Note by @jeder

@yassie_j@labyrinth.zone

1y

I’m wearing a tinfoil hat when saying this, but anyway

I wonder if part of the reason why the UK doesn’t have its own national payments processing network that cuts out Visa/Mastercard is because Mastercard actually owns — through it’s Vocalink, that it bought in 2017 — the entire UK payments network.

The Faster Payments services network, the Link cash machine network, and the Bacs direct debit network! They’re all owned by Mastercard!

Therefore, it’s in Vocalink’s (and thus Mastercard’s) best interest to not develop a national payments standard that works off the existing FP network because that would cut them out of the payment processing space in the country.

:neobot_cat_ears_thermia_heart@catwithaclari.net:

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Yaseeniko

@yassie_j@labyrinth.zone

1y

Vocalink were actually working on this in 2015! They had it all worked out. They even had a system where if you paid using a UK bank card, you would bypass Visa/Mastercard and the payment would process using Vocalink instead. It would use the FP network to handle the payment, so the money would be taken directly from your bank acct and transferred over to the merchant, without needing Visa/Mastercard to be in the middle and no need to hand over any data, including the card number

Then Vocalink got sold to Mastercard, and there’s suspiciously very little about this project any more, you can only find dead news articles proclaiming that it would be fully rolled out by 2016

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Jeder

@jeder@miau.jeder.pl

1y

@yassie_j yeah in Poland Blik is partially owned by mastercard iirc
which, Fun

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