Visa uses bribery, blackmail and fear to win contracts.
I built a small credit card company, we have around 500k users and 2k merchants. We focus primarily on the low-income families, our service is free to users, just merchants have to pay (and our price is 60% lower than visa’s) that’s how we could outmaneuver pretty much all the big guys in the employee-benefits market. We are a company of just 12 employees now, we live in the cloud, our costs are just a very tiny fraction of the cost our competition faces, they could never compete with us on a level playing field. They were all screwed and they know it, and we received some buyout offers, which we refused.