While the payment networks of giants Visa (NYSE: V ) and MasterCard (NYSE: MA ) are enormous and currently cannot be matched, smaller players Discover (NYSE: DFS ) and American Express (NYSE: AXP ) aren't sitting idly by -- they're taking action.
In this video, Motley Fool financial analysts Matt Koppenheffer and David Hanson discuss how Discover is leveraging its smaller network by reaching out to a huge number of partners, and the initiatives American Express is making to reach out to a large number of smaller businesses, where Visa and MasterCard are currently undercutting American Express on price.
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Report this Comment On April 20, 2014, at 5:50 PM, PhilipCohen wrote:
“How Discover and American Express Plan to Takedown Visa and MasterCard”, and
“Are Visa and MasterCard Being Threatened by Silicon Valley?”
Oh, please, Motley Fool, stop publishing such arrantly nonsensical stories! Who is paying you to publish this nonsense, eBay’s Johnny Ho?
Regardless, without exception (except for Amex and Discover), all the “middlemen” payments processors do little or no more than operate Credit Card Merchant Accounts with their own retail bankers and ride, somewhat precariously, on the backs of MasterCard and/or Visa, or the banks’ relatively primitive ACH direct debiting process; none of these “pretenders” are or ever will ever be of any serious threat to the “bankcards”, MasterCard and Visa; not even the other independent “bankcard”, Discover, can possible compete with the systems of the two major players. And what about Amex? Well, they did consign Diners Club (now owned by Discover) to the scrap heap of history, but most merchants are never going to accept Amex’s higher discount fee, and Amex simply does not have anywhere near the number card-carrying users that of the two majors have …
As of 2012, of the total global payments market (volume), Visa has ~52%, MasterCard ~33% and Amex ~11% (total ~96%); that leaves ~4% for the rest: Discover has ~1.6%, JCB (Japan) ~2.2%, and Diners Club (owned by Discover) ~0.4%; that leaves ~0.0% for payments handled directly by all the others. Why do these middlemen not make even a blip in these statistics? Because most of their processing is done on the backs of MasterCard or Visa or, as in the case of eBay’s clunky “PreyPal”, some via ACH direct debits—if any of its users are silly enough to give “PreyPal” such authority.
So, how about some stories on this matter that make some sense, like the probable demise of eBay’s “PreyPal” (outside of its effectively mandated place on the eBay marketplace) now that the two major bankcards have launched their own mobile/online digital wallets …
Report this Comment On April 21, 2014, at 4:04 PM, mikewatson021 wrote:
The positive outlook is based on the expectation that American Express’s earnings will increase 12% in FY14. Shares are currently changing hands at 16.3 times the company’s expected earnings for 2014
http://goo.gl/ZTUsmD
Report this Comment On April 21, 2014, at 4:05 PM, mikewatson021 wrote:
The positive outlook is based on the expectation that American Express’s earnings will increase 12% in FY14. Shares are currently changing hands at 16.3 times the company’s expected earnings for 2014
http://goo.gl/ZTUsmD
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