The total annual digital payments volume is estimated to be $11.5 trillion. Given that context a few billion dollars in profit off the top to add ease of use, security, fraud prevention etc. into the system doesn't seem all that absurd.
It’s not a few billion though.
its tens of billions spread across a bunch of different organizations, honestly if you count Stripe, PayPal etc as well, you are in the hundreds of billions. In the last fiscal year for Visa, they alone made $14.9 billion in profit. This doesn’t factor any of the second order money effects either, like kickback to banks for rewards, and this is just Visa. Mastercard, American Express and Discover all factor into this too, at least in the US, and a quick glance suggested this is a world wide figure, which introduces even more variables
The volume is also misleading because it does not differentiate on source, fee structure etc. it’s a gross (as in financial gross) number that says very little about how it was moved and what it cost to move it. Digital payments is a huge category
