Is it time for a REAL card payment alternatives to come?

[italkcash]

For far to long the world of payment has been dominated by the duo-poly, Visa Inc and Mastercard. In any regards these cards are not only the only ones to dominate the world stage of payment, but there is more and more evidence of how much the US government is controlling its interest through these two companies.

Let us look at some facts in regards to Visa & Mastercard.

- Each and every bank on the planet that wants to offer their clients a payment solution which is widely accepted they either offer Visa or Mastercard. Some would arguably add that there is Maestro (sub-brand of Mastercard), Dinners Club Card (owned by Discover Financial Services in the USA), Amex (owned by an American company).

- After going through a lengthy due-diligence process, banks have to apply to a Visa and/or Mastercard license, a socalled BIN, which in turn is completely up to Visa & Mastercard to issue or not to the respective bank.

This shows us that apart from the Japanese JCB card and the growing amount of users hooked up with the CUP card (from China) there is no alternative that is not American owned, American controlled, and American government supervised.

This is bad in many ways as the highly effective interbank networks that Visa and Mastercard have build up is something banks either sign up for, or they get left out of the entire payment scheme.

Through an article posted earlier today on The Guardian here it also shows how much of an interest the American government has in keeping complete control of the Visa and Mastercard interbank networks.

With these networks the American government can more or less track each and every person on this planet that has a credit card or debit card issued by one of the institutions in USA (Visa, Mastercard, Diners, Amex).

So when did this go awfully wrong?

Well apart from the whole world now knowing how Mastercard closed down the Wikileaks processing merchant, followed through by Visa same day this has occurred in the past as well, probably many more times than documented one single place.

Another case earlier this year was the attack on the widely known and popular online payment system, Epassporte, which was shut down without reason, or notification by Visa. Naturally this effected the owners of Epassporte a lot as they could not see any reason behind such an attack, but then again, a duo-poly cannot be questioned, since its all controlled by a monopoly.

What we as a pure financial community can hope for is complete openness in regards to payment gateways, interbank networks and card alternatives in the future. One of those could be the European EAPS card program or the European Monnet card program (read more here) or even the Russian soon to be National Payment Card System (NPCS). Currently only China has shown muscles in doing something out of the ordinary with their CUP card program that is exclusively dominant in China, while slowly catching on in the rest of the world.