Visa Now Paying Businesses to go cashless

By Matt Agorist July 17, 2017

According to the most recent data, Visa — which is mostly owned by banks–accounts for over 50 percent of all credit card transactions and 70 percent of all debit card transactions in the world. Hundreds of billions in transactions process through Visa’s databases every year and this number continues to grow.

Despite their overwhelming increase in market share, cards issued, and overall total volume, Visa has made a recent move that shows they intend to completely snub out their most unaccountable, untraceable, and most liberty-associated competitor and means of payment–cash.

In a news release, ostensibly written as an attempt to “help small businesses,” Visa announced that they are launching “a major effort to encourage businesses to go cashless. Aiming to create a culture where cash is no longer king, the program will give merchants increased ability to accept all forms of global digital payments.”

“At Visa, we believe you can be everywhere you want to be, and that it should be easy to pay and be paid in more ways than ever — whether it’s a phone, card, wearable or other device,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s head of global merchant solutions, said in a statement. “We have an incredible opportunity to educate merchants and consumers alike on the effectiveness of going cashless.”

Laughably, Visa claims that companies who stop accepting cash — a major form of payment for people around the globe — that they could increase profits.

Apparently, they want business owners to forget that they take upwards of five percent of every single transaction.

“The important thing to realize is that going with ‘fast and easy’ is not always the best and most cost effective,” Marco Carabjo, a credit expert, wrote in a 2013 U.S. Small Business Administration blog post.

“Typical merchant account companies can charge up to 5 percent of everything a company earns with prices consisting of merchant processing costs, gateway fees, interchange costs, Visa, MasterCard, American Express charges, statement fees and so on.”

Outside of the obvious reason of convincing businesses to go cashless so they can tax their sales into oblivion by creating a monopoly on accepting payments, the implications for control and surveillance are far more insidious.
Visa — just like government — wants to monitor your spending habits and use that data to exploit humanity. This is why governments and banks across the world have almost simultaneously launched a war on cash.
Earlier this year, the European Commission proposed enforcing “restrictions on payments in cash” under an all-too-familiar premise — terrorism.
“Payments in cash are widely used in the financing of terrorist activities,” the Commission’s proposal states. “In this context, the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments could also be explored. Several Member States have in place prohibitions for cash payments above a specific threshold.”              The free thought project