Forty ways to pay for coffee in Japan

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/

–
Presenting Sponsors: Mercury & MongoDB

Complex Systems is presented by Mercury—radically better banking for founders. Mercury's new feature Command brings an LLM directly into your banking interface, so checking balances, finding invoices, or sending a wire is as easy as asking. Apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com/.

What's the point of building faster with AI if your database can't keep up? MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. Ship at the speed of AI while staying ACID compliant at Fortune 500 scale. Start building at https://mongodb.com/ai.

–

Links:

• Payments in Japan: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payments-in-japan/
• An Introduction to Japanese Society: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Introduction-Japanese-Society-Yoshio-Sugimoto/dp/1107626676/
• Use transit cards on your iPhone or Apple Watch in Japan: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120474

–
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