I think it's worth noting that VISA is also really doing a pretty good job. Like the cards work. Here in Europe they seem eager to adopt emerging technology and are willing to invest to maintain their dominance.
There's a ton of not so consumer friendly backroom deals with kickbacks for the banks and stuff, but the core product is roughly what consumers desire. A card that works almost 100% of the time without any difficulty. While simultaneously implementing and adopting whatever weird regulations get passed into law.
They are, in my opinion, doing a decent job.
Isn't this a winning formula because the consumer is the one spending the money? Imagine an opposite approach that was vendor-friendly at the expense of the consumer. I don't think most people would willingly use that.
Back before Amazon, WalMart did the same thing[1] by squeezing their vendors to lower prices and passing (some of) the savings onto shoppers.
[1] https://popularresistance.org/walmart-creates-a-race-to-the-...
Like an aforementioned comment stated above, their dominance is all about consumer convenience reinforcing vendor adoption. If you have an equally smooth payment process to compete against that, it will crumble. Case in point, India and UPI. Credit cards are largely used by the most affluent today, simply because UPI has become so prevalent for general transactions. UPI are actually a much easier way to carry out payments than credits cards are.
But of course, American banking is ages away with even FedNow not having been implemented in any strong form whatsoever.
Stripe is a merchant acquirer and Visa/MC a card network.
The 2%-3% are the total fees imposed by a stripe, a merchant acquirer. The 0.3% is Visa's cut. After subtracting the card issuer's cut, what remains goes to Stripe.
Who?
I thought it was just like Costco that didn't take Discover/Amex/MC due to Visa contract. Aren't all the credit card terminals pretty much from 3p vendors who support everything including Apple Pay + Square + etc?
Costco's a weird one though because they resisted credit cards for a long time until they had their Amex contract with the dual-branded Costco Amex card, but then dropped them for a dual-branded VISA card in 2016.
Outside of US-defaultism, why in the world would anyone expect it to be accepted here?
That's not to say that Visa hasn't worked toward favorable regulations, but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them which means most customers don't want to set them up. If most customers don't have those payment methods, there's little incentive for a merchant to setup those payment methods.
With OpenAI, there isn't the same network effect. I don't care what LLM you're using or what LLM Walmart or anyone else is using. If Anthropic or Google start offering better/cheaper LLMs, companies can simply switch over. Maybe some integrations will need to be rewritten, but that's a lot easier than getting hundreds of millions of customers to sign up for something new. Plus, companies like Google are simply implementing the OpenAI API so that integrations don't have to be rewritten.
By contrast, if another company launches a payment network, it isn't enough just to convince a company to switch. You need to convince millions of consumers to switch - which would require convincing enough companies to switch.