After Singapore & Australia, Now Amazon to stop accepting Visa cards in UK

Wildberries – Russia’s Amazon Rival Wildberries or also called Russia’s Amazon (Wildberries), also began charging Visa and Mastercard users an extra fee of 2%.

Instigating a 0% commission scheme to commission to encourage customers to use Mir Card (a payment system created by Russia’s Central Bank), SberPay (run by state-owned banking giant Sberbank) or other local options. When using Visa or Mastercard, customers now have to pay a commission of 2% of the cost of the goods they are ordering. To justify their decision, Wildberries said that international payment systems offer far lower commission rates in other countries and claimed this was “obvious discrimination against Russian businesses”.

Yes, A2A payment is just started in Western countries.

What is A2A payments ?

Account-to-Account (A2A) payments move money directly from one account to another without the need for additional intermediaries or payment instruments, such as cards.

FIS’ Global Payments Report 2020 predicted that A2A payments will account for 20% of all e-commerce payments, surpassing both credit and debit cards by 2023.

A2A payments, which travel over national clearing systems like the UK’s Faster Payments, eliminate the need for intermediaries and therefore have huge potential to reduce friction, boost efficiency, and deliver at a much lower cost.

In the UK, one in four credit cards can now be paid off using an A2A payment.

At Token, A2A payments doubled every month between March and December last year, and transaction volumes this year are growing 20% month-on-month. Interestingly, the average transaction size is over £400, which suggests that early adopters include merchants selling high-end products, drawn in by the compelling cost savings on offer. In terms of conversion rates, after selecting ‘pay by bank’, 85-95% are moving forward with their payment selection. The drop-out rate has reduced over the last six months as consumers become more comfortable with A2A payments as a choice. Moreover, success rates are in excess of 98% for those that proceed with the payment type.

Considering the timelines -

A2A payments will continue to grow, simply because they’re better. Merchants can have it all – great reach (anyone with a bank account), great conversion rates (exceptional UX with no data entry), and lower costs (no intermediaries).

Another advantage is that merchants can now combine the power of data with the payment; they can harness Open Banking data to assess a customer’s creditworthiness, get insights, and track their loyalty.

Merchants have to adopt en masse of course, but in the UK we’re already moving beyond the early adopters, and once A2A payments are available from all gateways and PSPs there will be a huge boost in numbers.

The question is when will A2A payments drop the term alternative ?

I was involved in internet banking in 2000 and mobile banking in 2010, and it took us 10 years to stop referring to these channels as alternative. I believe with A2A payments it will take half the time, and in five years they’ll no longer be an alternative payment method – just a form of digital payment.

Source - https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/21104/will...

One or maybe 2 visa cards is enough to use international transactions.

RuPay card is not useless, the reason you can get the luxury type services in your super premium tier Credit card (last time you said in other post) because very few users use Amex cards or Visa super premium credit cards.

When more and more people start using super premium credit cards (higher MDR charges cards), merchants will stopped accepting those cards. This is a true fact. Last time you couldn’t digest my words when I said that RuPay prepaid card MDR charges have already increased to 2.5% and some merchants already refuse to accept RuPay prepaid cards.

Yo, large merchants like Amazon have their own payment gateways and the payment gateways pay an amount to the card companies for each transactions.