Maybe look at Adyen instead.
Unless a business is extremely small, extremely low margin or doesn’t want an electronic record of the transaction most businesses prefer not to deal with cash.
So you are back to a payments network. Those are very hard to bootstrap and are not free to run.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pablo-escobar-and-rubber-ban...
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
It will be a cheap/free, instant, money sending service. What will be the point of visa/mastercard/paypal then?
Also, paying at stores, clinics, doctors, etc.. all done with PIX nowadays. Very few people are carrying cash these days. Very few clinics had a payment machine to accept debit/credit cards and now with PIX they have no incentive to do so anymore.
To transfer funds, you can specify the user's ID (which can be a phone number, national tax identification or some random string the user creates). To pay for purchases, you usually scan a QR code or copy a payment string using your bank's app/website. It's very convenient.
Absolutely, and I kinda expect this to become the case eventually across Europe, as the "cashless society" vision becomes inevitable. If you make it de-facto compulsory for citizens to operate electronically, it's only fair that there should be the sort of guarantees and accountability that only the State can provide, even if you lose a bit of innovation or efficiency.
By VISA/ MasterCard contract backed by governments' regulations a merchant in EU can not charge more because he's using a card instead of cash. Of course the transactions costs are paid by the customer, it's just all customers instead of those paying by card.
That's why some cards have charges, to the merchants, of around 2%... because the customer who use that cards does not pay them.
If I, as a customer, when doing an Amazon checkout saw a 2% charge to use VISA I would drop them in a second. Because that's hidden on purpose, I keep using it.
No idea what's going here.
Also, there are different payment systems (non US). It is up to sellers to support them.