Visa and MasterCard have surged in the past two decades, reaching a combined $1 trillion market cap. That has attracted unwanted attention from regulators.
And credit unions offer accounts with lower fees and higher interest rates than commercial banks, whose only advantages are having more branch offices, ATMs, and a bigger marketing budget.
Postal banking solves this deficit by making every post office a branch of the national credit union.
If you have a card issued by a credit union, yours probably has this too. It means you can use any other credit union’s ATMs that have this symbol without fees as if they were owned by your credit union.
There are thousands of credit unions across the US operating tens of thousands of ATMs. 7-Eleven ATMs are also part of this network.
I’m not saying that postal banking is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea, as a way to serve underserved communities and as a way to generate revenue for the Postal Service, if nothing else. But the idea of not-for-profit banking on a national scale isn’t exactly a new concept.
What country is this?
In the US, we have credit unions. Credit unions are member-owned not-for-profit financial institutions that offer the same services as banks.
And credit unions offer accounts with lower fees and higher interest rates than commercial banks, whose only advantages are having more branch offices, ATMs, and a bigger marketing budget.
Postal banking solves this deficit by making every post office a branch of the national credit union.
See this symbol?
If you have a card issued by a credit union, yours probably has this too. It means you can use any other credit union’s ATMs that have this symbol without fees as if they were owned by your credit union.
There are thousands of credit unions across the US operating tens of thousands of ATMs. 7-Eleven ATMs are also part of this network.
I’m not saying that postal banking is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea, as a way to serve underserved communities and as a way to generate revenue for the Postal Service, if nothing else. But the idea of not-for-profit banking on a national scale isn’t exactly a new concept.
If you’re aware of what a back-of-card network is then you should understand how transformative a state-backed zero-fee interchange would be.
That’s essentially what FedNow wants to be, except the goal is to replace the debit card network.
Trying to start a new debit card network is a chicken-and-egg problem.
Not when you’re a government.
Mandate that payment processors have to support the state debit network and you’ll be on half the terminals in the country in under a year.