3 ms·
Rewards programs turn out to have been an extraordinarily shrewd way for credit card issuers to align customer's interests with their own desire to limit the po
by alexqgb 12y ago
Rewards programs turn out to have been an extraordinarily shrewd way for credit card issuers to align customer's interests with their own desire to limit the power merchants would otherwise enjoy as the conductors of transactions.
In other words, payment tech that makes life easier for sellers without driving a wedge between credit card companies and buyers is going to suffer opposition from two directions at once. Here again, the winning play comes down to satisfying the end user first.
- abalone 12y agoI couldn't have put it better myself. If you look at the history of Visa & interchange fees, they've gone UP precisely because banks are competing to deliver more benefits to their customers. The "lower fee" advocacy is mainly coming from merchants. It's easy to sell a lower-fee system to merchants. But Marc Andreessen needs to ask: what's in it for consumers?