely close to this.