How To Resolve Pricing Paradoxes

InĀ Five Pricing Paradoxes, we covered many pricing paradoxes and speculated on why they happen. In this post, we will examine if and how they need to be fixed. Is There A Problem? While there’s a logic to pricing paradoxes, we cannot expect the Average Customer to accept them. As a result, they will complain about … Read more

Five Pricing Paradoxes

According to common wisdom, middleman adds a margin, so his price will be higher than the original manufacturer’s price. Why do D2C brands price their products higher on their own website and make them cheaper on marketplaces like Amazon? I always assumed buying from their website is cheaper, given they save on commissions. What's the … Read more

Shattering The Myth Of Exorbitant Credit Card MDR

Since times immemorial, merchants have complained that banks charge exorbitant fees for processing credit card payments. Called Merchant Discount Rate (MDR), this fee is around 2% of the transaction value, as described in my blog post titled Credit Card Primer – Interchange, MDR & Surcharge. In this post, I will shatter the myth that MDR … Read more

Credit Card Primer – Interchange, MDR & Surcharge

This post provides a quick primer on MDR, Interchange, and Surcharge, and covers a few recent updates to rules around these key concepts in the credit card industry. 1. Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) When you buy something worth $100 and pay with a credit card, the merchant gets $97.62. The difference of $2.38 is the … Read more

Unveiling What Merchants & Banks Learn About You When You Tap Your Credit Card

Among others, the credit card value chain comprises the following entities: Consumer (aka Customer, Cardholder), who uses the credit card to pay for the purchase Merchant (aka Store, Retailer), who sells what the consumer purchases Issuer Bank, which issues the credit card to the consumer Acquirer Bank, which issues the POS terminal and Merchant Agreement, … Read more

Zepto Becomes The First Quick Commerce Unicorn

Zepto just became the first unicorn in the Quick Commerce space. Zepto, an India-based grocery delivery company, secured a $200 million Series E at a $1.4 billion valuation in a deal led by Stepstone Group. – Axios Pro. Compared to UDAAN and a couple of other startups that became unicorns in six months or so, … Read more

Utilities: New Source Of Subscription Trap

Media, OTT, SaaS and other recurring-revenue businesses generate revenues from subscriptions funded by credit card- (or debit card-) based standing instructions that automatically charge the cardholder’s account every month. As their consumer, if you want to stop a subscription, you’d want to click a cancel button on their website or app and be done with … Read more

How AI Can Take Readability Of Bills And Statements To The Next Level

In Bills And Statements Are Hard To Decipher, we noted that it was very hard to read bills and statements from banks, ecommerce companies, retailers and other industries. We took two examples and did a deep dive to understand the full extent of the indecipherability problem: Ecommerce Bill Bank Statement In this post, we will … Read more

Why Are Bills And Statements So Frigging Hard To Decipher?

People regularly complain that it’s very hard to decipher bills and statements from banks. Rant from Quora: Why are the description info on Bank Account Statements so confusing? We cannot find what is the debit for and from whom the payment / transfer has come in. End of the month when you see the statement … Read more

Hair Splitting In Finance

Between Eight WYSINWYG Terms In Finance – Part 1 and Eight WYSINWYG Terms In Finance – Part 2, we covered eight terms in finance that should not be taken literally i.e. they’re WYSINWYG (“What You See Is Not What You Get” – to be pronounced “wisinwig”). To recap, they were: Nonprofit Company Winner Takes All … Read more