Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 253 posts

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#201

Post by mathgeek »

pembrook wrote: post #197
mathgeek wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> 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.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#202

Post by sparkling »

sublimefire wrote: post #196
taffydavid wrote: post #152

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

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/

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#203

Post by zipy124 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #174
Magnets wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#204

Post by M2Ys4U »

DaSHacka wrote: post #82
matt-p wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#205

Post by vanviegen »

trumpdong wrote: post #122
notpushkin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#206

Post by vanviegen »

andrewshadura wrote: post #50
rahkiin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mollie also doesn't want small businesses, unfortunately. (We were rejected as too small.)

Really? Must be a recent thing then..? I've used them for all sorts of small (and not so small) things.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#207

Post by properbrew »

Tinkeringz wrote: post #200
properbrew wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#208

Post by TruffleMuffin »

vanviegen wrote: post #205
trumpdong wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#209

Post by elzbardico »

kyrra wrote: post #48
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,…

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)

         │

  (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.

Re: Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

#210

Post by chrncirurp »

testfrequency wrote: post #10
arjie wrote: post #6

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).

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..

> 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

Post reply on HN