CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple Pay and Credit Card Fees

Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple... by zaroth on Monday October 27, 2014 @12:34AM (#8513853)

This is so bad it makes me angry, so I'm sorry for ranting, but, seriously WTF? Did Walmart just think, 'Blast those Visa and Mastercard scum with their excessive fees! Lets create our own eWallet and save that 2%...'

  He also that found that its Terms Of Service leaves high
  liability for fraud to the user if someone else is able to get 
  access to a user’s phone and make CurrentC payments.

Wait, what? What do you mean consumers don't want to be on the hook for the full charges if their phone/wallet is stolen and nobody at Best Buy cared to check ID on that $10,000 electronics purchase? But sure glad we're saving those interchange fees though.

I'm pretty sure they didn't actually intend for this to be a badly timed Aprils fools joke, but come on. QR code based, no fraud protection, built in spyware, loose integration with any kind of platform security, collecting health information. Introducing CurrentC -- all the safety of carrying your entire bank account balance in large bills in your pocket, all the privacy of HTTP over Verizon LTE.

It's so easy to use, just unlock your phone, open the app, click to active the QR scanner, hope that it scans (but don't worry you can type in the QR data by hand if you need to). The bit about paying at the gas pump had me facepalming like Picard.

I can't even imagine how much they would have to pay me to use this. They take away my free 30+ days of float, my fraud protection, take away the firewall between my bank account and the world. Take away the chargeback defense against a misbehaving merchant. Not to mention a dozen other perks of credit cards, like the cash back rewards, purchase protection / extended warranty, price protection, etc.

I guess Apple couldn't have asked for a better counterpoint to demonstrate the difference between building a product to serve your customers versus building a product to serve yourself. Apple is trying to make credit cards more secure and more convenient, building on top of the existing system, and rent-seeking to the tune of whatever costs they can wring out of the system. Kudos and good luck to them. This CurrentC abomination on the other hand... how did this even see the light of beta?

Edit: In a few months the credit card networks will start to see the difference in fraud and chargeback levels for Apple Pay purchases. I'm really interested to see if there's a significant difference, and what implications that holds for merchants which don't adopt or actively block Apple Pay.

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Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple... by kenrikm on Monday October 27, 2014 @01:56AM (#8514087)

CurrentC - All that's good for us (Retailers) nothing that's good for you (Consumer). It's so bad it almost seems as if it's a giant April Fools joke. As I write this, CurrentC has a one star rating on the App Store: consumers are not laughing.

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Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple... by hayksaakian on Monday October 27, 2014 @02:07AM (#8514122)

Here is some perspective: Walmart's margins are approx. 3% according to [1]

- most if not all of their income comes from transactions/sales. - some significant % of their transactions are paid with credit cards.

With those two things in mind, 2% of a retail transaction might mean a lot more than you think.

Do I think it's a good idea? no.

Do I think a WalMart executive walked through the same chain of logic and found an extra billion? probably.

[1] http://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/profit_margin

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Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple... by TheCoelacanth on Monday October 27, 2014 @05:50PM (#8518390)

It's obvious what retailers get out of it. Credit card fees are a significant amount of money to them.

It's not obvious is what consumers get out of it. What incentive do customers have to use this form of payment? After taking credit card rewards into account, credit cards fees end up making everything <1% more expensive for consumers. That's a small price to pay for the consumer protections that you would give up by using CurrentC instead of a credit card.

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Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple... by hayksaakian on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @02:28AM (#8519766)

oh, it's clearly anti-consumer

they're just banking on the idea that they will make more money saving transaction fees than losing some customers because of incompatible payment methods.

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Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple... by aosmith on Monday October 27, 2014 @01:38AM (#8514038)

While I hate CurrentC because its a worthless implementation that's already late to the party I think there's a bigger reversal risk for unauthorized ach transactions than credit cards. The possibility of fines/prosecution is much greater when you mess with checks.

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