@tango42 answered the question:
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Just to clarify and make this thread even more polluted, I was referring to my questions (plural) in post 52.
If anyone knows anything about why the government is pushing small businesses onto digital payments I am all ears. Also whether they are sponsoring a particular payment rails or infrastructure is interesting to me.
in some particular markets there is a reticence to change ways and systems that have been working for decades.
Taiwan, as Japan, is a market which besides the digital wallets payments has a super conservative and traditional financial system with heaps of bureaucracy, paper needed and old system of liaison between financial providers and clients (registered letter, fax, limited phone, in person attendance to “home” branch with stamps and several pieces of ID if foreigner).
The financial sector in TW is therefore not incentivised to try to actually innovate the critical processes in the back. At the end, ewallets here are a kinda closed system. The connection with the traditional banking system is only with top-up and disbursements, the former made via either card or account debits (each ewallet has partner banks supporting this via an ad-hoc clearing system), while the disbursement is just basically the ewallet operator making a bank local transfer via the local clearing network of the funds to the client own bank account.
Real innovative digital service like the digitisation of all the incredibly bureaucratic FX and crossborder remittance declarations, real online account opening with online ID verification for both individuals and companies, complete digitisation of all correspondence and/or bank documents (like the disappearance of bankbooks) is still a scattered and incoherent exercise at best.
There is no incentive since no one is putting effort in this, just some token initiatives by some players. This is because the barrier to enter the industry is very high, the regulator ultra-conservative and the current players are just happy with the money they are making and lack of vision for innovation.
So the government here needs to push for innovation, but still very little is achieved given the reticence of the regulators to actually enforce the government agenda and the industry participants to take any lead.
This is a distortion of normal market dynamics since it is a protected market with very high barriers to entry, overregulation and control of capital. Hence, an external force needs to push for innovation. But it is not efficient since the force is external, so not complying will not create any externality. Only if a participant starts to do things different and attracts enough customers attentions, then the externality realises and the other participants are compelled to act not to lose their share and profits.
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Perhaps the gold card community can question this “digital minister” on why Taiwanese digital systems often STILL don’t recognise ARC numbers and why Taiwan STILL cannot allow “foreigners” and Taiwanese born abroad (foreigners in the eyes of the Taiwan government.) As to why this group of people are discriminated against for things such as opening bank accounts online, submitting online credit card applications and the like.
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there are many things being done behind closed curtains. Things unfortunately take time in this country… But there is movement and attention from many gov departments and the cabinet.
But bureaucracy overlords have the upper hand, they are simply not collaborating that much.
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Digital payments is a tricky one to get right, a lot of countries have struggled with it. In my own country there were a handful of payments providers in the 1980s. They got bought up by one company, which eventually became the standard for electronic payments debiting from your bank account. The network is run by a fully privately held (!) company, and runs into all the major banks. I’m talking here about going to the supermarket or cafe and using your bank card to pay from your savings account. So if you were opening a shop, you talked to the bank about renting a terminal for $30 a month or so, and they hooked you into this network. In recent years it has been updated to do NFC contactless payments. Alongside this network was the usual Visa/Mastercard credit network, which was separate, but ultimately a customer could pay with either their bank card or credit card, at anywhere that was
bigger than a hamburger shop.
Of course it is a lot harder to establish a massive point of sale payments infrastructure like this today. There are a lot more scraggly startup payment providers in this space. We all know about Line pay, and then you have Quan Lian who seem to have cut an exclusive credit card deal with one or two banks, and then there’s PX Pay. And every other brainfart app payment method. Then the stored value cards. When I go to the convenience store they seem to have a lot of terminals to swipe stuff with.
Whoever wins cannot be stingey, need to invest a huge amount in the POS infra and getting all the banks on board. That is where the government could come in. Hence the reason for my naive question above, if you’ve read this far. I don’t know, I’ve got NFI what is going on here most of the time. Reading the papers is just a hairpulling exercise, it’s just so hard to get any real information from what appear to be mostly airhead journalists trying to fill a page.
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Audrey Tang was pushing for digital compliance certificates some time back, IIRC. He/she lost my respect at that point. Fortunately nothing ever came of it (as far as I can tell - possibly things are rolling along in the back rooms as they are elsewhere).
Techies seem to become enamoured with what their technology does and fail to think about whether it serves any purpose, or might be misused by people without any morals. Us old crusties, who can remember life before microprocessors, are a lot more sanguine about what computers can and cannot do.
As for digital payments, I agree that it’s a lot more complex than it appears to the average punter, and I think governments fundamentally misunderstand the infrastructure costs that would be imposed on businesses operating with a small turnover - not to mention the headaches of dealing with technology that invariably stops working at inopportune moments.
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What did these digital certificates purport to certify?
I can’t even remember. It was supposedly something to do with vaccinations, but their intended use was for social control - entry into shops and suchlike. IIRC Taipei City government was involved to some degree. The certificates went ahead, but the single use-case was for international travel to countries that demanded such things in a compatible format.
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Brings to mind those photos of tent cities of the Chinese with amber Covid passports on their phones. The ones refusing to go into quarantine.
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This isn’t a digital problem or an oversight. Banks specifically exclude foreigners from signing up online. Regulations either make it too difficult to bother with or prevent it altogether, probably the first. I think telecoms are the same. This is a question that should be complained about to the government, but this is the wrong ministry.
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I actually think privately or even public held company for a payments network sucks unless you are one of the insiders. I wonder if it probably should be a government owned piece of infrastructure. This is where I’d like to see some news. But I suspect this initiative above is just another “look what I made the computer do” shiny app and database. The detail simply isn’t there, I’m guessing.
Technologists often confuse political or organisational problems for technological problems.
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Taiwan digital certificate is technically the same as the EU one. Many countries accept it.
It was useful for people who had to travel to countries which required proof of a vaccination during the covid pandemic.
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It is exactly the same. You can even use the official EU apple wallet card. It lists Taiwan as an EU state!
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Yes, I know that’s how it ended up. And that’s fine up to a point (there’s not much that Taiwan can do about Europe’s descent into techno-theocracy except play along). However, when it was first mooted, I distinctly remember Taipei City government talking about using it to shame and annoy the noncompliant - for example by making it difficult or impossible for them to buy necessities or to travel. Tang seemed to be completely on-board with that.
Whether Tang was ultimately instrumental in getting them to back off from that nonsense, or whether the government lawyers said “um, no, sorry, you can’t actually do that because it’s illegal”, I don’t know. Or perhaps they’ve just put it aside until they’ve implemented the ability to switch off people’s bank accounts, as in the EU. I’d be interested to find out.
^^ Yeah, this. Although the way governments are behaving right now I don’t trust them to manage the payment infrastructure either.
Electronic payment systems have their place. I don’t think anyone would want to go back to putting cheques in the post for their electricity bill or collecting their salary in cash. But the technology required to make it work - and frankly it still doesn’t work properly - is costly and complicated. Credit/debit card companies charge 5NT$ and upwards handling fee for transactions because that’s how much it costs. Mom and pop stores don’t want that expense and hassle when they’re collecting NT$50 here and $100 there. Cash (or something like it) is the correct solution, and always will be.
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I was scratching my head watching the news piece, thinking, why on earth would any mom and pop store, with the yellow sign up on the wall and a solid customer base, want to move onto electronic payments?
Was it open sourced and we just used the code?
More importantly, all those illegally set up food stands taking over all the sidewalks in every city and county in Taiwan don’t want to pay any taxes on their income. Cash-only = you don’t know how much money we made, in fact, we don’t exist.
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True enough, but so what? It doesn’t actually matter if the tax authorities don’t have 100% coverage; in fact I’d suggest it’s better that they don’t, because all that happens is that the cost of collecting the tax from some random guy selling 烤地瓜 outweighs the putative benefit to the country. Have you noticed how Customs is obsessed these days with collecting trivial amounts from people buying or selling stuff online? They never used to even bother, because it just wasn’t worth the effort. But all bureaucracies eventually realise that they need to secure their own existence, and that generally means getting their tentacles into places where they really don’t belong.
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