Card transaction fees. Businesses hate them. Banks love them. Lawmakers want to cap them. Consumers often end up paying them in the form of higher prices for goods and services.
In the US, these fees are a long-running source of contention between merchants and payment processors. Visa and Mastercard, the two biggest card networks in the world, handled $14.8tn and $9tn worth of transactions respectively last year. Both are under fire from regulators for their dominant positions, with the justice department filing an antitrust lawsuit against Visa last month.
But some countries have found a workaround — in the form of instant payments. So-called account-to-account (A2A) systems allow customers to pay merchants directly from their bank accounts — often with a simple scan of a QR code — instead of using a debit or credit card. They have taken off in a big way in countries such as Poland, Thailand and Malaysia.