Visa and Mastercard are schemes, they basically licence their name and allow "issuers" (generally banks but can be companies like GE and others) to use their brand and provide close to universal acceptance. For this they charge a fee (say 10c per transaction) to the card issuer for every transactions and set scheme rules.
The "Issuer" (Bank/GE), issues the card to a consumer, charges them interest and determines if frequent flyer points can or cannot be accrued per specific card, Visa does not make this call. (If you pick any Bank and look at their product suite you will see credit cards with frequent flyer arrangement and basic ones with no frequent flyer arrangement.) Also these arrangements are not free and add to transaction cost.
When using a Visa card at a merchant, the transaction "Acquirer", basically the Bank or the company that has provided the eftpos terminal or the online facility, charges a transaction fee say 2% of the face value for a credit and .30c per debit transaction.
The Visa announcement the other day, in simple terms, basically said that they will provide BNPL capability to the Issuers and Acquirers, however Issuers/Acquires still need to 1) convince customers that their product is superior to Afterpay (and cannibalise their own credit card business) and 2) Acquirer will need to go back to individual merchant and get them to sign up to BNPL merchant agreement including a specific fee.
Finally, and assume all of this has been successfully accomplished they all (Visam Issuers/Acquirers) need to all agree on a revenue/cost sharing arrangement. I promise you this will not be easy.
I am not saying that this cannot be accomplished, what I am saying that there is significant complexity that will need to be overcome given that there is no single customer ownership along Visa/Issuer/Acquirer value chain. Ultimately this is the biggest competitive advantage that both APT and Z1P as they own both the consumer and the merchant and they create value across the whole chain.
