Whenever I hear about a US based payment processor, I feel compelled to mention UPI, India's Unified Payment Interface.
Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees.
We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want a cut of transactions for the incredible service of making a number go up in one place and down in another place. Instead of fixing bank-to-bank transfers, we're stuck with ACH, which for some godforsaken reason takes days to clear.
There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. There's no reason why we MUST allow rent-seeking payment processors to take a cut when someone in Mumbai can make a peer or merchant transfer for free in seconds.
You're ignoring history and momentum. (I am likely wrong on some parts of the below). Credit cards have been present in the United States for a century (I believe originating as store credit), within becoming ubiquitous after the mag strip was invented in the 1970s, and really starting to replace checks and cash in the '80s and '90s. Because of this, the US had a very large infrastructure and consumer momentum to continue to use credit cards. Adopting another system requires banks and merchants to all agree on such the system. Without government intervention, that's pretty hard.
Many nations didn't have such systems in place, so they were prime to have their own technology be brought forward. That's why WePay was able to spread in China.
The other huge factor here is that forcing things on companies in the US is extremely difficult. Our constitution and laws make it a lot more difficult for the government to force certain behavior on private businesses. Along with the cultural idea of free enterprise, people don't like the government making decisions for them on how a business should be run.
In India, the Bank of India and the government was able to force UPI down everyone's throat, and companies have no choice on the matter.
I think the U.S. federal government is working on a payment system. At first it will just work between banks. I dunno if that means consumers can use it between their banks or if it means B2B bank transactions, but they are working on something (and I recall it’s close).
Edit: FedNow, May 2023, pricing not yet released. It is for business and consumers
> There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI.
You're right there is no technical reason, but there is a very strong political reason.
They way things are now, people in the US have to pay for a lot of things that people don't pay for in other countries. Bank Transfers is just one example. Health Insurance (and care) is another. Higher education. Filing taxes. This list is endless.
Making people pay for this stuff is extremely good for the economy, and probably a big part of the reason the USA has the highest GDP.
It also makes many, many hundreds of billions of dollars for those entrenched in those industries, who will spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars lobbying to make sure it never changes.
Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees.
We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want a cut of transactions for the incredible service of making a number go up in one place and down in another place. Instead of fixing bank-to-bank transfers, we're stuck with ACH, which for some godforsaken reason takes days to clear.
There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. There's no reason why we MUST allow rent-seeking payment processors to take a cut when someone in Mumbai can make a peer or merchant transfer for free in seconds.
UPI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface