Hey
I work in the payment processing industry as a software developer.
Your problem isn't tech, there is a huge regulatory and compliance hurdle. By the time you figure all that out and convince people to use your network, you will be charging the same fees
Naive question, how do you incentivise customers to use it and grow adoption?
My hazy understanding of the traditional credit card network businesses [1] is that a credit card network partners with a retail bank to design a credit card product offering big incentives to customers (points etc) and then gouge the merchants to pay for those customer incentives and also to pay for the network's high fees. Merchants hate it but can't really do anything about it as if they don't offer credit card payment they miss out on a huge chunk of potential business. Customers love it due to the incentives. Every now and again a huge merchant tries to launch their own competing payment system that costs them less than credit cards and they struggle to gain adoption.
Another data point, over here in Australia, an industry group formed by our major banks rolled out the New Payments Platform, in response to a strategic review by our federal reserve bank. NPP supports instant payments for low value retail transactions. It took about 6 years from design to go live, and went live in 2018. It's settled through our federal reserve bank. Wholesale payment fees charged to the banks for these transactions are not disclosed, but apparently amount to a few cents per transaction. As of 2022, 4 years after the NPP's 2018 launch, 75% of transactions and 65% of transaction value was being processed by card networks (this has been growing as cash is used less and less) while the number of card protocol transactions was still around 5-6x the number of NPP transactions [2]. This rate of adoption of NPP is relatively high, probably influenced by Australia having a small number of major retail banks who were part of the industry group designing and rolling out NPP.
I think this is correct. And the poster equally identified this issue.
"Customers love it, merchants hate it".
But customers would drive adoption of any system, and why would they use this one?
Speaking as a merchant, I don't "hate" the fees. They're a cost of doing business (shrug). Like rent. It's just built into the price the customers pay.
And no, I'm not going to have things at multiple prices for different payment options. Life is too short for that kind of admin.
I think ultimately this is where all "payment disruption" falls over - they rely on customers changing, but customers are happy already...
How would this be different than me getting a TransferWise account and getting access to global instant payment rails they plug into (UPI [India], Pix [Brazil], SEPA [Europe], etc)?
that's an interesting map, thank you for sharing it, but oh my it'd be easier to read if they'd decided to use more colours beyond two slightly different shades of green to encode "has instant payments" and "does not have instant payments".
FedNow is extremely exciting, as is the development of local instant payment networks and I’m hoping they can eclipse card networks soon. Development in the US hasn’t been as fast as in other emerging markets though wrt their own networks
As for Venmo/Paypal interoperability across other fintechs is something they’re not supporting at the moment for instance I can’t send money to my friend who uses CashApp and have to use Zelle (so ultimately Zelle/banks win). But that being said they do have a large user base between their two platforms.
Paylias is more closer to the links you shared around instant payment systems, than Wise. In an ideal world, Wise would integrate Paylias’s APIs and issue you an alias that you could use to send/receive/pay money to a friend that uses another wallet.
Hey I work in the payment processing industry as a software developer. Your problem isn't tech, there is a huge regulatory and compliance hurdle. By the time you figure all that out and convince people to use your network, you will be charging the same fees
Naive question, how do you incentivise customers to use it and grow adoption?
My hazy understanding of the traditional credit card network businesses [1] is that a credit card network partners with a retail bank to design a credit card product offering big incentives to customers (points etc) and then gouge the merchants to pay for those customer incentives and also to pay for the network's high fees. Merchants hate it but can't really do anything about it as if they don't offer credit card payment they miss out on a huge chunk of potential business. Customers love it due to the incentives. Every now and again a huge merchant tries to launch their own competing payment system that costs them less than credit cards and they struggle to gain adoption.
Another data point, over here in Australia, an industry group formed by our major banks rolled out the New Payments Platform, in response to a strategic review by our federal reserve bank. NPP supports instant payments for low value retail transactions. It took about 6 years from design to go live, and went live in 2018. It's settled through our federal reserve bank. Wholesale payment fees charged to the banks for these transactions are not disclosed, but apparently amount to a few cents per transaction. As of 2022, 4 years after the NPP's 2018 launch, 75% of transactions and 65% of transaction value was being processed by card networks (this has been growing as cash is used less and less) while the number of card protocol transactions was still around 5-6x the number of NPP transactions [2]. This rate of adoption of NPP is relatively high, probably influenced by Australia having a small number of major retail banks who were part of the industry group designing and rolling out NPP.
[1] e.g. https://joincolossus.com/episode/rampell-visa-the-original-p... [2] https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/annual-reports/psb/2023/...
I think this is correct. And the poster equally identified this issue.
"Customers love it, merchants hate it".
But customers would drive adoption of any system, and why would they use this one?
Speaking as a merchant, I don't "hate" the fees. They're a cost of doing business (shrug). Like rent. It's just built into the price the customers pay.
And no, I'm not going to have things at multiple prices for different payment options. Life is too short for that kind of admin.
I think ultimately this is where all "payment disruption" falls over - they rely on customers changing, but customers are happy already...
How would this be different than me getting a TransferWise account and getting access to global instant payment rails they plug into (UPI [India], Pix [Brazil], SEPA [Europe], etc)?
International instant payment network map: https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea...
Faster and safer instant euro payments become a reality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45532280 - October 2025
[US] FedNow Is Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 - July 2023
Venmo and Paypal users will also send money to each other now using an alias starting in November 2025.
Venmo and PayPal users will be able to send money to each other - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45427088 - September 2025
Maybe I'm missing the value prop?
> International instant payment network map
that's an interesting map, thank you for sharing it, but oh my it'd be easier to read if they'd decided to use more colours beyond two slightly different shades of green to encode "has instant payments" and "does not have instant payments".
FedNow is extremely exciting, as is the development of local instant payment networks and I’m hoping they can eclipse card networks soon. Development in the US hasn’t been as fast as in other emerging markets though wrt their own networks
As for Venmo/Paypal interoperability across other fintechs is something they’re not supporting at the moment for instance I can’t send money to my friend who uses CashApp and have to use Zelle (so ultimately Zelle/banks win). But that being said they do have a large user base between their two platforms.
Paylias is more closer to the links you shared around instant payment systems, than Wise. In an ideal world, Wise would integrate Paylias’s APIs and issue you an alias that you could use to send/receive/pay money to a friend that uses another wallet.
Coinflow does this already and Stripe is working on something similar.
Website: https://paylias.xyz/
Docs: https://apidocs.paylias.xyz/overview/index
Demo video: https://youtu.be/sUiZuVT9yR4