It was a real eye-opener for me when the credit card duopoly blocked out Wikileaks. That's another thing with the credit cards, we actually have a de-facto duopoly on payments! Duopolies and monopolies are very bad indeed!

In Norway we've had our domestic debet payment solution BankAxept. It's much cheaper to use than Visa/Mastercard - often a credit card transaction costs as much as 2.5% in fees. The consumer won't see this - for the end consumer it's most often the same price either he pays with BankAxept, Visa or cash. Quite some shops in Norway accepted only BankAxept - but it has been changing during the last decade. The shops have to accept credit cards or else they will lose turnover.

The credit cards are being pushed hard. The fees collected during payment processing, the currency exchange fees in case one uses the card abroad, plus the possibility to charge high interests should the payer fail to pay all of his credit card bill on time - it's quite a lot of money indeed. Some of it goes to Visa/Mastercard, but the banks also get a kickback (plus all the interests), and they often also pay the customer for using the card (either by a direct kickback, or by perks like free insurance, 30 days free credit, etc). So, we have the situation that the end customers are actually bribed to forego BankAxept and cash, and use Visa/Mastercard instead. In the short term, those end customers choosing credit cards are winning on this, but in the long term it's only MasterCard/Visa earning on it.