Rick has hit on a particular beef of mine.
For a brief time in the 90s, I was in charge of a banking industry group
looking into consumer payments in the U.S. A number of things were
clear, including the fact that the U.S. consumer payments system is in
the dark ages--very high costs, large amounts of fraud, and slow as
molasses. Au contraire, commercial (wholesale) payments using the Fed
Wire, CHIPS, SWIFT, etc, get done virtually instantaneously worldwide.
Rick is reporting what can be done with modern technology on behalf of
consumer payments. Unfortunately, it's in Germany, not here in the U.S.
The German costs--compared to U.S. consumer payments--are infinitesimal,
the transactions are much more secure, and they are settled promptly.
The reason we do not have the same kind of end-to-end real-time consumer
payments is because the Fed, the credit card companies, and the banks
have a lock on the present system, which is highly profitable for all
concerned. The "electronic" systems in use today are verging on 35 years
old. Over the succeeding years, the unnecessary costs of the antiquated
systems, still in place, likely have exceeded a trillion dollars, borne
in the end by consumers.
Please excuse the bandwidth :-)
73,
John, W3ULS
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