Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pay…
Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
171–180 of 253 posts
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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!
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#174Surprisingly 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).
If £8m/year is a fraction of a mid-size company cloud budget, I don't think you can class them as "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.
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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 po…
The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#176Adyen 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
They basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies.
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, S…
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.
Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
#180It 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
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.