rprend

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61.
by rprend 1y ago
It’s funny you mention apartments, because that is exactly the comparison i thought of, but with the opposite conclusion. If you buy an apartment with debt, but get positive cash flow from rent, you wouldn’t call that unprofitable or a bad
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by rprend 1y ago
Card network payments are NOT irrevocable after a few days. They are revocable for 60 days. This “pinky promise” is not a technical limitation, it is US law: Reg E for “electronic funds transfers” and Reg Z for credit payments. These are fo
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by rprend 1y ago
1. App Clips meant no app download required- it’s already on your phone 2. No funding of an account required. There was no account required. You do a “connect your account with Plaid” once then the connection is stored in the secure enclave
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by rprend 1y ago
Stripe has pay-by-bank they are pushing with Stripe Link, by making it users’ default payment method. They get terrible conversion, though if they could it would make them massively profitable. Shopify has ShopPay which means they take home
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by rprend 1y ago
There are no countries which limit Visa and Mastercard’s cut. Visa’s cut is the same ~.14% in the US, Europe, and everywhere else.
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by rprend 1y ago
Apple does not only gain by disintermediating Visa. Apple takes a cut on every purchase through Apple Pay (.15%), which is more than Visa's cut (.14%). Apple probably hasn't made a payment network because it would have to either c
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by rprend 1y ago
nooooo zenobia is an ancient queen
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by rprend 1y ago
oops
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by rprend 1y ago
Yep you get it Bruce. Unfortunately I confused being a villain (everybody likes to bash visa) with being bad at their jobs and disrupt-able.
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by rprend 1y ago
I appreciate you looking out for my well being, but really there was nothing shady here. We weren’t forced out by a Visa mob or something like that. I actually wish that were the case, because that would mean that we were growing! We just a
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by rprend 1y ago
it's a super dangerous tarpit, because it has what id call theoretical product market fit: when you describe it to people, they're super excited by it. Everybody says that they want it and they encourage you along the way. But whe
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by rprend 1y ago
> The incentive for merchants to accept cards for payment is that it'll increase number of sales this is something that ive thought about a lot, because while it is strictly true in the short run it may not be in the long run. For e
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by rprend 1y ago
Where do you get 5X? European interchange is regulated to .3-.4%, the network fees are the same as the US (.1-.2%) and then the payment service provider takes their fee. Online card processing in the EU costs around 1%.
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Open Source Visa / Mastercard Competitor: Zenobia Pay(zenobiapay.com)
12 points by rprend 1y ago|1 comments
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by rprend 1y ago
Since February, Teddy and I have worked tirelessly to build a Visa+Mastercard competitor. We quit our jobs and built an instant clearing, mobile first, pay-by-bank network. However, we failed to get any adoption besides thieves and mobsters
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by rprend 1y ago
I think it’s important to note that this is asking rent, not what people are paying on average. Landlords do tricks to make rental history appear more expensive than it was, and every online posting should be read as aspirational price, not
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by rprend 1y ago
Pix, UPI, etc are nationally silo'd and have little risk of spreading around the world. They took over their respective countries because they were government backed and mandatory. The US has its own version of this: government backed,
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by rprend 1y ago
it's important to note that Pix took over Brazil because it was mandatory. The US Federal Reserve built equivalent infra: FedNow, as of 2023, is the rails for instant settling, $.04 bank transfers. But adoption is meh
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by rprend 1y ago
Ya we looked in to the wallet fund model and while it solves fraud concerns, it introduces new frictions (funding the wallet) that makes growth tough. Cashapp pay is leading in this department, and since they own the POS terminal Square the
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by rprend 1y ago
Stablecoins do seem to address all these concerns. USD backed, and I believe Visa/Mastercard are adding stablecoin support so that there will soon be stablecoin debit cards. Our thesis on crypto was that American consumers will never p
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by rprend 1y ago
I’ll talk to my cofounder about open sourcing. In payments, though, the code isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the licensing/regulation and most of all the risk analysis. You need a partnership with someone with an MTL to move mone
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by rprend 1y ago
The merchant would disagree, but the merchant is lying to themselves, haha. The tough lesson i had to learn was people’s stated preferences often don’t match their revealed preferences. I really wanted it to be true so i gave them a ton of
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by rprend 1y ago
I’m still convinced that someone could play our playbook and it would work. Just someone with deeper pockets and deeper industry connections. Luxury is struggling in 2025 and is losing to the resale market which is growing 3x faster. They’r
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by rprend 1y ago
We tried with SMBs (it was our original focus, low net margin businesses). But 1. Deployment times are way worse in person, 2. Merchants still actually didn’t care (they said they did! But there was no strong need). 3. conversion at checkou
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by rprend 1y ago
This is ecom, not in person, and we found these places are brand agnostic about payments— they don’t control the look/feel of PayPal, Klarna, etc. And for every Hermes, there are a dozen luxury merchants less anal about the brand. Whit
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by rprend 1y ago
Haha i wish i were just a bean counting manager. A number of venture backed startups have tried exactly this idea, and it was a tarpit. Confused about your hate of acronyms. The bank rails are a practical limitation on how effectively a sta
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by rprend 1y ago
Speaking as someone who tried (and failed) to build a competitor, merchants don’t actually care about the fees. We built a mobile payment system using bank transfer rails (ACH debits and FedNow credits) for ecom platforms. QR payments, just
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by rprend 1y ago
I suspect people wouldn’t actually like the alternative. An alternative world where it’s relatively easy to get an MTL, or consequences for AML aren’t huge, looks a lot like crypto. Imagine banks and money processors doing rugpulls or going