HMRCs digital services in general are pretty good, but refunds not so much.
Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.
If you know Taiwan’s history, and you understand China - there’s no surprise to be..
The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
[2] https://frontierfintech.substack.com/p/55-send-pix-brazils-i...
[3] https://brazilstockguide.com/behind-the-lines/the-cost-of-pi...
> This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation.
> There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day.
> The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics.
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44753626
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Because it is a grift ("regulatory capture"). The "overbearing system" is the result of regulation to bring the consumer excess of cheap payments to an entire country's financial user population. Why does Jamie Dimon not like stablecoin yield [1]? Because JPMC makes almost $100B/year in interest taking customer deposits and lending against them, which stablecoins would compete against by operating as a form of narrow bank, parking the underlying deposits in risk free US Treasuries [2].
As a US financial services consumer, it is hard for you to avoid the rake of the machine built to skim off of you as you hold onto fiat or move it, but the rest of the world can avoid being captured by it (as this piece demonstrates). Also, Europe can't regulate Stripe as easily as they can Adyen. You don't have to be the biggest or the greatest, it just has to work "good enough".
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/29/dimon-jpmorgan-cryp...