

Visa Launches PayPal Alternative - aymeric
https://www.payclick.com.au/Home.aspx
That's pretty big news. Some healthy competition in this space will probably be benefitial.<p>Although if Amazon and Google didn't manage to dethrone Paypal in this space, I wonder how Visa will approach the challenge.
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byoung2
I've often wondered why the credit card companies haven't gotten into this
business already. My bank (Bank of America) offers a program called ShopSafe,
where you can generate temporary credit card numbers to use online. You can
set the limit and expiration date, even for recurring transactions. The
numbers are only valid for the first merchant that authorizes a charge.

I wonder why there hasn't been a credit card company that offered a version of
this with the option to prepay or link to a bank account or existing credit
card. That way people could shop online and merchants who are already set up
to accept credit cards wouldn't have to modify their code to interface with
yet another payment API. The credit card companies would still get money from
the fees charged to merchants, and they could also earn interest on the
balances users keep.

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jules
The iDEAL system is very good also. It works like this:

1\. You click checkout

2\. You are sent to your bank's website

3\. You login

4\. You get a screen that shows the amount you have to pay, you verify this

5\. You get an SMS with a code that you have to enter

6\. Purchase completed

The nice thing about this is that it's very quick and the seller doesn't get
your credit card number; steps 2-6 happen on your bank's website. And there is
no intermediary: it's just the seller's bank and your bank. There is nothing
to set up, you just have to have a bank that supports it (almost all banks in
the netherlands do) The nice thing for sellers is that chargebacks are not
possible. This is a much saner way to do online payments.

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trebor
What about for people without SMS?

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jules
They either buy a $10 phone, or they use another payment method. Or perhaps
there are banks that don't require SMS authentication, but I don't want to be
a customer.

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Groxx
_The amount of money held in a payclick account must be between $20 to $1000
and withdrawals to a bank account are not allowed. Payclick also supports
recurring transactions_

WTFno. That's not a PayPal competitor. That's a way to _guarantee_ that you
spend money - a credit card company's wet dream.

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hippich
this is a no way a paypal alternative. in paypal you pay to arbitary email.
and in this "alternative" - you actually need to go thru some screening
process to open seller account..

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r0s
Seems glaringly obvious, the reason Paypal exists is the fluidity it gives to
transactions. Visa could simply match features and clean up, but no.

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sjs
As a Canadian who uses PayPal to pay for things directly from my bank account,
I'll believe it when I see it. No PayPal "alternative" that I've heard of will
let me do this.

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mistermann
Agreed, as a Canadian, we are usually a few years behind, and as for Visa,
almost every time I use my credit card online I have to reset my "verified by
visa" password, because I can't remember the password from the last 20 times I
had to reset it, but luckily all it takes to reset it is the skill testing
question of what is my mothers maiden name.

So I have to go throught this BS reset every time, and whenever someone wants
to steal my credit card, all they need is my mothers maiden name.

What irks me though is that visa knows this is a security flaw, I wish I had
the paper to link the fully explains what isn't immediately obvious.

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dmd
When they ask for your mother's maiden name, you should map that phrase to
"your password, unique to this company" in your head. Now it's not quite as
insecure.

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lenni
Maybe I'm a little biased but being a payment solution and having a URL ending
in Home.aspx shouts "Hack me!".

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bosch
Good troll post, with the up votes it looks like there are other trolls here.
If you're going to say something like this then please back it up with some
data.

Visa is a financial giant within the credit card industry. I'm sure they have
created a secure platform or they would be held liable for any mis-
appropriated funds. Also, Visa would be aware of the fact that any bad press
regarding a hacked platform would cause users not to use it. So I'm fairly
certain they would have taken their time to implement a robust security
design, even though you have misgivings about the .aspx URL.

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grok2
From their FAQ's it appears this is available only in Australia:

Is payclick available to use outside of Australia? No. Australia is the first
country to launch this new product.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Australia: Testing ground for new products, sideways move for past-it
executives, and loads of pretty beaches. Come use our internet while we still
have it.

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r0s
Why bother re-branding? Visa must not put much faith in this venture, or at
least wants to retain the option to dump it.

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aymeric
It is good to see some competition in this space.

Amazon and Google tried before, it will be interesting to see what approach
Visa will take to dethrone Paypal.

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aymeric
I got my comment deleted on this thread. Is it forbidden to comment on the
link you submit?

(The comment was neutral, nothing aggressive)

~~~
alexkay
It wasn't deleted, you cannot submit both the link and the comment (see the
FAQ)

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terra_t
it's pretty different; for one thing, they want people to use it to pay for
downloadables. You can, ~in theory~ sell downloadables through Paypal, but
just try selling $100k in downloadables and withdrawing the money from your
Paypal account...

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nopassrecover
If they make it any easier on developers it'll be a hit.

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known
I hope it's not worse than PayPal.

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ramy_d
well it's about fraking time

