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Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

theregister.com

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

#41

Post by bmiedlar »

bostik wrote: post #36
theturtletalks wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

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.

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

#42

Post by cherryteastain »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14
actapp80 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

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 co…

> All payment systems are centralized

Except for blockchain based ones

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

#43

Post by mrsilencedogood »

jeroenhd wrote: post #38
randunel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 righ…

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'…

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).

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

#44

Post by tims33 »

rahkiin wrote: post #40
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…

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).

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

#45

Post by dumpsterdiver »

jorvi wrote: post #27
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ill…

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.

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

#46

Post by toomuchtodo »

cherryteastain wrote: post #42
toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> 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.

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

#47

Post by Silhouette »

m101 wrote: post #29

The solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs. Then everyone will start using bank transfers.

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?

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

#48

Post by kyrra »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
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).

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, 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.

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

#49

Post by alibarber »

jorvi wrote: post #22
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…

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.

Some banks in some parts of the EU have - SEPA instant was only mandated in January 2025, only for Euro payments.

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

#50

Post by andrewshadura »

rahkiin wrote: post #40
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…

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.)
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