Welcome on board, few questions regarding your post.
"Well for one most of zips revenue is from the customer fees not the merchant and they will still get a small percentage with the visa virtual card payment not to mention it opens them up the a much broader market that they can slowly move their direct zip payments into."
how do you know that ZIP gets more of their revenue from the customer fees not the merchant? If it is true, then it is going in the opposite direction as Afterpay because afterpay definitely promotes the idea of getting their revenue from the merchant rather than the customer fees. And i'm definitely on APT side on this one.
"However thats not really the point of this post. I don't think people have really thought about the fact that using a 1 time use visa card online for your purchases marketed in the right way makes zip look like the most secure way to pay online. No one can steal your credit/debit card details from a one time use card. I've also used it a few times and its very easy to navigate to online stores through the app and use the card and its also very easy to generate the card and use outside of the zip app."
what's stopping competitors from doing the same thing, everything is digital, I know this isn't particularly hard to implement. Credit Card was dealing with security issues for years and they were thriving fine, you can lock your card, you can set limit, you can even get notifications on spending to your phone, this is a rather weak point.
"Theres next to no marketing to get the older generation involved with zip."
I see ZIP ads everywhere I go along side APT, next to no marketing to get the older generation involved is false, they are just reluctant to change.
"Sure less of the over 50's have a phone capable of using tap and zip but in 5 years there likely wont be phones sold without the feature and everyone is embracing technology."
Apple pay has been there for ages, you can link your card to it years ago and tap with it, I don't know why people talk about tap & zip like it's a game changer, it's not new but it definitely is attracting more people to use tap and pay on their phone, which is a plus for ZIP, but there is a deal with visa on this one so they probably cut some money off from ZIP, maybe this is the reason why APT is not doing it atm.
I'm a ZIP believer and holder myself, but with a very different reason. I'm holding to see how much damage Quadpay can deal and compete with APT in the US and also how ZIP business is doing, every major deal ZIP is doing is about ZIP business not ZIP pay, I think alot of people are missing the key difference between APT and ZIP. I have stated this before, ZIP is more like a digital bank with BNPL as the main attraction, with bigger loans to SME through their Spotcap/ZIP business side which APT doesn't have, I'm not sure why people are not talking about this side of ZIP more but purely concentrate on ZIP Pay. Let's be realistic here, APT can do anything ZIP is doing and annouce tap & pay tomorrow, what's stopping them? what's the winning edge with ZIP by then?? APT is currently the king of BNPL and the reason they are infront is simple and they have stated this themselves, they are a shopping platefrom with BNPL features attracting customers to use their app to buy and therefore merchants love them because it channels alot of customers to their website, APT then take a decent fee from the merchant, the merchants are paying APT like they are paying google for ads but with a much more direct result, all is good and simple.
On the other hand, ZIP is a fianance plateform with BNPL with bigger loans avaialble to SMB, moving into tap & zip is definitely not a game changer, merchants doesn't have to sign up to zip anymore, and since ZIP is not a shopping plateform, merchant don't have a strong reason to sign up anymore because anyone can use it anywhere anyways, but alot more customers will use this feature simply because of the rewards they are able to get. This will probably result in faster turnovers and bigger trasaction volume.
Now can you tell the different directions they are heading?
APT is going with simplicity and quality with merchant fees as a key source of revenue, the quality is not about how good and bad the app is, but merchant quality, as they need to sign deals with every merchant, they probably don't even want bad merchants to use their services.
ZIP is going with quantity and trasaction volumes on the BNPL side and diversity with bigger loans through ZIP business which APT doesn't have
ZIP and APT are not necessarily competitors because they are going different directions, I like them both, with ZIP definitely carrying a bigger risk with their unique approach, don't pretend it's not, but at current price to Afterpay? I think it's undervalued and that's why I invest in ZIP.
Oh yea btw, Westpac switched to Mastercard from VISA probably a year ago, i've noticed this when my new Westpac card arrived and I think it's one of the reason they jumped ship from ZIP to APT, as ZIP is parternering with Visa and APT with mastercard, another major difference, should have seen it coming, but I missed it.
(20min delay)