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Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

reuters.com

111–120 of 333 posts

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#111
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, PayPal has nowhere near the adoption of other countries, for making payments directly between accounts, and Visa and Mastercard have enough regulatory capture to ensure it stays that way. If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.

>FedNow There is no recourse if something goes wrong with FedNow, right? Like you get scammed, and the scammer just keeps the money. Seems like a pretty big difference (in theory anyway) to PayPal. Although I'm apparently not the right guy to ask, since I really don't see the use case for PayPal vs. credit card.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#112
post #65

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…

> informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.

> This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical;

Not if you pay a bit of dividends to jared or dtj

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#114
post #110
post #97

Not good. Stripe makes restrictions that PayPal allows (cannabis adjacent, adult adjacent) that Stripe blocks. Many vendors will be negatively impacted by Stripes morality police and selective application of their policies.

In my experience, having worked at several large PSPs, it is Mastercard and Visa who are the morality police. Stripe are just enforcing the rules insisted on by them, and PayPal forgot about them 3 layoffs ago.

Then how do other processors go over the Visa and MC rails for these transaction types? How does Stripe allow some and then block others?

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#115
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now

Do you have any evidence that you can just bribe your way past antitrust regulations (which are enforced by hundreds or maybe even thousands of attorneys across the political spectrum) or is this just how you feel because you don't like who is in the White House right now?

Not anti-trust, but you can apparently bribe the FCC to get a merger through. This just came out today.

https://www.propublica.org/article/paramount-mergers-fcc-ken...

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#116
post #3

That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now

You think they'd only have to go through antitrust in the US? These are global payment processors, and the EU loves getting involved in this kind of thing. And no they can't just ignore it if they want to keep the majority of their customers.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good thing about price collusion is that it's hard to coordinate. If even one competitor defects (and they have every advantage to, as they'll win big), then the cartel falls apart.

That assumes that * it instantly brings them a ton of consumers * they have capacity to serve those customers if they don't competitor can just keep higher price (especially if it is just small middleman fee most people might not care that much about) And even if both of those are true worst possible case is them expanding to handle influx of customers and then competition following in few months, making their invest…

That's true, but the thing about price fixing is that it basically guarantees these conditions.

The price is artificially high -> there's a ton of demand waiting to be unlocked by the "potential energy" gated behind the unnatural price

Capacity is easy to plan around; get too much and you can just raise the price again.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#119
post #41

Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.

Don't forget Venmo - PayPal smartly gobbled that up many, many years ago, and it has a great amount of mindshare (though I don't know how profitable it is). Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users, but unlike Venmo, Zelle is a steaming pile of sh*t of user experience, due to it being a consortium of all the famously-tech-backwards big banks, which stood it up out of fear and jealousy that those "Interne…

what's the problem with zelle? it works in my bank app, it's fast, no fees, it's really easy to use

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#120
post #65

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…

> informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.

i just wonder why you think fees are high. seemingly the only thing that keeps fees low elsewhere in the world is regulations.
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