Opinion

Payment professionals seem to have this idea that they are the knight in shining armor who is standing between the clueless and childlike customer and the omnipotent criminal. In their pursuit of safety for everybody, they seem to be willing to sacrifice privacy, self-determination and individual responsibility one small step at a time.

I say that customers are perfectly capable and willing to take responsibility for their actions, and they should bear the consequences of their actions instead of hiding behind the bogeyman of the criminal who, in the imagination of the risk managers, keeps getting ever more sophisticated and smarter every year. By now, all these online criminals must be geniuses that would make Prof Moriarty look like an amateur.

Competition is good, and any open and interoperable payment system should make it easy for new players, small and big, to join. In this spirit, I am happy that another e-wallet has entered the market: MannyPay.

To satisfy my curiosity, I downloaded the app on my iPhone and tried to enroll. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get past a nonsensical error message, and the app froze on the screen where you are supposed to enter a passcode from a text message (which also never arrived).

Nevertheless, I have some initial comments, and I will update this post when they have fixed their teething issues.

Everything that can be said about merchant surcharge and interchange fees has already been said, for instance (1), (2) or (3), but it hasn’t been said by everybody yet. Especially not by me. So, here I go.