Web 2.0 Summit: Revolution Money's Ted Leonsis and Jason Hogg

October 17, 2007 at 6:44 pm PT

Now that Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL and president of its “fast-growing” Audience business, has retired from his active management role, he’s got plenty of time to shill for his “Web 2.0 payment platform,” Revolution Money. It’s “PayPal meets MasterCard without the high fees,” says Leonsis, who claims Revolution will completely overhaul the online payments industry with its PIN-protected anonymous credit card and payments platform for social and instant-messaging networks.

But I suspect it’s going to take quite a bit more than that to unseat institutions like Visa and MasterCard, even with merchant fees of just 0.5%.

Tagged with: AOL, instant messaging, John Paczkowski, MasterCard, network, PayPal, Revolution Money, Ted Leonsis, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Summit

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Ian F. Barger

But the low fees are exactly why it can succeed. The really hard part isn’t getting people to use the card, it’s getting merchants to accept it. And because the interchange fee is so low, just watch — they’ll be falling all over themselves to accept it.

I work for a merchant group in DC (UnfairCreditCardFees.com) and we focus on just this issue. And Revolution Money is not just a solution, it’s also a way to give the issue more visibility.

It’s about time Visa/MC had some competition.