✋ No more benefits on your credit cards!

Also this week:

  • 🧧 Tax deduction with Vipps

  • 👋 Goodbye, Facebook Pay!

  • ➗Products are functions

  • ☑️ The world's most satisfying checkbox

✋ No more benefits on your credit cards!

The Ministry of Justice and Public Security in Norway has just submitted a proposal to ban the offer of additional benefits for credit cards. The thought is that a stricter regulation in this field will make fewer people take up credit, and it is unfortunate if the bonus program acts as an incentive to pay by credit card rather than debit.

The Financial Authority of Norway states that a general ban on offering additional benefits when taking out credit will be effective but probably more intrusive than necessary to remedy the unfortunate aspects. Many consumers probably perceive that credit cards' travel insurance is a good thing, and a ban on offering travel insurance with the cards will not be a proportionate measure.

Therefore, they suggest opening the additional benefits for users who want to pay with debit. Suppose a lender offers benefits (insurance, discounts, bonuses ) when using a credit card. In that case, the benefits must be offered equally to consumers who want to pay with debit solutions.

What is the consequence of this? Many niche banks don't have any debit solutions and aren't connected to the banking system in a way that allows them to offer debit cards or other debit solutions. Suppose these banks can continue to provide additional benefits under the proposed regulation (After all, this is why most of them exist). In that case, they must cooperate with other players to offer debit solutions or make necessary changes.

This could also potentially mean the end of credit cards as we know them in Norway and companies offering top-up cards with credit lines instead (if you're eligible).

The consultation note is also rather one-sided: Not once did they write about the consumer benefits of having a credit line to pay for travels or products online before you get it in the mail and the fraud protection users get from that.

🧧 Tax deduction with Vipps

In Norway, you can get a tax deduction on monetary gifts to selected organizations if the gift is from 500 to 25 000 NOK and is given to the same organization within a year. The process so far has been a bit cumbersome for one-time payments, but an innovation from Vipps makes it easy to activate tax deductions: The organization activates tax deductions in their portal. The next time a donor wishes to tip a gift to the organization, they can start the tax deduction by giving consent for Vipps to share necessary information with the Norwegian Tax Administration. This is a clever solution from Vipps to be the preferred payment solution for giving to NGOs.

👋 Goodbye, Facebook Pay!

Facebook Pay is rebranding to Meta Pay as a consequence of their company rebrand last year. This caught my attention at the same time as Accenture wrote about why money in the metaverse is a massive opportunity for banks. They see four distinct opportunities for banks in the metaverse:

  1. Become trusted custodians of digital assets

  2. Offer virtual wallets any customer can understand and use.

  3. Create the standards for safe, smooth, "pay any way" transactions

  4. Build bridges between the metaverse and the real world.

➗Products are functions

Ryan Singer has written about an exciting framework for thinking about products that force you to think about what happens before and after users use the product. He argues that products are functions that take an input and give you an output. It's an interesting thought I recommend reading if you create products:

Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation.

☑️ The world's most satisfying checkbox

To round things off before we take (a well-deserved) summer vacation, I thought it was fitting to share this case study about creating the world's most satisfying checkbox and how to apply a game feel to product design.

That's it before summer 👋

We'll be back again in August!

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X