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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

#81

Post by matt-p »

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).

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.

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

#82

Post by DaSHacka »

matt-p wrote: post #77
KetoManx64 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that every couple you shop with just increases the prices of their items to deal with the fees, so you're just paying more for items to feel good about getting reward program benefits.

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

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

#83

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #69
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.

The issue with bank transfers today is that the SEPA system is robust and established, but got no web compatible API. But there are two projects (why one, if you can have two!?), one being Wero by different banks, the other being the Digital Euro by the European central bank. If either finds good adaption (Wero is rolling out slowly and for quite a bunch of banks every customer already got a Wero account automaticall…

I'm Irish, but I've built a website for an Australian client and they integrated something which did that. In the checkout, you could choose to pay with a system which would log you into your bank's website, where you could approve a payment, then return to the site on which you'd made your purchase, where it would instantly be marked as paid. I think that it may have taken a few days for the money to actually arrive in their bank account, but the payment was authorised instantly.

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

#84

Post by TreeInBuxton »

matt-p wrote: post #81
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).

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.

Depends on the tax - I pay my vehicle tax through the gov.uk website!

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

#85

Post by toomuchtodo »

cherryteastain wrote: post #80
toomuchtodo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Solana mainnet was shown to have capability to handle 100k transactions per second [1]. Granted, it was a synthetic benchmark of noops, but it shows the capability is there. For reference, Visa claim 83k TPS [2] for their system. It also has the advantage of being vastly cheaper than tradfi payment networks at ca. $0.0005 per transaction [3] irrespective of transaction amount. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/202…

Until it is in prod, it is a proof of concept. Blockchains solve for low trust; if you have trust, you don't need the efficiency loss of a decentralized ledger or blockchain. Central banks provide trust.

As mentioned in one of my other comments, Pix in Brazil costs ~$10M/year. They process ~6-8 billion monthly transactions and roughly $6.7 trillion in payment volume a year [1]. That's roughly ~$0.0015/transaction based on the math in this comment, and we don't know what the ceiling is based on existing capacity (which would drive per transaction costs down further). Choose boring technology, when possible [2].

The innovation in this context is nuking the profits of Visa and Mastercard (their margins are ~45-50% [3] [4] [5]), replacing them with central bank instant payment systems run at cost. The reduction in their revenue is money back in the pockets of everyone paying unnecessarily to move value around. I highly recommend the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" on this topic [6].

[1] https://www.ebanx.com/en/insights/articles/five-years-on-pix...

[2] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2023/289/arti...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/visa-vs-ma...

[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/mastercard...

[5] https://aftabborka.substack.com/p/over-50-profit-margin-how-...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

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

#86

Post by PearlRiver »

colechristensen wrote: post #54
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).

Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system. EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%. It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.

The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.

The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).

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

#87

Post by enos_feedler »

ArmadilloGang wrote: post #72
enos_feedler wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really enjoys rewards programs, keep those scams alive!

Might want to think twice about that: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/credit-card-rewar...

I briefly skimmed this, but why are you wasting my time? What does this have to do with me earning free trips from being smart about how I buy things? does not compute.

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

#89

Post by lxgr »

actapp80 wrote: post #12
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…

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…

> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly?

Why would anybody willingly lower their own margin?

> It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries

It’s almost like regulation can sometimes achieve good outcomes in a not very competitive (due to network effects) market…

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

#90

Post by lxgr »

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

Most blockchain systems are fairly or even extremely centralized as well and amount to little other than decentralization theater. Bitcoin and Ethereum are arguably more of an exception than the norm.
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