3 ms·

Nice post. Tangentially, am I the only one who feels the card is a brilliant, simple, secure UX, and that I don't really see the draw of the cardless approach?

• amalag 14y ago
  A physical card is great, but why a static number on the card? Why expose yourself to skimming with a static card number, all these advances in cryptography and we are keeping a 16 digit number on a piece of plastic and sending out new ones when someone knows those 16 digits and a date. I am surprised things like this havent picked up: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/the-credit-card-that-may-stop-or-at-least-hinder-on-and-offline-fraud/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/the-credit-card-that-...
  • dllthomas 14y ago
    Not even "when someone knows those 16 digits and a date" - that happens as soon as you use it, by definition. It's "when you've observed that someone is abusing that knowledge", which is even messier. ... but, apparently, not messy enough to fix.
• tomblomfield 14y ago
  Founder of GoCardless here. GoCardless makes it really simple to set up Direct Debits (ACH in the US). Direct Debit is a really cheap & simple way of accepting recurring payments - for stuff like subscriptions & regular invoices. For example, something like 75% of the UK pay their gas, phone & electricity bills by Direct Debit. GoCardless is making that infrastructure available to smaller businesses, optimised for the internet. This used to be surprisingly difficult. We're certainly not going head-to-head with credit cards, and the system is not suitable for some e-commerce because of the slow payment timings (payments take 2 days to clear). But it's great for regular payments (Hosting, SaaS etc) - long-term regular credit card payment plans typically see 5-10% failure rates, whereas we see in the region of 0.5%.