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Comment by havaloc | Hacker News Reader

V and MC need to be careful here. My natural gas utility has decided to turn off auto pay using credit cards completely.

V and MC should be happy to collect their 3-5% and leave it alone, but keep on kicking the bear and acceptance and usage is going to go down.

They are going to kill the golden goose. If they were smart (and they aren't), they'd work to lower fees and make sure that utility providers can continue to accept cards at a lower fee structure. We are at peak credit card usage and with any increase that's only going to drop.

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Agreed. More and more companies are allowing ACH and passing (some of) the savings to the customer. I worked in this industry and it is really hard to get users to be comfortable with linking a bank account, but the incentive for the company is pretty huge. Any company that can bribe the user to make the switch should. Especially for recurring payments.

Problem with ACH is you have to cancel your bank account to stop withdrawals. There are horror stories of people getting fired and being unable to stop ACH withdrawals (I'd rather my rent bounce this month than not be able to eat, etc) and ending up hosed. With a card you can just cancel the card number. It's best to use your bank's bill pay (push) instead of any external automated billing (pull).

T-Mobile no longer provides an autopay discount unless you switch to ACH from credit card payment.

Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325778

Luckily, you can still manually pay each month using a credit card. With two data breaches already in 2023, I'm not trusting T-Mobile with my bank account information.

Yup TMobile gets a Privacy.com virtual card from me to minimize collateral from their breaches.

Especially as the barriers to entry for competitors are much lower with QR code/mobile payments taking off in many countries (UPI, tikkie, swish, mobilpay, paypay etc etc)

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