Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2021 essay "Payments in Japan," tracing how Japanese consumers navigate a landscape with dozens of competing payment methods at once: credit cards, electronic money, QR-code super apps, convenience-store cash vouchers, and bank transfers. Along the way he covers the JFTC's campaign to force credit card networks to disclose interchange rates, how Rakuten and 7-Eleven each bought a bank to solve a payments problem blocking their core business, why PayPay's subsidized 2018 launch let it run away with the QR code market, and why konbini payments remain popular despite a user experience frozen in the late 1990s.


Full transcript available here: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/japanpayments/


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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:44) Credit cards
(10:40) Payment method heterogeneity
(12:57) Cash
(14:57) Sponsors: Mercury + MongoDB
(17:29) Cash (cont’d)
(19:58) Electronic money systems
(22:13) App-based payments
(28:27) Convenience store payments
(31:27) Bank transfers
(34:03) Ambitions thwarted
(34:30) Wrap


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