Surprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).
Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system.
EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.
It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
Can someone explain to me if EU card transactions are capped, why Stripe charges me (US) the full ride on my EU customer's cards? In fact, I get charged even more for EU cards – perhaps as much as 2.5% extra.
I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.
The EU only capped interchange fees, which is the amount that goes to the bank that issued the card. It did not cap the fees that go the your PSP. Which makes sense, since you can pick the PSP you do business with, but you can't pick the bank that issues your customers' cards.
(And I don't think it applies to US merchants like you anyways)
perhaps they are capped only for EU merchants, because EU government works to protect their own companies and citizens from foreign artificial unregulated monopolies.
in US, the government is more protective of private monopolies due to lobbying
How are you defining monopolies? Companies that are successful? Because you seem to be defining most US companies that do business in Europe as monopolies. It seems that this is the kind of mindset that has kept Europe behind. Too bad. Regulation that keeps out competition or needlessly puts obstacles in place is bad for the consumer, bad for employment, and bad for the general standard of living. And If you think US companies are unregulated then you haven't seen the 20 ft of federal CFR regulations together with the regulations of 50 different states that US companies have to deal with everyday.
Interestingly, the EU did manage to cap interchange on US cards paid by EU merchants to pretty much the same rate as that paid for domestic/intra-EU cards, at least at the POS. Many things are possible with a regulator with teeth.
The funny thing about that is that HN used to say if the fee was 4% it's because that's what it costs and if it was any lower the card networks would just abandon the country that forced it to be lower, since they'd lose money.
I remember people saying the same thing. It was some time ago.
Turns out some markets really aren’t that efficient and corporate capture really is a thing…
The irony is that every couple you shop with just increases the prices of their items to deal with the fees, so you're just paying more for items to feel good about getting reward program benefits.
Most places other than the USA, when they use these card networks or their local country networks, are normally using debit cards. There's just no reason to overcomplicate a payment card by making it also a loan.
Mid-thirties Brit here. I've never owned a credit card, neither has my partner.
All of our card transactions are with a debit card.
I've never needed instant-access debt so it's not really an attractive proposition. Perhaps the added consumer protection rules could be worth it, but it's not been an issue to date.
Much more common in Europe, which is partly cultural, and partly because there's not the same single/dual message technical distinction between debit and credit cards, so you don't "need" a credit card in the way you would for certain things in the US (e.g. a hotel that wants to preauth it).
That surprises me, I've never met someone that uses Debit cards as their primary method of payment.
You lose a lot of consumer protections and many cashback rewards by using only Debit cards. The only drawback to credit cards is the interest, if you don't pay it off at the end of the month. So long as you're responsible with your spending, it's a direct upgrade.
> That surprises me, I've never met someone that uses Debit cards as their primary method of payment.
That in turn is not surprising – the split is very much correlated with socioeconomic status (to the point where quite a few of the people working on debit card products have never themselves used a debit card to pay, in my experience).
> The only drawback to credit cards is the interest [...]
Which is a significant drawback if your bank account balance regularly oscillates around zero and/or you've seen your peers get in financial trouble from credit card debt.
I buy flights on credit card, and other one-off purchases like house and car insurance, and often my Costco purchases (because the credit card lives in a different wallet where I normally keep my membership card).
My day-to-day wallet just contains a debit card so that gets used for almost everything else.
Internet transactions are usually done using Revolut because then I can use a disposable card number.
do consider that in Italy most credit cards cost around ~30€ per year + a 2€ tax for all months you spend more than ~70€ and most offer no benefits. Debit cards are offered for free by all banks. So credit is only used to rent cars (not really mandatory anymore) and if you really need the credit (but other ways of getting short term credit exist now).
Given the price at the register is $X across all payment methods, I prefer to use my card that lets me pay 0.96X 30 days later. (I don't know what discount you can get from UK rewards cards...)
I hope that rewards cards go away, because they distort the market, but I'm going to use them while they're here. Rewards cards push costs onto customers that don't use them, and I don't want costs pushed onto me.
I briefly skimmed this, but why are you wasting my time? What does this have to do with me earning free trips from being smart about how I buy things? does not compute.
The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.
The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).
Note that this is highly location dependent. In most of Europe, credit cards are basically all that exists (that is, even "debit cards" are just credit cards with a balance); and regardless of the type of card, because all payments are either chip & pin, biometric based, or verified with some additional 2FA, it's extremely hard to dispute a charge, whether a charge to a credit or debit card.
There's also "contactless" credit card payments in the UK and are common for buying things in shops/pubs etc. I don't know what the situation would be if you were to dispute an incorrect contactless charge.
Those are common in all of Europe, and they are still based on either biometrics (if using your phone) or the card's chip. They do typically include a transaction value and count limit below which the biometrics or pin don't actually get checked, for ease of use. But, given that this limit is controlled by the user, I expect that the contract terms also prevent you from disputing transactions below those limits - though I haven't read carefully enough to be sure.
I don't think I can control the contactless limit on any of my cards (I'm in the UK). Occasionally, the contactless device will prompt to enter a pin, but it happens fairly rarely (probably more common if the payment is at a new location).
I also haven't examined the various contracts, but I'd be surprised if there was no option to dispute transactions below a certain limit as that could be exploited by banks or thieves (but I repeat myself) or shops. An unscrupulous shop could double up transactions or change the amount paid and customers would not be happy if the bank turned round and said "it's below the £50 limit, so we don't care". The bank is more likely to push the problem onto the retailer and simply refund the customer and charge the retailer.
Personally, I don't like contactless due to the change of responsibility between the customer and bank and prefer to use PINs. As far as I know, I can't get just a PIN card as they all have contactless enabled.
In some places Visa/MC is the default way to pay. Such as large parts of Europe now that the fees are capped. The cashier asks you to pay, you hold your card up to the terminal, and you've paid. Some places like Australia have their own local systems that are more commonly used by locals and probably have lower fees, but those POS also support Visa/MC. It's just the default way to pay internationally now.
Except in the US, it does. Depending on the card, it can cost as much as 4.5% (or more!) to run the card. You can argue that it shouldn't, but that's a different statement than it doesn't.
it is illegal for Merchants to charge credit card processing fees by law, they have to absorb these fees and cannot display them to the customer.
This naturally protects the artificial oligopoly of visa/mc/discover systems.
The moment you allow Merchants to charge cc fees (even 2-3%) and allow customer to choose low processing option (ACH/debit card/cash), the whole scheme falls apart and Visa/MC will slowly go bankrupt
the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
and most small/med businesses dont have clout to protest that, so they have to accept these terms in order to earn money
This hasn't been the case for a wide variety of payment processors for quite a while now. Many of the new startup-based ones have features to help you pass through the fees even. Small business can use Stripe, Square, Clover, or one of many other payment processors that don't ban them from passing credit card fees forward to consumers.
> the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
These clauses would be illegal in many states and countries these days, so they don’t.
Interchange average in the UK was about 0.2% last time I looked (which was a few years ago), it't not much anyway.
Also the government doesn't really do card transactions. I imagine this is for fairly rare things like renewing your passport, booking a driving test or buying a title copy. Oh and visa fees maybe? Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.
Interchange as a standalone might be low but scheme fees are about the same nowadays. Aydens provide a detail breakdown per transaction, for example on a UK consumer credit card there's sometimes 8 different line items (interchange, ayden markup, various scheme fees), one generally does not get out under 0.5% on interchange++ even in the UK on the most favourable cards. When you're on interchange pricing with either Stripe, Adyen or another big boy you're paying extra for AVS, 3DS, and several other scheme services. No one is walking away with 0.2% all in. A lot of people find these Visa and Mastercard published PDFs for interchange and think that's cheap, but reality is when the schemes got their nuts tightened on interchange fees they just spread the loss by marking up various scheme services and mandating them. John still want's his Avios points even in Europe/UK.
The gov.uk runs card transactions for dozens of services - which add up - from car tax, driver license renewal, passport replacements, to paying previous NI years (do you consider this tax?) and so on..
0.5% is a pretty incredibly low interchange rate in any case. But if you are saying that half of it is going to scheme fees, I doubt it is funding rewards programs for consumers.
A very crude calculation for £1B a year in payments (thats probably too low) would mean a payment to Ayden (contract is upto £25M over 3 years) of 0.8%
Most of the things I pay on the government website (except vehicle tax renewal), so basically tax, I've been pushed towards a one-off direct debit each time instead of a card payment.
By credit card, it's quite useful for the reward points - I'm fairly sure it was MC and Visa only (no AMEX) last time I did it, though that may change with this new payment provider
In the UK, the so-called car tax is an emissions tax (i.e. electric vehicles pay £0) and doesn't pay for road maintenance etc. Roads are paid for out of general taxation (e.g. income tax). Actual road tax ended in 1937.
I feel this is worth correcting as "don't bloody pay road tax" is a common form of abuse aimed at cyclists which is wrong on a number of levels. A lot of cyclists also drive a car and non-driving cyclists would fund roads if they pay tax. Another way to think about it is that the emissions tax for cycles would be zero anyway.
Brazil's central bank operates their instant payment network Pix [1] [2] [3] for ~$10M/year [4]. Its not that these are small contracts, but that large, inefficient, unnecessary contracts have become the norm (I argue). Similar example from India's UPI payment system [5]. The US has FedNow to move instant payments for pennies, but banking and payment system participants in the US ecosystem are avoiding it to continue to private payment system rake [6] (cc networks, Zelle commercial bank network, private wallets, etc).
The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus.
> This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation.
> There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day.
> The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics.
The BCB in Brazil does very little to operate Pix. It's effectively a P2P system, where the BCB forces all the banks to interop with one-another (and all the banks directly call eachother). They can operate it that cheaply because they do close to nothing technically (they host the main discovery endopints). The only place the BCB actually ingests data is via their reporting mechanisms.
UPI is a bit more centralized, where the NPCI does the top-level routing between banks, so their operating budget is likely much higher than Pix. It also is drastically more simple to be a participant in UPI compared to Pix.
For Pix adoption: you can thank Covid for that. The Brazilian government said if you wanted to get free money from the government, you had to set up and use Pix.
US Financial Innovation: I'd say the hard thing here is that the government is extremely strict (lots of regulation) when you start looking like a bank. Lots of companies have tried to innovate here, but regulation makes it really hard to do. There's a lot of regulator capture going on.
This is incorrect . The system is not P2P, while it appears to be for customers. The BCB keeps both the directory that ties a chave pix to an actual account (DICT), and a centralized ledger (SPI - Sistema de pagamentos instantaneo)
│
(2. Send order)
▼
[ SPI - Central Ledger] ──────(3. Real time settlement over Financial Institutions account: Debt/Credit)
│
(4. Notification Message)
▼
[Receiver Bank]
The ledger doesn't keep individual accounts, but a Instant Payments account for each institution. This account is not the master bank account in the Reserve Transfer System (Sistema de Transferencia de Reservas) which is the system of record for banks funds, so the banks need to allocate funds from the STR to the SPI every day to be able to honor PIX transfers. The STR system doesn't work out of normal banking hours, so the banks need to predict how much money they will need for PIX transfers and move that money from the STR to the PI (pagamento instantaneo) account during defined liquidity transfer windows, to avoid banks double-spending the same funds over different rails (traditional vs PIX). If a bank finds itself without funds on its PI account in a saturday night, it can loan the funds from another bank who still have excess liquidity on his PI account).
As you can see, between the SPI, STR an DICT, it is a very centralized system.
Also, the system operates in a dedicated zero-trust networks which is completely isolated from the internet. The messages between banks and the central bank follow the ISO 20022 format. IBM MQ is used to route messages back and forth between banks and the BCB.
In both Brazil and the US, making something like Pix mainstream requires regulation. Brazil did its part, but it’s unclear whether the US will do the same anytime soon, I don't think so, unfortunately. Technically, it would benefit the American population (the process of making pix payments is so smoothless), but payment companies may have little incentive to support it, and could lobby against it.
In Brazil, the Central Bank overpowered the coordination problem. In the US, it may be the opposite: the government seems to have less power over the payment lobby, or at least less willingness to confront it directly.
Thanks for that. I am wondering if anyone have written up a high level technical comparison between different payment systems including Pix, UPI and others.
Feels odd that you exclude mentioning the EU, which has had instant transfers for more than a decade. More than two decades, if you include things like iDeal from The Netherlands.
Wasn't intentional, I mention SEPA and Wero in other comments, not intended to be an enumeration of all instant payment systems currently active globally. My apologies!
> not intended to be an enumeration of all 54 instant payment systems currently active.
Even then, not mentioning those who pretty much started / invented instant transfers still seems odd :) but no need to apologize haha, maybe I was a bit too abrasive.
I get why you prioritized to mention those though. The Chinese and Indians have leapfrogged us. No more fussy legacy (digital) cards, just scan a QR and go. Even illicit food stalls and street wanderers have accounts, when they wouldn't be able to get a 'real' bank account.
And the Chinese and Indians don't have to pay tribute to the Mastercard-Visa overlords either. Although Wero and the digital Euro might eventually change that for Europe too.
Can you imagine how cumbersome conversations would become if people felt obligated to qualify ad-hoc statements with what amounts to a historical ledger?
Every new entry would open up an opinion around “if you included that, why didn’t you include this?”
The comment literally mentioned how unusual Pix adaption is and how innovative it is. It is neither of those things. Because of aforementioned history.
don't centralized payment systems like this reduce the overall resilience of the ecosystem and prevent future innovation? You hint on those lines with the possible future transformation of deposits into credit.
Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
All payment systems are centralized. Zelle is owned by the largest US commercial banks ("Early Warning Services"), Congress directed the Federal Reserve to build and offer FedNow as a utility so smaller banks would not be excluded from offering instant payments. It costs $~30/month (last I checked the rate sheet) to plug into it. The instant payments are the utility, your opportunity to innovate is using this as a component of your user experience.
Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Because it is a grift ("regulatory capture") [1] [2]. The "overbearing system" is the result of regulation to bring the consumer excess of cheap payments to an entire country's financial user population. Why does Jamie Dimon not like stablecoin yield [3]? Because JPMC makes almost $100B/year in interest income taking customer deposits and lending against them, which stablecoins would compete against by operating as a form of narrow bank, parking the underlying deposits in risk free US Treasuries [4].
As a US financial services consumer, it is hard for you to avoid the rake of the machine built to skim off of you as you hold onto fiat or move it, but the rest of the world can avoid being captured by it (as this piece demonstrates). Also, Europe can't regulate Stripe as easily as they can Adyen. You don't have to be the biggest or the greatest, it just has to work "good enough".
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
(I don't have a finance background.) There any multiple instances of a one-size fits all user experience decision which strikes me as a result of the centralization and removal of competition (in efforts to drive up adoption).
I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
> UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
The Indian government has mandated this for strong identity assurances. Your only hope at "innovation" (ie violating financial services regulators and laws) here is cash or something like Monero.
> UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
I haven't used UPI recently, but I imagine this is a UX issue around aliases (phone numbers, email, and other human identifiers that associate to an underlying account).
TLDR People problems cannot be fixed with tech (in this context, regulatory requirements or alias UX, submit a public comment to the regulator if you can).
> I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
Because without regulation, it turns into Monopoly (the board game). Sometimes, competition can be encouraged, but in some cases (broad, shared infrastructure) it cannot and regulation must fill this gap to ensure the target outcome. This is why we regulate electric utilities similarly. Happy to help, I am very interested and curious on this topic.
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services.
Well, as a brazilian who is used to pix and has also faced the bad payment ux in american, I think a possible solution should be adding the missing Pix-like layer above the existing US rails.
One of the best part that makes Pix an incredible experience, It’s that the app almost doesn’t matter. I can use one bank, you can use another, a merchant can use a different provider, and it still works through the same basic language: QR code, Pix key, payment request, confirmation screen. I can even transport my "pix key" to another app/bank provider.
So maybe the US opportunity is a agnostic interoperability layer on top of FedNow/RTP/Zelle/bank APIs: universal aliases, QR payments, routing, fraud checks, receipts, and reconciliation. Making instant account-to-account payments feel universal before the government forces a universal standard.
I don't think consumers broadly should be the main goal first, the best initial path should be small-business, marketplaces, rent, etc.
If someone could own that neutral UX/addressing layer, that seems much closer to the useful part of Pix than just another closed wallet.
None of which are in production at scale. I admit crypto is optimal for less than legal transactions and speculation, but the volume for legal payment transactions is negligible.
Solana mainnet was shown to have capability to handle 100k transactions per second [1]. Granted, it was a synthetic benchmark of noops, but it shows the capability is there.
For reference, Visa claim 83k TPS [2] for their system. It also has the advantage of being vastly cheaper than tradfi payment networks at ca. $0.0005 per transaction [3] irrespective of transaction amount.
Until it is in prod, it is a proof of concept. Blockchains solve for low trust; if you have trust, you don't need the efficiency loss of a decentralized ledger or blockchain. Central banks provide trust.
As mentioned in one of my other comments, Pix in Brazil costs ~$10M/year. They process ~6-8 billion monthly transactions and roughly $6.7 trillion in payment volume a year [1]. That's roughly ~$0.0015/transaction based on the math in this comment, and we don't know what the ceiling is based on existing capacity (which would drive per transaction costs down further). Choose boring technology, when possible [2].
The innovation in this context is nuking the profits of Visa and Mastercard (their margins are ~45-50% [3] [4] [5]), replacing them with central bank instant payment systems run at cost. The reduction in their revenue is money back in the pockets of everyone paying unnecessarily to move value around. I highly recommend the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" on this topic [6].
Pix is really good but I don't think it beats Solana or Ethereum L2s.
Most recent indicator of peak Pix transaction volumes I could find [1] was 227M/day (=2700 TPS). You can see yourself that Solana does 130-140M/day consistently. Pix fees you quote are still triple Solana's.
Not to mention there is the entire decentralization aspect, which means the government does not control your money as with other blockchains.
Fraud can be managed at instant payment rails, you don't need credit card rails to manage it; fraud must be managed on any rails utilized, so it is somewhat agnostic. If you as a consumer want credit card chargeback protection insurance, push the fee onto the consumer with a surcharge to cover the cost. I believe the evidence is robust credit card rails are unnecessary in today's world, plain and simple. They are a bloated legacy holding on for relevance (and their grossly excessive margins) imho.
Common misconception - it's the merchant who pays for fraud and the 3% is pure bank profit. If there's a fraud transaction, the merchant has to pay the whole amount back and ends up negative the transaction fee and the chargeback fee. The banks just want you to think they're earning the 3% but actually it's pure profit.
Most blockchain systems are fairly or even extremely centralized as well and amount to little other than decentralization theater. Bitcoin and Ethereum are arguably more of an exception than the norm.
Note that in the EU and UK mid-size has a definition:
"fewer than 250 employees and a turnover of under €50 million (or a balance sheet total below €43 million)"
Thus by definition that company wouldn't be mid-sized over here anyway.
edit: in-fact after checking even in the US, the IRS for example declares a large business as one with more than 10 million in assets, though there is no set rule like in the EU to be used by other gov orgs.
Well, obviously it’s cherry-picked. It’s an example of something that challenges my intuition. Most things align with my intuition because I’m in my late 30s and have seen enough of the world to have a fairly good idea of the rough numbers. Here’s another one: the London Underground is older than the telephone.
There’s a light board game called Timeline where you have stuff like this and there are so many surprises. Temporal stuff is hard to reason about and the game catches that. But with large numbers one loses intuition easily: NYC’s subway vs. all domestic and international US air travel is closer in total passengers than one would think. The median American did not fly last year.
Stuff like this. It’s just Gladwell-fodder but numerically fun.
I misinterpreted your intent here, and that’s on me. Thank you for explaining, you clearly picked the sample as a comparison of fact, not as narrative. Apologies
Sadly pretty normal for European companies. The penalties they face for signing up a bad customer are so much harsher they won't risk letting just anyone sign up without actual KYC not just checkbox KYC. This is the same reason Hetzner turns away 50% of its customers.
I used to work at Stripe and they subject to the same penalties as Ayden. There is a misconception that Stripe is an American only company, they have dual HQ model in Ireland and San Francisco. Since they are an Irish founded company and they have an EU entity “Stripe Technology Europe”. They can be kicked out of entire countries and regions if they didn’t have an extensive KYC systems and be fined just the same.
Since Stripe operates by working with a BIN (banks that sponsor them within each country) generally like all payment providers. While the decline rates for new customers are not public, they are very high, especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling [1]. Also revocation of existing accounts can happen often if KYC systems flag anything, like Stripe Identity, Connect, and Radar.
Mollie (also Dutch) existed even before Adyen (and way before Stripe). They have no problem dealing with small customers, and have always offered a trivially easy to use API.
Love for Mollie - and literally had this exact theme last year at work. Stripe implemented, then customer A couldn't use it due to US base, so went to Adyen, built integration, rejected as less than $5 million as first responder said, then went to Mollie.
Only gripe is no embeddable checkout but its not a huge deal, and they have superior test platform than even Stripe. The test cards are right there in slide in panel, and you have option to select paid/cancel/fail etc to test different outcomes.
Mollie B.V. is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Dutch Central Bank (relationship number: F0038). Mollie UK Ltd is licensed and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution in the UK (FRN: 977968).
No point in marketing when you outright reject customers:
Thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback.
I have taken a look at the information you have provided and unfortunately, at this time, Adyen is only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year or businesses which are currently supported by a Plugin built by Adyen.
The reason for this is so that we are able to provide the right level of support and resources to our merchants at the right stage of their company growth.
If you would like to stay up to date with our payment offering please do sign up to our newsletter here.
In the interim, I want to ensure that you find the right provider, so I would like to direct you about payments. They are specialists in finding the most relevant payment solutions for all business models and I have no doubt they will offer you several great options.
I wish you the best of luck with your business moving forward, and hopefully we can reconnect in the future.
I wish more companies would try to serve tiny shops at the same time they serve multi million euro companies. The requirements for the two are very different, as is the support and customer care requirement. Integrating directly with Adyen as a small business is like running a kubernetes cluster on AWS to host your blog, except they'll have even less time for customer support to spend on your tickets when things don't go right.
Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.
Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.
Once you hit a certain processing threshold, stripe underwrites you. The benefit is some people get better deals or get to skirt by rules just by being immaterial.
Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.
And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).
You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.
A big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion.
The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.
Like with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages.
From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?
ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.
As a Stripe customer I can attest to its simplicity: you have API that you call and that's it. You don't have to deal with any of the PCI stuff if you would do it in-house, just an SAQ once a year.
The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.
> Do you have 3d secure or whatever the marketing name is for it this week?
Stripe takes care of that for cards that are enrolled into 3D Secure (I think it is a Visa thing - the naming) and other kinds of card 2FA validation (Mastercard has their own and so on).
Having built on Authorize.net and a few other gateways before Stripe, I'd say yes - but the value that justifies the rake isn't the nicer API, it's what you no longer have to own. The moment you're paying out to third parties you're on the hook for KYC, identity verification, and the whole compliance/risk surface around moving other people's money. Connect absorbs that. Handing those pieces off so I stay compliant on payouts and can actually focus on the business is worth far more to me than the basis points. With other gateways I was assembling all of that myself.
Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.
People will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
> If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
EU has plenty of VC, maybe not enough to sustain crazy rounds rounds like those we see often in the US, but capital is not the biggest blocker to founding your company in Europe, law is.
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
Sure there are. Both Mollie and Adyen are API-first. Mollie developer experience has always been on par with Stripe in my experience. And they existed 6 years earlier.
It’s the whole system. It takes many characteristics for something to happen in a specific manner.
Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.
So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.
But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.
It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.
It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .
And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.
Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!
Quite to the contrary: all a company is (at least as originally conceptualised) is the formalisation of a group of people, usually working together towards a shared goal. It’s in the name - just like you have a troupe of actors, you may have a company of engineers and accountants (though to keep in the vein of live stage production, you also have a theatre company).
This is why we tend to use collective pronouns when referring to a company - Meta just announced that theyare planing share dilution (though to weaken my own case, one can also use singular nouns, likely due to the increased modern perception of a company as a single entity due to the increased anonymity afforded by the internet)
Stripe is dual headquartered in the US and in Ireland afaik. They tried to avoid having just a satellite in Irl, which other companies do but which makes it harder to take decisions independently.
So why do they say they are dual HQd in Dublin/SF? Is it purely for tax purposes? How is it any different to other tech companies having their EU HQ in Ireland? I've tried researching this but I can't seem to find info on it
It seems to me like whole Western countries, especially Britain being outside the EU and Eurozone and with its own currency, ought to have at least one big domestically-based option for something this fundamental. It’s an odd thing to have to rely on foreign countries for.
Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?
> Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?
British payment processors usually sell out / get taken over by US firms
Checkout.com isn't terribly British just headquartered there (Swiss guy founded it in Singapore, tons of foreign investors). They opened a SF office last year, after a big US push prior, so if their financials stay adequate I imagine it'll be another that sells out to the US
Worldpay was the biggest by far, but it never really shook off its legacy image (it had its origins in a couple of 1980s-era payment gateways). Stripe had overtaken it by the mid 2010s, and it has since been dismembered and partially rebuilt by (American) private equity.
The UK tends to punch well above its weight in FinTech, but PSPs are high-volume and very low margin so not really an attractive proposition unless you can be reasonably sure of grabbing a decent share of the global market.
Yeah agree with the legacy image of Worldpay. The payment page is straight out of the early 00s. N.B. though, the Government does/did use Worldpay
Started in 1997, got bought out by a US company in 2018. RIP.
The founder, Nick Ogden claims "His career began when he pioneered ecommerce in 1994, inventing the first online shop, the Wine Warehouse." [0] Big if true! UK has a long, rich history of inventions.
I wasn't with the company when it started using Stripe, but there's really no need to interact with Stripe besides setting up your account and using the API they provide. Since being involved with Stripe, I don't we need to talk to them more than once a year on a "so, all good?" type of emails.
They basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies.
They can't afford it because they have no customers, because they turn down small customers and then Stripe already has them when they become big enough for Adyen.
The issue with bank transfers today is that the SEPA system is robust and established, but got no web compatible API.
But there are two projects (why one, if you can have two!?), one being Wero by different banks, the other being the Digital Euro by the European central bank. If either finds good adaption (Wero is rolling out slowly and for quite a bunch of banks every customer already got a Wero account automatically) this could move things around ...
I'm Irish, but I've built a website for an Australian client and they integrated something which did that. In the checkout, you could choose to pay with a system which would log you into your bank's website, where you could approve a payment, then return to the site on which you'd made your purchase, where it would instantly be marked as paid. I think that it may have taken a few days for the money to actually arrive in their bank account, but the payment was authorised instantly.
This stuff is very popular in the Baltics, there are many payment options and banks provide the necessary connections to be able to complete payments for the users using 2fa auth. Not to mention crypto. e.g. check out varle.lt as an example of an online retailer, the options are sort of normal and expected.
I believe the usual SEPA flow is either scan this QR code or type this IBAN+reference into your bank's mobile app? SEPA is a "giro" system, meaning the person who owns the money has to push it, rather than a cheque system where the money owner writes something to the merchant who then pulls money from the money owner. These are always less convenient because the money owner has to contact their bank. They're also more secure.
That would seem like a logical solution. So wouldn't it be convenient for the expensive payment methods if legalities prevented merchants from charging higher fees to customers using them?
Indeed. It's a triumph of consumer protection laws failing to protect consumers. Merchants here have to set their prices a bit higher to compensate for the fees and you still have to pay those higher prices as a customer even if you're using a more efficient payment method. I will never understand why the law wasn't set the other way - requiring explicit disclosure of payment fees to end customers and prohibiting payment services from incorporating these kinds of anticompetitive terms in merchant agreements - so that everyone could make an informed choice and market pressures would push the transaction overheads down.
It might have been regulatory capture - though I have seen no specific evidence of that myself. It might simply have been the old story about a road and good intentions. At this point it doesn't really matter how it happened - it would be better if the situation were fixed in any case.
Customers paying the price would:
1) induce scrutiny from the public on visa a Mastercard (the monopolies)
2) encourage the competitive market amongst issuers to compress prices
> Adyen will take over GOV.UK Pay card payments for local authorities, police forces and armed forces units from Stripe, as well as pay by bank services, under a three-year contract worth up to £25.3 million.
I would prefer they take this money and either build a payment processor or use an existing UK company. The UK government is addicted to offshoring all contracts it can, and then is surprised when the cheapest possible quote actually ends up ballooning over the agreed amount.
Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
> use an existing UK company
Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
> Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
These projects are possible, it's just clear the current project management structure of the UK government is not up to the task. I would lean heavily towards a UK-based private sector solution.
> Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
This is the point, there should be one, and the UK government could heavily put their thumb on the scale to ensure that payments are processed within the UK.
It seems mad to have foreign companies make money on UK government fund raising activities.
If you ever worked with any of the UK gov or agencies you’d understand why it happens. Despite having its own IT in every agency those same agencies buy externally because “it is too difficult”. IT is entangled beyond belief and some of the knowledge is institutionalised. Existing contracts do not make it easier either. Any high ranking clerk is afraid of any risk associated as well. Not to mention the procurement process is hard and lengthy.
I understand, but it's why things are desperate to change. I refuse to believe that the UK is fundamentally unable to rise to these challenges, in which can I can only chalk it up to poor government structure and management. These people have a lot to answer for.
Why is that so insane? Would you be saying the same when the NHS was originally proposed?
It's entirely possible, the fact that the UK government lacks imagination is at great cost to the tax payer. There is no serious long term investment into UK tech, past building AI datacentres for a bubble economy with some of the worst energy rates in the world.
Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain does not work because there is an address verification which is not possible because Spain's credit cards do not share customer address information, so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.
>Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain .... so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.
I don't follow ?
Don't they have Wise (previously known as Tranferwise) in Spain ? Or a similar platform ?
Its 2026 and for most people the answer is just to use one of those platforms to pay wire transfers instead of your bank.
Sure there will still be fee of some description, but it will almost always be much lower than what your bank charges for international transfers.
Stripe allows for these kinds of payments, we've been updating our store to support Wero etc. It should give better conversation and processing rates than the US credit cards.
Got to love the people taking a swipe at the company. They found their market, can't you just be happy for them? They're hardly the only company in the world to only deal with bigger clients.
This site regularly dunks on European tech as being subpar, but when an American company gets ditched for a European one, barely anyone can find nice words to say. You really reveal yourselves in times like this, I've got to admit.
It's pareto better, all else equal (which, fair, it may not be in this case) for a company to serve businesses from $1 and up than to only serve $5M and up.
Stripe is an EU and US company dual headquartered in Ireland and subject to the same EU regulations as Ayden. They spend a lot developing and maintaining talent in Ireland.
I'm sure Stripe EU is subject to EU regulations, just like Adyen. But unlike Adyen, they are also subject to some US regulations due to being a subsidiary. And, highly likely, they run software systems build by their US counterpart, meaning data exfiltration or even sabotage is trivial.
2-3 years ago they changed something and I know tens of people (and I don't know that many people) say that now filling in bank details in the SA itself has become a no-op, and that they (and I) now had to explicitly request a withdrawal of the balance. Often 2-3 times.
And it's not been a matter of waiting. The money just sits there for the better part of a year before people have noticed.
Well, it is signalling. It's signalling that there are competitors which are trustworthy enough for a government and it signals the overall trend one can observe how European governments detach from US companies. With some lower hanging fruit and some larger projects.
Most government processing is prohibited at Stripe that is why it always tends to be small. Too much risk being exposed to more regulatory scrutiny that is not worth it as payments processor.
> “Prohibited Businesses… Government services… Disbursement of government economic support, such as grant” [1]
[1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses
Surprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).
Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system.
EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.
It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
Can someone explain to me if EU card transactions are capped, why Stripe charges me (US) the full ride on my EU customer's cards? In fact, I get charged even more for EU cards – perhaps as much as 2.5% extra.
I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.
I guess the NA interchange is charging the card, rather than the EU? Could using a MOR reduce the fee structure?The EU only capped interchange fees, which is the amount that goes to the bank that issued the card. It did not cap the fees that go the your PSP. Which makes sense, since you can pick the PSP you do business with, but you can't pick the bank that issues your customers' cards.
(And I don't think it applies to US merchants like you anyways)
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_15_...
perhaps they are capped only for EU merchants, because EU government works to protect their own companies and citizens from foreign artificial unregulated monopolies.
in US, the government is more protective of private monopolies due to lobbying
How are you defining monopolies? Companies that are successful? Because you seem to be defining most US companies that do business in Europe as monopolies. It seems that this is the kind of mindset that has kept Europe behind. Too bad. Regulation that keeps out competition or needlessly puts obstacles in place is bad for the consumer, bad for employment, and bad for the general standard of living. And If you think US companies are unregulated then you haven't seen the 20 ft of federal CFR regulations together with the regulations of 50 different states that US companies have to deal with everyday.
Monopolies are one-two companies that capture the market and lobby the government to fortify the regulatory capture via:
1. regulatory bloat, artificial increase in cost of business to prevent new competition
2. lack of anti-trust enforcement, government fails to protect the consumer and instead protect the monopolies' income
You're not in EU so the full stack is happy to charge you whatever it can.
Yeah, you don't live in the EU.
Interestingly, the EU did manage to cap interchange on US cards paid by EU merchants to pretty much the same rate as that paid for domestic/intra-EU cards, at least at the POS. Many things are possible with a regulator with teeth.
Uh… more profit?
The funny thing about that is that HN used to say if the fee was 4% it's because that's what it costs and if it was any lower the card networks would just abandon the country that forced it to be lower, since they'd lose money.
> HN used to say if the fee was 4% it's because that's what it costs
Do you have a link to the comment you're thinking of?
I remember people saying the same thing. It was some time ago. Turns out some markets really aren’t that efficient and corporate capture really is a thing…
As someone who really enjoys rewards programs, keep those scams alive!
The irony is that every couple you shop with just increases the prices of their items to deal with the fees, so you're just paying more for items to feel good about getting reward program benefits.
You are also being subsidised by debit card users.
How many people are actually buying things on a Debit card? I imagine not a lot
Most places other than the USA, when they use these card networks or their local country networks, are normally using debit cards. There's just no reason to overcomplicate a payment card by making it also a loan.
Mid-thirties Brit here. I've never owned a credit card, neither has my partner.
All of our card transactions are with a debit card.
I've never needed instant-access debt so it's not really an attractive proposition. Perhaps the added consumer protection rules could be worth it, but it's not been an issue to date.
Depending on your annual spend you could be missing out on one or more free trips per year in airline and hotel points.
I’d say it’s the norm in much of Europe for starters…
Much more common in Europe, which is partly cultural, and partly because there's not the same single/dual message technical distinction between debit and credit cards, so you don't "need" a credit card in the way you would for certain things in the US (e.g. a hotel that wants to preauth it).
Roughly half of all card users in the US, and probably much more elsewhere.
That surprises me, I've never met someone that uses Debit cards as their primary method of payment.
You lose a lot of consumer protections and many cashback rewards by using only Debit cards. The only drawback to credit cards is the interest, if you don't pay it off at the end of the month. So long as you're responsible with your spending, it's a direct upgrade.
> That surprises me, I've never met someone that uses Debit cards as their primary method of payment.
That in turn is not surprising – the split is very much correlated with socioeconomic status (to the point where quite a few of the people working on debit card products have never themselves used a debit card to pay, in my experience).
> The only drawback to credit cards is the interest [...]
Which is a significant drawback if your bank account balance regularly oscillates around zero and/or you've seen your peers get in financial trouble from credit card debt.
I buy flights on credit card, and other one-off purchases like house and car insurance, and often my Costco purchases (because the credit card lives in a different wallet where I normally keep my membership card).
My day-to-day wallet just contains a debit card so that gets used for almost everything else.
Internet transactions are usually done using Revolut because then I can use a disposable card number.
do consider that in Italy most credit cards cost around ~30€ per year + a 2€ tax for all months you spend more than ~70€ and most offer no benefits. Debit cards are offered for free by all banks. So credit is only used to rent cars (not really mandatory anymore) and if you really need the credit (but other ways of getting short term credit exist now).
I can’t remember the last time I paid using anything else in the UK. Occasionally a credit card if I need additional protection
Anyone who's credit rating is bad enough to not be able to get a credit card.
Given the price at the register is $X across all payment methods, I prefer to use my card that lets me pay 0.96X 30 days later. (I don't know what discount you can get from UK rewards cards...)
I hope that rewards cards go away, because they distort the market, but I'm going to use them while they're here. Rewards cards push costs onto customers that don't use them, and I don't want costs pushed onto me.
Might want to think twice about that: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/credit-card-rewar...
You are assuming they don't know about all this already when I feel like they have made it quite clear they do.
I briefly skimmed this, but why are you wasting my time? What does this have to do with me earning free trips from being smart about how I buy things? does not compute.
The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.
The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).
Note that this is highly location dependent. In most of Europe, credit cards are basically all that exists (that is, even "debit cards" are just credit cards with a balance); and regardless of the type of card, because all payments are either chip & pin, biometric based, or verified with some additional 2FA, it's extremely hard to dispute a charge, whether a charge to a credit or debit card.
There's also "contactless" credit card payments in the UK and are common for buying things in shops/pubs etc. I don't know what the situation would be if you were to dispute an incorrect contactless charge.
Those are common in all of Europe, and they are still based on either biometrics (if using your phone) or the card's chip. They do typically include a transaction value and count limit below which the biometrics or pin don't actually get checked, for ease of use. But, given that this limit is controlled by the user, I expect that the contract terms also prevent you from disputing transactions below those limits - though I haven't read carefully enough to be sure.
I don't think I can control the contactless limit on any of my cards (I'm in the UK). Occasionally, the contactless device will prompt to enter a pin, but it happens fairly rarely (probably more common if the payment is at a new location).
I also haven't examined the various contracts, but I'd be surprised if there was no option to dispute transactions below a certain limit as that could be exploited by banks or thieves (but I repeat myself) or shops. An unscrupulous shop could double up transactions or change the amount paid and customers would not be happy if the bank turned round and said "it's below the £50 limit, so we don't care". The bank is more likely to push the problem onto the retailer and simply refund the customer and charge the retailer.
Personally, I don't like contactless due to the change of responsibility between the customer and bank and prefer to use PINs. As far as I know, I can't get just a PIN card as they all have contactless enabled.
Third option: You have the money and like paying less than people paying with non-rewards cards.
Fourth option: You use tap-to-pay and pay the balance in full every month for the convenience at zero cost.
Do American debit cards not have tap?
I'm in Australia, I have my credit card set up as the default to tap.
Means one payment from my savings account a month to cover all daily expenses.
In some places Visa/MC is the default way to pay. Such as large parts of Europe now that the fees are capped. The cashier asks you to pay, you hold your card up to the terminal, and you've paid. Some places like Australia have their own local systems that are more commonly used by locals and probably have lower fees, but those POS also support Visa/MC. It's just the default way to pay internationally now.
Except in the US, it does. Depending on the card, it can cost as much as 4.5% (or more!) to run the card. You can argue that it shouldn't, but that's a different statement than it doesn't.
uh, I'm including the card issuers as participants in this multi-party scam
it is illegal for Merchants to charge credit card processing fees by law, they have to absorb these fees and cannot display them to the customer.
This naturally protects the artificial oligopoly of visa/mc/discover systems.
The moment you allow Merchants to charge cc fees (even 2-3%) and allow customer to choose low processing option (ACH/debit card/cash), the whole scheme falls apart and Visa/MC will slowly go bankrupt
>it is illegal for Merchants to charge credit card processing fees by law,
This is only true in 4 states.
the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
and most small/med businesses dont have clout to protest that, so they have to accept these terms in order to earn money
FYI there was a lawsuit about this a while back and part of the settlement was merchants can pass on fees now.
This hasn't been the case for a wide variety of payment processors for quite a while now. Many of the new startup-based ones have features to help you pass through the fees even. Small business can use Stripe, Square, Clover, or one of many other payment processors that don't ban them from passing credit card fees forward to consumers.
> the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
These clauses would be illegal in many states and countries these days, so they don’t.
> they have to absorb these fees
absorb and then pass on as general "costs have risen". It's not like it's coming out of their profits, exclusively.
if people could choose Debit card for no fee vs Credit card for 2.5% fee, then customers would reduce their usage of cc for purchases
It's still costing them > 3%.
Interchange average in the UK was about 0.2% last time I looked (which was a few years ago), it't not much anyway.
Also the government doesn't really do card transactions. I imagine this is for fairly rare things like renewing your passport, booking a driving test or buying a title copy. Oh and visa fees maybe? Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.
Interchange as a standalone might be low but scheme fees are about the same nowadays. Aydens provide a detail breakdown per transaction, for example on a UK consumer credit card there's sometimes 8 different line items (interchange, ayden markup, various scheme fees), one generally does not get out under 0.5% on interchange++ even in the UK on the most favourable cards. When you're on interchange pricing with either Stripe, Adyen or another big boy you're paying extra for AVS, 3DS, and several other scheme services. No one is walking away with 0.2% all in. A lot of people find these Visa and Mastercard published PDFs for interchange and think that's cheap, but reality is when the schemes got their nuts tightened on interchange fees they just spread the loss by marking up various scheme services and mandating them. John still want's his Avios points even in Europe/UK.
The gov.uk runs card transactions for dozens of services - which add up - from car tax, driver license renewal, passport replacements, to paying previous NI years (do you consider this tax?) and so on..
0.5% is a pretty incredibly low interchange rate in any case. But if you are saying that half of it is going to scheme fees, I doubt it is funding rewards programs for consumers.
Why do you think that? People definitely pay taxes by card.
But regardless this contract is _not_ for HMRC payments, its for gov.uk pay which is basically a centralised service that other services can use.
GOV.UK pay has done £9.2B in payments in the last decade, with an average of £67
https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/
A very crude calculation for £1B a year in payments (thats probably too low) would mean a payment to Ayden (contract is upto £25M over 3 years) of 0.8%
Most of the things I pay on the government website (except vehicle tax renewal), so basically tax, I've been pushed towards a one-off direct debit each time instead of a card payment.
Most underpaid taxes are collected via a change in tax code for the following year.
> Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.
I do. If I’m going to give the government a big pile of money, I may as well earn some points for my trouble.
They charge a surcharge when you pay by card, don't they?
They do, but with the redemption value I still end up ahead.
Not in Europe, where there are strict limits on credit card surcharges
My state government certainly does
Depends on the tax - I pay my vehicle tax through the gov.uk website!
With CC or bank transfer?
By credit card, it's quite useful for the reward points - I'm fairly sure it was MC and Visa only (no AMEX) last time I did it, though that may change with this new payment provider
Paying UK corporation tax can be done with a personal credit card.
Isn’t it illegal to pay a corporate entities tax with a personal card?
If it isnt it would be one hell if a headache with reimbursement and the accounting and reporting around it.
I imagine it is a bit of a headache, but it is an available option you can choose.
Has to be a personal debit (not credit) card - https://www.gov.uk/pay-corporation-tax/debit-or-credit-card
Road fund licence aka car tax is probably the most common thing that lots of people pay for regularly.
In the UK, the so-called car tax is an emissions tax (i.e. electric vehicles pay £0) and doesn't pay for road maintenance etc. Roads are paid for out of general taxation (e.g. income tax). Actual road tax ended in 1937.
I feel this is worth correcting as "don't bloody pay road tax" is a common form of abuse aimed at cyclists which is wrong on a number of levels. A lot of cyclists also drive a car and non-driving cyclists would fund roads if they pay tax. Another way to think about it is that the emissions tax for cycles would be zero anyway.
The tax for electric cars is normally £200 after the first year or £20 for electric cars older than 2017.
Ah yes - looks like they changed it in 2025.
And Companies House - still relatively rare though, like one payment of £50 per company per year.
Brazil's central bank operates their instant payment network Pix [1] [2] [3] for ~$10M/year [4]. Its not that these are small contracts, but that large, inefficient, unnecessary contracts have become the norm (I argue). Similar example from India's UPI payment system [5]. The US has FedNow to move instant payments for pennies, but banking and payment system participants in the US ecosystem are avoiding it to continue to private payment system rake [6] (cc networks, Zelle commercial bank network, private wallets, etc).
The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
[2] https://frontierfintech.substack.com/p/55-send-pix-brazils-i...
[3] https://brazilstockguide.com/behind-the-lines/the-cost-of-pi...
> This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation.
> There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day.
> The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics.
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44753626
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The BCB in Brazil does very little to operate Pix. It's effectively a P2P system, where the BCB forces all the banks to interop with one-another (and all the banks directly call eachother). They can operate it that cheaply because they do close to nothing technically (they host the main discovery endopints). The only place the BCB actually ingests data is via their reporting mechanisms.
UPI is a bit more centralized, where the NPCI does the top-level routing between banks, so their operating budget is likely much higher than Pix. It also is drastically more simple to be a participant in UPI compared to Pix.
For Pix adoption: you can thank Covid for that. The Brazilian government said if you wanted to get free money from the government, you had to set up and use Pix.
US Financial Innovation: I'd say the hard thing here is that the government is extremely strict (lots of regulation) when you start looking like a bank. Lots of companies have tried to innovate here, but regulation makes it really hard to do. There's a lot of regulator capture going on.
This is incorrect . The system is not P2P, while it appears to be for customers. The BCB keeps both the directory that ties a chave pix to an actual account (DICT), and a centralized ledger (SPI - Sistema de pagamentos instantaneo)
[Payer bank] ──(1. Lookup key)──> [ DICT - Name Service] (Returns account data)
[Receiver Bank]The ledger doesn't keep individual accounts, but a Instant Payments account for each institution. This account is not the master bank account in the Reserve Transfer System (Sistema de Transferencia de Reservas) which is the system of record for banks funds, so the banks need to allocate funds from the STR to the SPI every day to be able to honor PIX transfers. The STR system doesn't work out of normal banking hours, so the banks need to predict how much money they will need for PIX transfers and move that money from the STR to the PI (pagamento instantaneo) account during defined liquidity transfer windows, to avoid banks double-spending the same funds over different rails (traditional vs PIX). If a bank finds itself without funds on its PI account in a saturday night, it can loan the funds from another bank who still have excess liquidity on his PI account).
As you can see, between the SPI, STR an DICT, it is a very centralized system.
Also, the system operates in a dedicated zero-trust networks which is completely isolated from the internet. The messages between banks and the central bank follow the ISO 20022 format. IBM MQ is used to route messages back and forth between banks and the BCB.
In both Brazil and the US, making something like Pix mainstream requires regulation. Brazil did its part, but it’s unclear whether the US will do the same anytime soon, I don't think so, unfortunately. Technically, it would benefit the American population (the process of making pix payments is so smoothless), but payment companies may have little incentive to support it, and could lobby against it.
In Brazil, the Central Bank overpowered the coordination problem. In the US, it may be the opposite: the government seems to have less power over the payment lobby, or at least less willingness to confront it directly.
Thanks for that. I am wondering if anyone have written up a high level technical comparison between different payment systems including Pix, UPI and others.
Feels odd that you exclude mentioning the EU, which has had instant transfers for more than a decade. More than two decades, if you include things like iDeal from The Netherlands.
Wasn't intentional, I mention SEPA and Wero in other comments, not intended to be an enumeration of all instant payment systems currently active globally. My apologies!
https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea...
https://www.emerald.com/cemj/article/33/4/575/1248919/The-ri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment
> not intended to be an enumeration of all 54 instant payment systems currently active.
Even then, not mentioning those who pretty much started / invented instant transfers still seems odd :) but no need to apologize haha, maybe I was a bit too abrasive.
I get why you prioritized to mention those though. The Chinese and Indians have leapfrogged us. No more fussy legacy (digital) cards, just scan a QR and go. Even illicit food stalls and street wanderers have accounts, when they wouldn't be able to get a 'real' bank account.
And the Chinese and Indians don't have to pay tribute to the Mastercard-Visa overlords either. Although Wero and the digital Euro might eventually change that for Europe too.
Can you imagine how cumbersome conversations would become if people felt obligated to qualify ad-hoc statements with what amounts to a historical ledger?
Every new entry would open up an opinion around “if you included that, why didn’t you include this?”
In such cases we’ll always up at Kevin Bacon.
The comment literally mentioned how unusual Pix adaption is and how innovative it is. It is neither of those things. Because of aforementioned history.
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Some banks in some parts of the EU have - SEPA instant was only mandated in January 2025, only for Euro payments.
Canadians have been able to transfer money via email for ages, only Americans think their system is unique, it is. Uniquely inefficient and costly.
don't centralized payment systems like this reduce the overall resilience of the ecosystem and prevent future innovation? You hint on those lines with the possible future transformation of deposits into credit.
Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Yes, centralised payment systems reduce resilience - whether it's Visa, EFTPOS, or Pix. The alternative is cash.
All payment systems are centralized. Zelle is owned by the largest US commercial banks ("Early Warning Services"), Congress directed the Federal Reserve to build and offer FedNow as a utility so smaller banks would not be excluded from offering instant payments. It costs $~30/month (last I checked the rate sheet) to plug into it. The instant payments are the utility, your opportunity to innovate is using this as a component of your user experience.
Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Because it is a grift ("regulatory capture") [1] [2]. The "overbearing system" is the result of regulation to bring the consumer excess of cheap payments to an entire country's financial user population. Why does Jamie Dimon not like stablecoin yield [3]? Because JPMC makes almost $100B/year in interest income taking customer deposits and lending against them, which stablecoins would compete against by operating as a form of narrow bank, parking the underlying deposits in risk free US Treasuries [4].
As a US financial services consumer, it is hard for you to avoid the rake of the machine built to skim off of you as you hold onto fiat or move it, but the rest of the world can avoid being captured by it (as this piece demonstrates). Also, Europe can't regulate Stripe as easily as they can Adyen. You don't have to be the biggest or the greatest, it just has to work "good enough".
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-109-billion-bank-hust...
[2] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-cantillon-effect-and-...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/29/dimon-jpmorgan-cryp...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331082
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
(I don't have a finance background.) There any multiple instances of a one-size fits all user experience decision which strikes me as a result of the centralization and removal of competition (in efforts to drive up adoption).
I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
> UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
The Indian government has mandated this for strong identity assurances. Your only hope at "innovation" (ie violating financial services regulators and laws) here is cash or something like Monero.
> UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
I haven't used UPI recently, but I imagine this is a UX issue around aliases (phone numbers, email, and other human identifiers that associate to an underlying account).
TLDR People problems cannot be fixed with tech (in this context, regulatory requirements or alias UX, submit a public comment to the regulator if you can).
> I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
Because without regulation, it turns into Monopoly (the board game). Sometimes, competition can be encouraged, but in some cases (broad, shared infrastructure) it cannot and regulation must fill this gap to ensure the target outcome. This is why we regulate electric utilities similarly. Happy to help, I am very interested and curious on this topic.
I loved your explanation and POV on this.
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services.
Well, as a brazilian who is used to pix and has also faced the bad payment ux in american, I think a possible solution should be adding the missing Pix-like layer above the existing US rails.
One of the best part that makes Pix an incredible experience, It’s that the app almost doesn’t matter. I can use one bank, you can use another, a merchant can use a different provider, and it still works through the same basic language: QR code, Pix key, payment request, confirmation screen. I can even transport my "pix key" to another app/bank provider.
So maybe the US opportunity is a agnostic interoperability layer on top of FedNow/RTP/Zelle/bank APIs: universal aliases, QR payments, routing, fraud checks, receipts, and reconciliation. Making instant account-to-account payments feel universal before the government forces a universal standard.
I don't think consumers broadly should be the main goal first, the best initial path should be small-business, marketplaces, rent, etc.
If someone could own that neutral UX/addressing layer, that seems much closer to the useful part of Pix than just another closed wallet.
> All payment systems are centralized
Except for blockchain based ones
None of which are in production at scale. I admit crypto is optimal for less than legal transactions and speculation, but the volume for legal payment transactions is negligible.
Solana mainnet was shown to have capability to handle 100k transactions per second [1]. Granted, it was a synthetic benchmark of noops, but it shows the capability is there. For reference, Visa claim 83k TPS [2] for their system. It also has the advantage of being vastly cheaper than tradfi payment networks at ca. $0.0005 per transaction [3] irrespective of transaction amount.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/08/18/solana-briefly-h...
[2] https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/securi...
[3] https://solana.com/learn/understanding-solana-transaction-fe...
Until it is in prod, it is a proof of concept. Blockchains solve for low trust; if you have trust, you don't need the efficiency loss of a decentralized ledger or blockchain. Central banks provide trust.
As mentioned in one of my other comments, Pix in Brazil costs ~$10M/year. They process ~6-8 billion monthly transactions and roughly $6.7 trillion in payment volume a year [1]. That's roughly ~$0.0015/transaction based on the math in this comment, and we don't know what the ceiling is based on existing capacity (which would drive per transaction costs down further). Choose boring technology, when possible [2].
The innovation in this context is nuking the profits of Visa and Mastercard (their margins are ~45-50% [3] [4] [5]), replacing them with central bank instant payment systems run at cost. The reduction in their revenue is money back in the pockets of everyone paying unnecessarily to move value around. I highly recommend the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" on this topic [6].
[1] https://www.ebanx.com/en/insights/articles/five-years-on-pix...
[2] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2023/289/arti...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/visa-vs-ma...
[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/mastercard...
[5] https://aftabborka.substack.com/p/over-50-profit-margin-how-...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
Pix is really good but I don't think it beats Solana or Ethereum L2s.
Most recent indicator of peak Pix transaction volumes I could find [1] was 227M/day (=2700 TPS). You can see yourself that Solana does 130-140M/day consistently. Pix fees you quote are still triple Solana's.
Not to mention there is the entire decentralization aspect, which means the government does not control your money as with other blockchains.
[1] https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/economia/noticia/2024-09...
[2] https://blockworks.com/analytics/solana/solana-onchain-activ...
And then we watch fraud soar. The 3% pays for a lot of bad transactions reversals and dispute management.
Fraud can be managed at instant payment rails, you don't need credit card rails to manage it; fraud must be managed on any rails utilized, so it is somewhat agnostic. If you as a consumer want credit card chargeback protection insurance, push the fee onto the consumer with a surcharge to cover the cost. I believe the evidence is robust credit card rails are unnecessary in today's world, plain and simple. They are a bloated legacy holding on for relevance (and their grossly excessive margins) imho.
On fraud management:
Pix: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...
UPI: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11063926
Common misconception - it's the merchant who pays for fraud and the 3% is pure bank profit. If there's a fraud transaction, the merchant has to pay the whole amount back and ends up negative the transaction fee and the chargeback fee. The banks just want you to think they're earning the 3% but actually it's pure profit.
Most blockchain systems are fairly or even extremely centralized as well and amount to little other than decentralization theater. Bitcoin and Ethereum are arguably more of an exception than the norm.
> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly?
Why would anybody willingly lower their own margin?
> It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries
It’s almost like regulation can sometimes achieve good outcomes in a not very competitive (due to network effects) market…
Regulations to do what exactly? Set price ceilings on markets with monopolies?
If £8m/year is a fraction of a mid-size company cloud budget, I don't think you can class them as "mid-size"
Mid-size in the US is comparable to a large european company, so yeah... mid-size.
I'm with a rather small company (~ 250 people) in the US and we pay about $1,2mm-1,4mm yearly on GCP alone.
Note that in the EU and UK mid-size has a definition: "fewer than 250 employees and a turnover of under €50 million (or a balance sheet total below €43 million)"
Thus by definition that company wouldn't be mid-sized over here anyway.
edit: in-fact after checking even in the US, the IRS for example declares a large business as one with more than 10 million in assets, though there is no set rule like in the EU to be used by other gov orgs.
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Why bring up Taiwan and China? This feels incredibly cherry picked?
If you know Taiwan’s history, and you understand China - there’s no surprise to be..
Well, obviously it’s cherry-picked. It’s an example of something that challenges my intuition. Most things align with my intuition because I’m in my late 30s and have seen enough of the world to have a fairly good idea of the rough numbers. Here’s another one: the London Underground is older than the telephone.
There’s a light board game called Timeline where you have stuff like this and there are so many surprises. Temporal stuff is hard to reason about and the game catches that. But with large numbers one loses intuition easily: NYC’s subway vs. all domestic and international US air travel is closer in total passengers than one would think. The median American did not fly last year.
Stuff like this. It’s just Gladwell-fodder but numerically fun.
I misinterpreted your intent here, and that’s on me. Thank you for explaining, you clearly picked the sample as a comparison of fact, not as narrative. Apologies
> Why bring up Taiwan and China? This feels incredibly cherry picked?
It’s because many times the obvious intuition is incorrect
He could’ve compared Singapore and China too
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/182de6c9-d...
https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/roadmap/
https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/
I wish Adyen was as good at marketing and hype as Stripe was.
Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.
There’s a huge difference for small business owners.
Stripe has a Get started button. You click it, fill out a form, get your site approved in maybe a day, and start making money.
Adyen has a Talk to our team button. You close the tab and never think about it again until you’re making serious money.
---
Edit: that is, of course, by design. Adyen doesn’t want small businesses. From the sibling comment:
> only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year
Sadly pretty normal for European companies. The penalties they face for signing up a bad customer are so much harsher they won't risk letting just anyone sign up without actual KYC not just checkbox KYC. This is the same reason Hetzner turns away 50% of its customers.
I used to work at Stripe and they subject to the same penalties as Ayden. There is a misconception that Stripe is an American only company, they have dual HQ model in Ireland and San Francisco. Since they are an Irish founded company and they have an EU entity “Stripe Technology Europe”. They can be kicked out of entire countries and regions if they didn’t have an extensive KYC systems and be fined just the same.
Since Stripe operates by working with a BIN (banks that sponsor them within each country) generally like all payment providers. While the decline rates for new customers are not public, they are very high, especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling [1]. Also revocation of existing accounts can happen often if KYC systems flag anything, like Stripe Identity, Connect, and Radar.
[1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses
> especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling
Well, it does makes sense. I’d be more interested in the rejection rate for businesses that are allowed but are just starting up.
Mollie (also Dutch) existed even before Adyen (and way before Stripe). They have no problem dealing with small customers, and have always offered a trivially easy to use API.
Love for Mollie - and literally had this exact theme last year at work. Stripe implemented, then customer A couldn't use it due to US base, so went to Adyen, built integration, rejected as less than $5 million as first responder said, then went to Mollie.
Only gripe is no embeddable checkout but its not a huge deal, and they have superior test platform than even Stripe. The test cards are right there in slide in panel, and you have option to select paid/cancel/fail etc to test different outcomes.
Not sure how would that change for Stripe dealing with EU companies.
They have to comply with the same regulations.
Why don't they have a fax option so you absolutely never think about it again?
Adyen has resellers. Mollie is one example, they do have. Get Started and no lower limit. These smaller parties rely on the bank license of Adyen
Are you sure about that? From Mollie's webiste:
Mollie B.V. is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Dutch Central Bank (relationship number: F0038). Mollie UK Ltd is licensed and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution in the UK (FRN: 977968).
Lightspeed is powered by Adyen and serves smaller businesses.
https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/lightspeed-integrated-pa...
Seems to be focused on retail / POS, not online payments. Though they do have eCommerce page and even API:
https://www.lightspeedhq.com/ecom/
https://www.lightspeedhq.com/pos/retail/api/
Mollie also doesn't want small businesses, unfortunately. (We were rejected as too small.)
Matches my experience. They didn’t state any reason in my case, though.
Really? Must be a recent thing then..? I've used them for all sorts of small (and not so small) things.
Mollie doesn't resell Adyen, nor does it rely on Adyen's banking license.
No point in marketing when you outright reject customers:
Thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback.
I have taken a look at the information you have provided and unfortunately, at this time, Adyen is only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year or businesses which are currently supported by a Plugin built by Adyen. The reason for this is so that we are able to provide the right level of support and resources to our merchants at the right stage of their company growth.
If you would like to stay up to date with our payment offering please do sign up to our newsletter here.
In the interim, I want to ensure that you find the right provider, so I would like to direct you about payments. They are specialists in finding the most relevant payment solutions for all business models and I have no doubt they will offer you several great options.
I wish you the best of luck with your business moving forward, and hopefully we can reconnect in the future.
Kind Regards,
Ana Sales Specialist
I wish more companies would try to serve tiny shops at the same time they serve multi million euro companies. The requirements for the two are very different, as is the support and customer care requirement. Integrating directly with Adyen as a small business is like running a kubernetes cluster on AWS to host your blog, except they'll have even less time for customer support to spend on your tickets when things don't go right.
Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.
Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.
Once you hit a certain processing threshold, stripe underwrites you. The benefit is some people get better deals or get to skirt by rules just by being immaterial.
Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.
And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).
At some point you realize that your smallest customers generate the least value but require the most support.
Shedding low value users to others makes you stronger and them weaker.
You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.
Small customers grow into bigger ones later on. At least they do in the US, maybe this doesn’t happen so much in Adyen’s part of the world?
What are these plugins? Could any business choose to use one, or are they highly specialized?
It's the list here:
https://docs.adyen.com/plugins#built-by-adyen
A big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion.
The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.
Like with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages.
From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?
ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.
As a Stripe customer I can attest to its simplicity: you have API that you call and that's it. You don't have to deal with any of the PCI stuff if you would do it in-house, just an SAQ once a year.
The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.
Do you have 3d secure or whatever the marketing name is for it this week?
Because it's my impression that either Stripe doesn't support it or it's so hard compared to the rest of their API that no one does it...
> Do you have 3d secure or whatever the marketing name is for it this week?
Stripe takes care of that for cards that are enrolled into 3D Secure (I think it is a Visa thing - the naming) and other kinds of card 2FA validation (Mastercard has their own and so on).
Not in my experience as an european cc user (where non 3d secure is rejected by default) using stripe based (us located mostly) stores.
The ones i've tried to pay on bull rush to charging me with no 2FA and my bank just rejects them.
https://docs.stripe.com/payments/3d-secure
Having built on Authorize.net and a few other gateways before Stripe, I'd say yes - but the value that justifies the rake isn't the nicer API, it's what you no longer have to own. The moment you're paying out to third parties you're on the hook for KYC, identity verification, and the whole compliance/risk surface around moving other people's money. Connect absorbs that. Handing those pieces off so I stay compliant on payouts and can actually focus on the business is worth far more to me than the basis points. With other gateways I was assembling all of that myself.
Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.
Which part that makes them look bigger than they are? Which services are larger than stripe?
Adyen isn't self-serve, so it's difficult for common people to be hyped with it.
More importantly, Adyen doesn't have a messiah-like founder. Patrick is like the second coming of Jesus.
Stripes revenue is ~$20B seems pretty big to me...
Stripe has a useful tool and markets it well. With that said, I'm glad there are other options.
Stripe processes like $2T in txns per year – how do they look bigger than that?
Adyen is used by Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Booking, etc
Stripe only outpaced after last year 34% vs 8% growth. Volume 1.9T vs 1.6T
Marketing is really Stripe's main competency and focus.
Really? I thought Stripe was a company that sells CSS stylesheets.
It hurts a little that stripe is an American company since it was founded by two Irish brothers. It could have been an EU company to begin with
People don't make a company. Stripe exists as is because it's not a EU company.
Why though? Because they raised a lot of capital in the US? Or because they had access to better talent in the US?
As I see, there are many payment providers in the EU, just not API first as Stripe ever was.
People will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
Ireland also stayed out of both wars.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
> If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
> Whose fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2..
So still Europe’s.
EU has plenty of VC, maybe not enough to sustain crazy rounds rounds like those we see often in the US, but capital is not the biggest blocker to founding your company in Europe, law is.
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
Sure there are. Both Mollie and Adyen are API-first. Mollie developer experience has always been on par with Stripe in my experience. And they existed 6 years earlier.
I've used Mollie and can confirm that DX is not any different than Stripe's.
It’s the whole system. It takes many characteristics for something to happen in a specific manner.
Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.
So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.
But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.
It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.
It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .
And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.
Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!
Quite to the contrary: all a company is (at least as originally conceptualised) is the formalisation of a group of people, usually working together towards a shared goal. It’s in the name - just like you have a troupe of actors, you may have a company of engineers and accountants (though to keep in the vein of live stage production, you also have a theatre company).
This is why we tend to use collective pronouns when referring to a company - Meta just announced that they are planing share dilution (though to weaken my own case, one can also use singular nouns, likely due to the increased modern perception of a company as a single entity due to the increased anonymity afforded by the internet)
Stripe is dual headquartered in the US and in Ireland afaik. They tried to avoid having just a satellite in Irl, which other companies do but which makes it harder to take decisions independently.
That may be true, but the Irish corporate entity (Stripe Payments International Holdings Ltd.) is ultimately owned by Stripe, Inc. in the U.S.
If you are looking for payment processors that are ultimately owned and incorporated in the EU: https://eualternative.eu/categories/payments/
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But it is Irish. Its HQ is in Dublin.
It has dual HQs. The one in Dublin is tiny (or at least it was the last time I visited), all the executive leadership is based in SF.
So why do they say they are dual HQd in Dublin/SF? Is it purely for tax purposes? How is it any different to other tech companies having their EU HQ in Ireland? I've tried researching this but I can't seem to find info on it
It seems to me like whole Western countries, especially Britain being outside the EU and Eurozone and with its own currency, ought to have at least one big domestically-based option for something this fundamental. It’s an odd thing to have to rely on foreign countries for.
Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?
> Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?
British payment processors usually sell out / get taken over by US firms
Checkout.com isn't terribly British just headquartered there (Swiss guy founded it in Singapore, tons of foreign investors). They opened a SF office last year, after a big US push prior, so if their financials stay adequate I imagine it'll be another that sells out to the US
Worldpay was the biggest by far, but it never really shook off its legacy image (it had its origins in a couple of 1980s-era payment gateways). Stripe had overtaken it by the mid 2010s, and it has since been dismembered and partially rebuilt by (American) private equity.
The UK tends to punch well above its weight in FinTech, but PSPs are high-volume and very low margin so not really an attractive proposition unless you can be reasonably sure of grabbing a decent share of the global market.
Yeah agree with the legacy image of Worldpay. The payment page is straight out of the early 00s. N.B. though, the Government does/did use Worldpay
Started in 1997, got bought out by a US company in 2018. RIP.
The founder, Nick Ogden claims "His career began when he pioneered ecommerce in 1994, inventing the first online shop, the Wine Warehouse." [0] Big if true! UK has a long, rich history of inventions.
[0] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nick-ogden-founding-father...
Yes, the 3rd competitor to Stripe and Ayden being Checkout.com
Also running payment processor per country would not be an easy feat or probably feasible.
Adyen refuses small clients, under the million :/
they probably dont have the scale for support for anything lower vs stripe
im amazed that stripe is able to handle small guys like me
I wasn't with the company when it started using Stripe, but there's really no need to interact with Stripe besides setting up your account and using the API they provide. Since being involved with Stripe, I don't we need to talk to them more than once a year on a "so, all good?" type of emails.
They basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies.
They can't afford it because they have no customers, because they turn down small customers and then Stripe already has them when they become big enough for Adyen.
They have resellers
The solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs. Then everyone will start using bank transfers.
> solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs
Then I offer an all-in price and take your customers.
Except your prices would have to be higher. Costco works on <0.5% margin, whilst these card fees are 1,2,3%+
The issue with bank transfers today is that the SEPA system is robust and established, but got no web compatible API.
But there are two projects (why one, if you can have two!?), one being Wero by different banks, the other being the Digital Euro by the European central bank. If either finds good adaption (Wero is rolling out slowly and for quite a bunch of banks every customer already got a Wero account automatically) this could move things around ...
I'm Irish, but I've built a website for an Australian client and they integrated something which did that. In the checkout, you could choose to pay with a system which would log you into your bank's website, where you could approve a payment, then return to the site on which you'd made your purchase, where it would instantly be marked as paid. I think that it may have taken a few days for the money to actually arrive in their bank account, but the payment was authorised instantly.
This stuff is very popular in the Baltics, there are many payment options and banks provide the necessary connections to be able to complete payments for the users using 2fa auth. Not to mention crypto. e.g. check out varle.lt as an example of an online retailer, the options are sort of normal and expected.
This is POLi and it's a massive security risk that they have everyone's bank passwords.
It could also be something PSD2 based. You should be able to create payment using PSD2, but the client still has to approve it inside their bank app.
They said Australian - it's POLi.
It was indeed POLi. Strange that it's using actual bank passwords!
I believe the usual SEPA flow is either scan this QR code or type this IBAN+reference into your bank's mobile app? SEPA is a "giro" system, meaning the person who owns the money has to push it, rather than a cheque system where the money owner writes something to the merchant who then pulls money from the money owner. These are always less convenient because the money owner has to contact their bank. They're also more secure.
That would seem like a logical solution. So wouldn't it be convenient for the expensive payment methods if legalities prevented merchants from charging higher fees to customers using them?
That’s exactly the system the card companies try to impose on vendors (mostly successfully).
In the UK it’s the system the law imposes on everyone.
Indeed. It's a triumph of consumer protection laws failing to protect consumers. Merchants here have to set their prices a bit higher to compensate for the fees and you still have to pay those higher prices as a customer even if you're using a more efficient payment method. I will never understand why the law wasn't set the other way - requiring explicit disclosure of payment fees to end customers and prohibiting payment services from incorporating these kinds of anticompetitive terms in merchant agreements - so that everyone could make an informed choice and market pressures would push the transaction overheads down.
I would say it’s regulatory capture. Some others would call it incompetence. Probably both in the UK
It might have been regulatory capture - though I have seen no specific evidence of that myself. It might simply have been the old story about a road and good intentions. At this point it doesn't really matter how it happened - it would be better if the situation were fixed in any case.
> The solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs.
so the ticketmaster model?
Ticketmaster is a monopoly.
Customers paying the price would: 1) induce scrutiny from the public on visa a Mastercard (the monopolies) 2) encourage the competitive market amongst issuers to compress prices
> Adyen will take over GOV.UK Pay card payments for local authorities, police forces and armed forces units from Stripe, as well as pay by bank services, under a three-year contract worth up to £25.3 million.
I would prefer they take this money and either build a payment processor or use an existing UK company. The UK government is addicted to offshoring all contracts it can, and then is surprised when the cheapest possible quote actually ends up ballooning over the agreed amount.
> and either build a payment processor
Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
> use an existing UK company
Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
> Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
These projects are possible, it's just clear the current project management structure of the UK government is not up to the task. I would lean heavily towards a UK-based private sector solution.
> Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
This is the point, there should be one, and the UK government could heavily put their thumb on the scale to ensure that payments are processed within the UK.
It seems mad to have foreign companies make money on UK government fund raising activities.
If you ever worked with any of the UK gov or agencies you’d understand why it happens. Despite having its own IT in every agency those same agencies buy externally because “it is too difficult”. IT is entangled beyond belief and some of the knowledge is institutionalised. Existing contracts do not make it easier either. Any high ranking clerk is afraid of any risk associated as well. Not to mention the procurement process is hard and lengthy.
I understand, but it's why things are desperate to change. I refuse to believe that the UK is fundamentally unable to rise to these challenges, in which can I can only chalk it up to poor government structure and management. These people have a lot to answer for.
I'm sorry? Did you just say you want the UK government to "build a payment processor"?
Why is that so insane? Would you be saying the same when the NHS was originally proposed?
It's entirely possible, the fact that the UK government lacks imagination is at great cost to the tax payer. There is no serious long term investment into UK tech, past building AI datacentres for a bubble economy with some of the worst energy rates in the world.
Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain does not work because there is an address verification which is not possible because Spain's credit cards do not share customer address information, so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.
>Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain .... so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.
I don't follow ?
Don't they have Wise (previously known as Tranferwise) in Spain ? Or a similar platform ?
Its 2026 and for most people the answer is just to use one of those platforms to pay wire transfers instead of your bank.
Sure there will still be fee of some description, but it will almost always be much lower than what your bank charges for international transfers.
Stripe allows for these kinds of payments, we've been updating our store to support Wero etc. It should give better conversation and processing rates than the US credit cards.
Got to love the people taking a swipe at the company. They found their market, can't you just be happy for them? They're hardly the only company in the world to only deal with bigger clients.
This site regularly dunks on European tech as being subpar, but when an American company gets ditched for a European one, barely anyone can find nice words to say. You really reveal yourselves in times like this, I've got to admit.
It's pareto better, all else equal (which, fair, it may not be in this case) for a company to serve businesses from $1 and up than to only serve $5M and up.
I'm curious whether this will materially reduce costs for local authorities or whether the benefits are primarily in expanding payment options.
Good for them. Self-reliance is a good thing especially weaning off hostile Americanism.
Stripe is an EU and US company dual headquartered in Ireland and subject to the same EU regulations as Ayden. They spend a lot developing and maintaining talent in Ireland.
I'm sure Stripe EU is subject to EU regulations, just like Adyen. But unlike Adyen, they are also subject to some US regulations due to being a subsidiary. And, highly likely, they run software systems build by their US counterpart, meaning data exfiltration or even sabotage is trivial.
Good on em. Ayden rocks, and improves European sovereignty.
So maybe it'll stop taking three requests, 1-2 months, and a certified letter every year to receive your tax refund?
HMRCs digital services in general are pretty good, but refunds not so much.
Forcing people through all that means they collect more interest and I assume some people don’t bother.
My self assessment refund came through within days of submitting my assessment.
2-3 years ago they changed something and I know tens of people (and I don't know that many people) say that now filling in bank details in the SA itself has become a no-op, and that they (and I) now had to explicitly request a withdrawal of the balance. Often 2-3 times.
And it's not been a matter of waiting. The money just sits there for the better part of a year before people have noticed.
Yes I have also received payments for refunds of PAYE automatically within a month or two of no action on my part.
Yeah, this has been my experience too. I don't know how much easier it could be.
doesnt seem like stripe has anything to worry about here the total contract value is of irrelevant scale
i guess i expected it to be more significant seeing that its the UK gov
Well, it is signalling. It's signalling that there are competitors which are trustworthy enough for a government and it signals the overall trend one can observe how European governments detach from US companies. With some lower hanging fruit and some larger projects.
They have moved as it also allows payment by paybybank which is the uk direct bank payment service
Stripe globally will be worried as countries seek to cut out the card payment middle man and do direct bank to bank account payments
Most government processing is prohibited at Stripe that is why it always tends to be small. Too much risk being exposed to more regulatory scrutiny that is not worth it as payments processor. > “Prohibited Businesses… Government services… Disbursement of government economic support, such as grant” [1] [1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses
Associated Adyen post: https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk
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Good luck with integration.
All are ditching american tech and what not as much as they could