“PayPal bought Paydiant.”

What a total waste of eBay shareholders’ funds; notwithstanding that PayPal’s “best by” date has passed; Paydiant is some sort of clunky reverse ACH direct debit process for mobiles (ie, apparently, at each transaction you give your bank the authority to direct credit the particular merchant’s account, always assuming that you have the necessary funds/credit to do so).

But, more materially, when one considers that the members of the MCX consortium “hate” MasterCard and Visa because of credit card fees that are, in fact, not charged by the card companies but by the card-issuing banks, they are going to love having to now deal with eBay’s “PreyPal”, an entity that, undoubtedly, they would otherwise not touch with a forty-foot pole …

“The CFPB has it in for payday lenders …”

And in the case of their investigation of eBay’s faux bank’ “PreyPal”, long overdue …

“Real Time and Same Day ACH was debated in the U.S. as competing/complementary proposals were put in front of banks to incentivize them to enhance their current settlement systems so that faster and ubiquitous ACH-enabled payments could be provided to consumers and businesses.”

This is an interesting situation. Bear in mind that the banks don’t even trust each other let alone, without appropriate security, trust any unlicensed, unregulated, uninsured “merchant of sorts”, as eBay’s faux bank, PayPal, has conveniently described itself when arguing that it should not be subjected to the same prudential constraints that are applied to licensed financial institutions.

Interbank transactions therefore are aggregated for daily (overnight) settlement between banks via their ACH system. The system is not “interactive”, nor need it so be.

Direct debits/credits via the ACH system were never intended as a means for parasitic intermediaries to ride, at nominal cost, on the backs of the banks’ existing systems and then take the lion’s share of an inflated merchants’ discount fee for themselves. ACH direct debits/credits are likewise not interactive and were never intended to be; they were only ever meant to be a means of enabling regular debits or credits between entities, where any risk to the paying bank was quantifiable and minimized.

In reality, merchants already have all they need to access the cheapest possible form of in-store payment: it’s called the “debit” card, and such debit card transactions could not be more nominal in cost, faster or more secure for everyone involved.

‘Former Walmart CEO Lee Scott is reported to have said, “I don’t know that MCX will succeed, and I don’t care. As long as Visa suffers.”’

Frankly, I don’t know what Wal-Mart’s ex chief was complaining about; and now they are going to have to deal with eBay’s “PreyPal”—LOL …

The eBay executive suite—where the incompetent mingle with the disingenuous, the malevolent and the outright criminal, and the just plain stupid … http://bit.ly/11F2eas