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Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) by cornholio on Friday July 25, 2025 @02:43AM (#44680286)
Bundling consumer protection with the payment system was always a bad idea. Payments need to be instantaneous and free.

The returns/refunds can be handled offline by a mutually agreed facilitator that does not have a monopoly on the payment system. You can also have a legal mandate that all internet purchase, for example, should employ such a service, that charges a market fee and is then liable for making fair decisions.

Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) by mirzap on Friday July 25, 2025 @03:06AM (#44680430)
It is not a bad idea. This is how it is supposed to be. My bank offers this even with Mastercard. I have to approve transactions when paying online. It's instant, I finish checkout, and then I receive the push notification asking me to confirm the transaction. I don't know if I would ever use CC in a country where banks don't allow this.
Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) by xyzzy123 on Friday July 25, 2025 @04:12AM (#44680859)
That is authorising the transaction and it makes sense for the card issuer to handle that. It's proving that it's "you" using the card and you really intended to pay for that thing.

The case where you have a dispute with the merchant (i.e transaction is authorised but problem is 1 layer up - reality is wrong!) is different. You paid as intended but the thing you wanted didn't happen. Right now those are bundled together.

Sometimes this is handled by marketplace (think aws, vs paypal/ebay and their balance of favouring merchant vs consumer) but overall (e.g. consider shopify who are basically uncontactable in case of merchant disputes) I don't think the payments system makes this very clear. It could be made clear who has the responsibility for resolving merchant disputes and this could be a more explicit point of difference in service offerings.

Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) by xyzzy123 on Friday July 25, 2025 @06:26AM (#44681628)
P.S. There are a LOT of details in this specific idea, some consumers are bad actors and are never happy, some merchants likewise are bad actors. Resolving these issues without disclosing sensitive information is extremely difficult. But largely processors are sort of punting on it in various ways when common sense resolutions seem possible. Like if a consumer has 50k transactions with 0 chargebacks and they initiate a chargeback, it's probably a merchant problem. This argues for collapsing the layers but channel-specific resolutions have the advantage of being able to look for delivery signals and other specific mechanisms of performance. Figuring who is right in the world is a hard problem in general. Possibly the Stripe Elite will correct me here since this is the Hard Problem of payments. Which can be solved well enough with statistics. Payments has a whole lot of Hard Problems which seem easy at first, it's a great area.
Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) by cornholio on Friday July 25, 2025 @07:23AM (#44681942)
Now you are just confusing consumer protection with having a secure online payment system, which credit cards are not and never will be. The entire "transaction approval" shtick is just a bandaid for passing a static password around in clear text, your credit card info.

Consumer protection deals with chargebacks after the payment was made and the products/services are not delivered to required standards. This gives enormous power to credit card companies against merchants and enables obscene rent extraction against consumers who don't require it, yet still pay 2-4% more on everything they buy, even with other payment methods.

Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) by whatagreatboy on Friday July 25, 2025 @03:39AM (#44680633)
Consumer protection can still be separate in this case. That's not a problem at all. The only reason it is not prevalent in these countries yet is because they in general have lax consumer protection laws. But this can easily change. The unified payment interface does nothing to exclude it.