The people who exploit this state of affairs to build business models that are pretty much cramming operations deserve to be fed to the wood chipper, feet first; but I’m never quite jaded enough to be wholly unsurprised by the fact that payment systems still in common use and considered to be current have essentially no provision whatsoever, or even a broken attempt at one that suggests someone tried, for a state between ‘no business relationship’ and ‘now they can unilaterally send bills that will be honored by default’. The naive observer would have suspected that ‘I wish to pay $X, once’ would be kind of a major use case.
Its especially striking in the nominally modernized stuff: sure, back when credit card numbers were carbon-papered onto receipts and reconciled periodically there wasn’t a lot of room for granular authentication; but they went to all the trouble of adding in a cryptographic verification chip scheme to overhaul the sorry state of the authentication fraud side and essentially did nothing whatsoever on the transaction authorization side.
It’s almost as though someone’s incentives aren’t aligned properly.
