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>Some resources should be spent on preventing laundering and fraud with the system, but this needs to be done in the banking system as well, with the costs pass

>Some resources should be spent on preventing laundering and fraud with the system, but this needs to be done in the banking system as well, with the costs passed on to the consumers. I feel that you glossed over the most important part of credit card companies. I would say 100% of the reason I have a credit card is their diligence in preventing and solving fraud on my account. I would imagine the same to be true for many financially responsible HN readers as well.

yholio 6y ago
It's debatable if this should be a lumped and mandatory feature of the payment system. For all in-person transactions, payments should be non-refundable and any fraud should be considered a technical weakness. This concurs with the longstanding tradition of paper money, with consumer protection handled off-line by adequate agencies, the courts etc. What currently happens is that credit card users enjoy a separate layer of protection that is subsidized by other consumers - debit and cash users - that pay the same nominal prices. Due to the credit card oligopoly, retailers are forced to do this since rejecting one of the major card issuers means forfeiting a large part of the revenue. For remote transactions, aside from discontinuing the absurd practice of treating numbers printed on a card as secret authentication data, thereby reducing fraud manifold, we could have a unified system where consumer protection is offered by a 3rd party. For example, before you are allowed to shop online using your central bank account, you must select a private payment processor such as PayPal, Revolut etc., and agree to their terms and fees, and they in turn would handle charge-backs for remote transactions.