None of you provided information about your studies or observations. Nobody talked about the effects of loyalty programs. You talked about premium cards, you claimed that consumers are the winners, and that premium cards provide bonuses. But there is a motive behind all this—it is called customer loyalty. Nobody talks about this in concrete terms.
I believe that Mr. Scholnick talked about platforms. You compare all of them, including the Visa platform, and the real estate listings platform. However, these things are very different; profit margins for those platforms are very different. In the real estate market, for example, brokers earn commissions that vary between 5% and 10%; merchants on the other hand have very thin profit margins which make things all the more difficult when interchange fees rise. when you paint all these platforms with the same brush, I find the comparison to be a bit unfair.