601–610 of 705 posts
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In addition to the other comment about cannabis, crypto is financial and comes with many laws and regulations that a payment process would need to be very aware of and follow. Porn is ripe with fraud/theft/bad actors/etc. It’s not a shadow government, it’s common sense.
It is a shadow government but it also makes sense.
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More specifically: if you're in the business of processing payments on behalf of others, you actually have "bank" as a core competency / requirement of your business model and need to make your plans accordingly (or carry the added risk of having your core business model outsourced).
What magic wand do banks possess that enables them to declare-into-existence a merchant account, anyway? I mean in a technical sense, not a legal sense. What are payment gateways and other banks seeing, that allows them to know that a particular merchant account X is a "real" account, that can be targeted with credit card payments, rather than a made-up one? Is there an X.509-based hierarchical bank registrar system…
In short, it's a different category of risk than the category that an individual business or even a business that is acting as a middleman for transactions takes on. And it's a different category precisely because most of the solutions aren't technical; they're legal, social, and financial. If a bank gets screwed it just gets screwed; even if the law intervenes to deal with transgression, money is often just gone as a result of such fraud. So they are comparatively more conservative in their decision-making.
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> Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching I'm genuinely curious why you wouldn't have done that anyway? I pretty much always do, precisely so I can experience a full end to end user experience.
Stripe advises against that (I'm not saying it makes sense) "Do not use real card details. Testing in live mode using real payment method details is prohibited by the Stripe Services Agreement. Use your test API keys and the card numbers below." https://stripe.com/docs/testing
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This isn't about protecting people's incomes, it's about bad customer service. Just you saying that makes me say it's a bad idea because that framing in itself is emotionally charged which increases the odds that protest could turn into violence/physical intimidation. That's not terribly wise when there are alternative options for payment processors available.
It's pretty rare for "bad customer service" to cost people tens of thousands in lost revenue and pretty severe reputation loss for their business. I've had some bad customer service before, but it never set me back months or years of progress before. So while I agree this is basically an issue of bad customer service, it is at the most egregious level. If your mortgage company started foreclosing on your home incorre…
Right, but that's a totally different situation and not one that would involve protest (it'd involve lawyers/lawsuits and court).
The problem with public shaming is the presumption that the people doing the shaming are in the absolute moral/ethical right (which is always subjective) and that anyone affiliated with the decided perpetrator (in this case, Stripe) are at fault. That's the problem with showing up at their office as an angry mob of people. An uninvolved worker could come out of the building and the mob could start shouting and attacking them even though they're a low-level employee who had zero involvement.
Doing it online is hypothetically better, but again, it just introduces a lot of unnecessary negative energy that is very unlikely to remedy the actual problem (and in extreme cases can still spill over into reality).
I agree that threatening someone's livelihood is bad, but in this specific example my immediate question would be "what were you or your customers doing?" If it's even remotely in the grey area of the TOS (however foolish/restrictive that may be), the owner has a responsibility to consider alternatives up front and communicate the potential for those to be necessary to customers.
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I smell a made up problem. Do you really think the CEO of Chipotle can’t buy a burrito from one of their branches without accountants getting a heart attack? They just walk in and buy one. They in their personal capacity end up richer by a burrito and some invaluable experience. The company ends up richer by the price of a burrito. If this kind of “revenue inflation” matters to anyone then either the CEO has a bad bu…
Where I worked, the CEO would walk in and get a free burrito. It's another kind of headache (technically that burrito is pay, and needs to be taxed and declared as CEO pay), but that was considered preferable to revenue inflation which is fraud rather than dodging taxes.
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I think the best solution here, is add a payments orchestration solution to your stack. There are others, I know of this spanish startup integrating with stripe. In this way,you can have both your bank TPV/ Payments and Stripe working alongside, if any fails just put the other, or the one giving better prices by default, etc https://monei.com/es/features/payments-orchestration/
Spreedly is a very good provider for this.
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I'm trying to understand your position here: You think AML/KYC laws, as they currently exist, are unconstitutional? edit: That's a fine position to have, but it's a fringe one, and I don't think you should be offering it as a reason why Stripe does what it does that's generally accepted by everyone else.
Those laws certainly feel like guilty until proven innocent or in many cases, guilty no chance to prove innocence.
Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there: Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make…
My company uses Stripe among others. We do on the order of 8 figures of transactions over all our payment channels. Not a whale by Stripe's standards, but not nothing either. We also have enterprise agreements in writing and signed contracts with all of them. It wasn't necessarily an underwriting process as far as I know, more of an enterprise software licensing agreement. But either way, they are obligated to provid…
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What is a "large company" in this context? My employer is on track to run about $5m through Stripe this year, which will be our fourth full year using Stripe. Our first year we did about $2.75m. This year I've been getting occasional emails from a Stripe sales rep for the first time, which suggests that we've crossed some sort of threshold...
Your stripe transaction cost is probably around the advertised fee, 2.9% + 30¢ With an actual merchant account you can probably get closer to 2% or at least 2.5% + 25-30¢ At 5 million in transaction revenue, a .5% decrease would be 25k a year. You can probably get a larger decrease depending on how much risk your company's business has. Stripe's sales rep might be contacting your company because you've hit the thresh…
If you’re using a gateway, there are some that Handle tokenization so you never have to touch the PANs and you don’t have to worry about PCI levels and audits. There’s no reason your systems should be touching PANs unless you’re really large and using multiple payment processors for scalability and redundancy like if you need to process a million transactions in a few hours.