I had no idea visa/mc didn't bear the cost of fraud. I remember Paypal almost getting killed by fraud in the early days, and I always thought of Paypal as basically replicating visa/mc for online purchases. I didn't realize they were doing so much more than visa/mc by assuming fraud risk.
PayPal was a counterparty so if one side didn't pay or there was a dispute then PayPal was stuck in the middle. Visa and MC are just payment networks and have minimal risk. The only risk I think would be criminal liability (handling drug money) or maybe if the bank goes bankrupt before the payment is due to the merchant (but even that might be borne by they merchant - not sure).
Visa/MC do carry some risk, but the chain generally goes merchant -> acquiring bank -> ? platform (like Stripe or something) -> Visa/MC. So they care a lot about the people just above them in the chain, and not at all about the rest of them as they won't end up holding the bag.
At least if the failed bank is Japanese, all of it will fall under their deposit insurance program (https://www.dic.go.jp/content/000010138.pdf#page=13), although this is actually a rare guarantee (FDIC and SVB comes to mind).
> Full coverage for deposits for payment and settlement
purposes, bearing no interest, being redeemable on demand, and providing normally required payment and settlement services
their monopolies were formed in a different time, when it might have been thought prudent to drop bad merchants even if they themselves did not bear the risk in order to not get governmental regulation imposed that would be more detrimental than just dropping the merchants.
Not saying that's the case, just given circumstances not sure if risk is needed to explain the result in this case.
