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In the article they talk about how they initially wanted to charge a per-year fee but eventually had to charge a per-month fee, but anyway the better granularit
by Hexstream 18y ago
In the article they talk about how they initially wanted to charge a per-year fee but eventually had to charge a per-month fee, but anyway the better granularity was better for everyone in the end.
Now I'm thinking, what would it take to reduce the payment granularity to 2 weeks? 1 week? 1 day? 1 hour? 1 minute?
I mean, we already have compound interest, which calculates interest continuously and precisely over time (I think). Why couldn't we have the same for payments?
Now I know that "micro-payments" aren't a new idea and it must be a really tough challenge but if someone has some knowledge of the different difficulties I'd love to see them spelled out.
- vaksel 18y agoprobably because of those fixed processing fees that you get charged...plus you'd have the stuff show up more than once on the credit card statement
- aston 18y agoThe main difficulties are the high per-transaction fees and the reasonably large percentage revenue cuts all of the concerned parties take from you. The more you charge, the larger the percent of your revenue you keep.
- ja2ke 18y agoThe smaller the granularity the more likely it is you'd need some sweeping change at the top of the chain -- at the CC providers, banks, processors. Most services charge you for every authorization request you initiate, let alone successful or failed transactions, so you'd have to be charging a very high rate for your service to be authing a card once a minute.
- jonknee 18y agoNot only that, but that many authorization attempts would immediately trigger fraud filters and the account would be locked.