OnlyFans and the Far-Reaching Power of Payments Companies
The social network’s U-turn on porn underscores how tricky it will be cleaning up online payments after Covid.
Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., the payments duopoly worth a combined $850 billion in market value, spend most of their time running silently in the background of a $2 trillion payments industry that enables purchases with little pieces of plastic.
Yet every so often, the elephant in the room becomes impossible to ignore. The kerfuffle around OnlyFans, a social network that says it was pressured by banking-service providers including Bank of New York Mellon Corp. to ban explicit content — a move it’s since reversed — is one such revelatory moment. It points to the centrality of online payments in people’s lives and the increasingly fraught role of the firms that manage them.