Another geek darling on the path to a dangerous monopoly?
Hello Cloudflare btw.
Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
271–280 of 333 posts
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply put, Stripe doesn't want to deal with the risk associated with those transaction types.
I know it's about risk. Perhaps my point was not clear? Simply put: Stripe selectively applies their own policy about "restricted" transaction types.
You said it was about morality, so it was not clear you knew it was actually about risk. Each payment company has to set their own policies because regulations tend to be (intentionally) vague and not all companies have the same risk tolerance. If the legal risks weren't there, Stripe would absolutely accept these categories. You should really complain about the dumb AML regulations instead.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#273The future is direct payments without middlemen. So consolidation of these legacy players is not unexpected - their revenue whilst sizeable is going to continually decrease every year as people use cards less (Many countries have/are rolling out their domestic app2app or bank2retailer payment system).
What if you are a merchant that needs to sell to O(10) countries? Integrating with each country's domestic payment rail is not feasible.
Payment Orchestrators help solve this problem.
source: I work at https://primer.io
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you are a merchant that needs to sell to O(10) countries? Integrating with each country's domestic payment rail is not feasible.
Stripe is already building itself out to be essentially a global bank, your income stays within there and you can pay vendors directly out of your Stripe balance to theirs.
Stripe still does not support all APMs in all markets - therefore its not a viable solution for all merchants. In addition, its underwriting is notoriously hostile to certain "high-risk" industries
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is a measure of the concentration of a market based on the market-share of the firms participating in it. Very much like the Simpson's index that tells you the probability of two organisms in a place being of the same type when randomly drawn. It's just \sum_i^n h_{i}^2 sum of squares of market-share. Enjoyed that. Thanks for the discovery.
Why does the `i` after `h_` need a curly but not after `\sum_`? A pity that HN can't render TeX or MathJax or whatever.
It doesn't. The rule for TeX is that single-character tokens don't need braces. I assume this is just an artefact of their particular muscle memory.
You can test it here, if you like: https://www.mathjax.org/#demo
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? There's a big amount of competitors for card processing. Just because they aren't well known within tech circles doesn't mean they don't exist.
There are many card processors but how many of them provide services equivalent to stripe?
Adyen has a big overlap and they are huge (https://docs.adyen.com/api-explorer/).
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#277The future is direct payments without middlemen. So consolidation of these legacy players is not unexpected - their revenue whilst sizeable is going to continually decrease every year as people use cards less (Many countries have/are rolling out their domestic app2app or bank2retailer payment system).
> The future is direct payments without middlemen. direct payment can be good, but thats only part of the service. First, this is not a "card vendors are good" they are a large buisness entity, with their own motivations. Visa/mastercard are outsized and should have proper competition. THe point of card vendors in the modern era is to provide credit and protection for both consumers and buisnesses. Credit is provided…
In the US, Zelle payments are accepted by most major banks and are free and instant. I'm not sure how it could be better than that.
It would be nice if more smaller banks used it as well, but the US has 5k different banks.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is pretty much the case with Visa and MC too. There's little card payment fraud in Europe thanks to mandated strong authentication, and very low transaction fees as interchange is capped by the EU; card issuers don't initiate chargebacks so easily.
> There's little card payment fraud You're confusing fraud as in unauthorized payments with fraud as in you not receiving what you paid for. The latter is not prevented by 3DS in any way.
No I'm not.
Ask anyone who tried to dispute a purchase that happened within the EEA, whether online with SCA or card present with PIN, card issuers often tell you to deal with the merchant directly. The interchange cap has significantly reduced revenue made on card payments, they have an incentive to avoid unnecessary manual work.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
As written Stripe has "morality police" - do you think that is a real thing? We all know it's a risk thing; we all know it's a money thing. And from experience I think it will happen. It will match Stripes current behavior pattern - regardless if their motive is money or morals. In fact, I think it will happen because it's obvious it is about money.
So your prediction is that Stripe will throw away billions for no reason based on your anecdotal experiences. I'll take the bet that you're totally wrong.
> I'll take the bet that you're totally wrong.
Good news is, this is one of the niche areas where prediction markets make sense.
I wouldn't mind seeing a few predictions around this acquisition and the longer term outcomes like the one y'all are discussing. I have no interest in participating, just want to see where folks are leaning.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
3-D Secure has been a fiasco IMO. I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's jump out of the middle of checkout and go to a page which looks like they're trying to phish your bank account to continue, and by the way, you can just skip it. So customers did, and then merchants followed, except in countries that effectively required it because they cared about fraud. One o…
> Let's jump out of the middle of checkout and go to a page which looks like they're trying to phish your bank account to continue, and by the way, you can just skip it. Any idea why they implemented it like that? In the UK you either get a text from your bank with transaction details and a code to approve it. Or the better ones you just open their app and tap approve.
> Any idea why they implemented it like that?
3D-Secure long predates apps, including in the UK. I had to work on a Government Gateway integration for local council payments in the mid 2000s that included 3D-Secure. I still see it today, although it normally now results in a ping to an app approval.