Everyone wants to be your wallet

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his Bits About Money essay on the business of wallets, with new commentary, prompted by paying his barber $100 over Venmo and wondering why PayPal so badly wants to be in the middle of that transaction. He walks through the economics that make wallets irresistible to anyone already moving money for users: funds enter the ecosystem at card interchange rates, move inside it at the cost of a database transaction, and get topped up over ACH pulls that cost about five cents at scale. From there he covers co-branded debit and credit cards, the loss-sharing language in PayPal's 10-K, Apple's 15 basis points on Apple Pay, and why a checkout page crowded with payment buttons starts to look like advertising inventory.

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Full transcript available here: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/everyone-wants-to-be-your-wallet/

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Links:

Source essay: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-business-of-wallets/Link: https://stripe.com/payments/link –

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro