The US have a monopoly on credit card payments with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, etc.
Even with online payment systems like PayPal, GPay, Apple Pay.
The only Canadian option that I know of is the new Shop Pay, which is owned by Shopify. (And we all know the founder CEO, Tobias Lutke is a far-right fascist traitor who loves the idea of being a 51st state.)
Right now Visa and Mastercard are controlling what stores can sell, and what services can be provided. Censoring online content, like asking Steam and Itch.io to remove certain games.
What are examples of alternatives in other countries? I know that Japan, for example, has their own independent ones, I think?
Do you think they might be refused by American companies in order to keep their monopoly?
I’d like to know what you think.
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Interac needs to enter the credit card market.
Not just Canada. It’s almost the entire world. Many Asian countries rely on Alipay, the rest of the world is under the control of US payment systems. Even in European countries the UK based Maistro has been replaced for Visa or Mastercard.
I know. It’s ridiculous.
How about accepting Bitcoin?
It won’t even increase the money supply when you do something as benign as buying some good at the super market.
Too speculative. Too unstable in value.
The housing bubble is fueled by QE, the BoC buying half of all mortgage bonds, and cheap mortgage debt.
The entire system is already a ponzi scheme. We made cantillionaires out of home owners as we lead to crisis levels in productive investment.
We have one. We don’t use it for credit cards but we could if we wanted to. We use it for debit transactions.
And it is orders of magnitude cheaper for retailers than credit cards.
The problem is there’s no incentive to use it, as you don’t get the kickback your credit card provides. I’m not sure how the CC duopoly tricked us into disallowing retailer cash/debit discounting.
it’s not the kickback, it’s giving access to my bank account that I’m trying to avoid by using a credit card as a middle man
Yeah, having someone bigger on your side when a purchase goes sideways is a big perk.
The discounting part isn’t really true as of 2022.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/credit-card-surcharge-faq-1.6610356
The only significant revenue streams for most credit card issuers is Interchange fees, Annual fees and Interest. As only a lower flat network fee exist for Interact, merchants are the only ones that would logically offer anything for customers using them. But the difference really doesn’t seem to be worth them bothering giving people 2-3 tier level pricing.
To put it into numbers at $100 transaction it’s like 6 cents for a interact and $1.5-2 fee for a credit card.
Appreciate the clarification. Guess I missed the memo when they changed that a few years back!
I use debit whenever I can. The incentive is to not hand over 2 to 3 percent of my economy to foreigners who contribute nothing.
The incentive is to exchange money for goods without having to carry cash around. Like yeah you get points and shit for cc transactions but if you can’t see that the customer is not the one who benefits and it is merely a tool to drive engagement then I can’t help you.
I mean, for me it literally makes all my purchases 1% cheaper for zero cost so long as I pay the full amount monthly, which I do. It’d make no financial sense to not take advantage of it.
This IMO is part of the problem, because I’m incentivized to take money away from local businesses and give it to the CC duopoly.
Yeah, some kind of legislation here would be nice. At least the credit card companies aren’t as entrenched as in the states.
Your credit card kick back has a yearly fee, and possible interest. They hope you over spend
That’s the thing. I don’t. I make a shit ton of extra cash with bonus points to a point where I can pay off a plane ticket when I go on vacation. That’s a pretty big incentive.
Westjet had a good system before with RBC and you would get flight cash, its be nerfed since they were bought though. And now the Dollars have become Points, which means they can play with point value to adjust pricing
Oh that sucks.
Not all CCs have annual fees. I’ve got one with no fees and I still get 1% back.
No fee is goos. With my spending that 1% would get me $200 back at end of year LOL.
Yeah, it just sucks that we are all paying about an extra 3% more on everything we buy to cover the interchange fees charged on credit transactions, even if we pay cash. It’s built into all the pricing. Years back, there were places that would discount a price by 3% if you paid cash, but I haven’t seen that in years. Best we can do now is get a cash back card to recover some of the loss. The annual fee cards usually get you more back, so if you use a credit card for everything you can, you might be further ahead.
Mine has no fee and I pay it completely every month so no interest. It’s a good place to be. Just perks for purchasing.
Still paying more for goods then we should be.
Eh, sorta.
We have digital payment cards in Interac. A bunch of the chip components come from other countries though, and are part of an integrated supply chain, if that matters. You’re right though, that a chip card / payment card, is ‘technically’ functioning very similarly to a credit card these days.
Where they’re different is in the settlements and insurance side of the transactions. Debit cards are nearly instant settlements in most cases, and require funds to be present in accounts. Credit cards allow for delayed settlement based on statement reviews – so you can challenge bogus payments later, at your convenience, in theory. Both provide a degree of insurance, but generally the CC is better on that front – this is also likely why they’re much more broadly accepted in online payments.
Debit cards can theoretically be sync’d up with a personal loan, to function similar to a credit card in that you can “spend” money you don’t “have” – but doing so would require adjustments to Interacs terms, and likely trigger non compete clauses with Mastercard/Visa for anyone tryin to go that route. In terms of that ‘credit’ though, on a debit card it’d be entirely the liability of the bank/credit union issuing the card – with a proper ‘credit’ card, that liability/risk is essentially offloaded to a larger company that can accommodate larger risk, albeit with higher % interest across the board.
Another fun one though, if you’re thinking credit cards… is that Canada should have its own Canada-focused Credit Bureau. Using US companies like Equifax, means all your credit information is already in the hands of the US Government, even if they have “canadian” wings, due to the US’s Cloud act. Same goes for our government / institutions continuing to use things like Microsoft clouds – all that data is just exposed, and Canada’s doing/done nothin about it. There’re fairly clear reasons the US considers Canada their bitch, I mean, our own government/regulators literally cannot function without US tech companies supporting them / providing them with service.
A few years ago I made the choice to switch all of my purchasing from debit to a credit card. So far it’s been entirely the right decision for me. Besides the safety of never using my own funds directly, I earn points and perks on my purchases.
Disclaimer: I pay the card off completely every month so there are no interest charges, and it’s resulted in both my credit rating and available credit skyrocketing far more than I’ll ever need. Comforting for emergencies.
My chequing account is tied to a credit margin. Any overdraft is added to the credit margin which I can pay off later.
The other thing about CCs is the security of having extended warranties, travel insurance, fraud protection, etc.
Interac has things like extended warranties and fraud protection, it’s just not ‘generally’ as good. Like here’s one from a mid sized CU in BC, community savings, talkin bout some of the perks. The extended warranty part reads as:
Extended Warranty doubles the repair period on a manufacturer’s authorized Canadian warranty up to two extra years for purchases made worldwide. It covers products with a manufacturer’s authorized Canadian warranty of five years or less.
That coverage is better than some CCs from what I can tell, as many CC’s cap it at one extra year.
That’s pretty damn good!
Canada doesn’t need its own payment system.
The EU does and we’ll just be compatible. That’s best.
Base it all on the euro just to kickstart the greenback’s tumble from international relevance.
I’d still prefer something independent from other nations.
I think we need our own everything. If it isn’t being done in Canada and we are relying on someone else for it, we should be on that whenever and as soon as possible. Especially considering how unstable the geopolitical situation is.
Don’t get all isolationist, my friend. Having domestic options is a good idea, but you will be dependent on international countries somehow. And that’s true for the world, right?
So, maybe soften your stance. Or don’t, as you prefer.
I read their comment as proposing to aim for potential self-sufficiency. That doesn’t necessarily imply isolationism. Developing homegrown options isn’t mutually exclusive with global trade.
It can just mean having domestic alternatives to assert our sovereignty in case, say, a fascist movement takes over the government of our largest trading partner with who we share the world’s longest border, or something like that. Purely a hypothetical, of course.
I see no reason to soften my stance as it isn’t isolationist to say anything we can do on our own we should be doing on our own considering the unstable geopolitical climate. That’s true for every country, wouldn’t you agree?
Except,
If it isn’t being done in Canada and we are relying on someone else for it, we should be on that
and
anything we can do on our own we should be doing on our own
don’t mean the same thing. The former is “everything we’re not doing” and the latter is “everything we’re not doing but can.”
At least the light is bright from the gas.
If it isn’t done in Canada, we should be on that. Whatever we can do ourselves, we should be doing on our own.
I know you understood what I meant, especially considering the further elaboration you cited, so if you respond I expect you to do so in good faith.
We’re also an international destination for education, travel, and business. We absolutely could present an alternative to VISA and expect international participation.
That’s one thing to add to the list to boycott the US. Stop using visa and mastercard and use debit instead.
I really wish I could.
Well… you can. What’s stopping you?
Edit: Actually let me answer that myself: online payments. None of the sites I know use Interac. It’s strictly credit cards and Paypal.
Credit card charges need to be transparent and charged directly to the user and not the merchant. Otherwise there is no downward pressure on pricing and Canadian consumers will continue to get ripped off.
I know that Japan, for example, has their own independent ones, I think?
Many companies have payment methods like QR codes that link with bank accounts (or require manually topping up in their own system from your account via transfer or ATM) and we have that in Japan. I’m not aware of any credit card that isn’t using the VISA/MC/Amex infrastructure (unless you want to count gift cards that only work in a specific store). I don’t know if the QR codes work at all for online stuff (I’m a luddite about that stuff: cash and credit work fine for me).
The other thing to note that, even were Canada to create its own domestic network, travel becomes harder for Canadians until/unless any common networks integrate with it.
Don’t we have JCB? Is that piggybacking off MC or Visa’s infrastructure?
And yes, you can do online payments using stuff like PayPay.
I did a little bit of digging (I checked before my comment and noted JCB asked the user to pick Visa or MC, but didn’t dig deeper). Apparently, they do use their own network domestically, but overseas they user partner networks (Amex, Discover, UnionPay, etc.)
Very cool. Thank you for doing the digging!
“Diner’s Club”? What year is it? 1987? That’s the last time I remember a business actually accepting that card…
Discover Financial Networks was for sale. But instead of Canada buying it, it’s now owned by capital one. Gotta be quicker next time!
Nothing’s going to beat GNU Taler.
BRICS
No.
Keep using USD then?
Do you know what “sovereignty” means?
What currency do we trade our oil in, who accepts Canadian dollars?
I think you’re missing the point.
Not a horrible idea.
