It is also a little entertaining that their "brand risk" department is probably doing so much unintentional damage to the brand.
They've been screwing over their customers, closing accounts on allegation of fraud and dragging out refunding the alleged victims for months and months, since before they were acquired by eBay. People still use their service.
It's always been this way. People use PayPal because it's convenient, and because there's no real competitor with comparable market penetration. No, I'm not sure that PayPal's brand will suffer much from continuing to act the way they've always done.
I'm not saying you're wrong (because I actually don't know) but this seems to be way off base. What specific regulations are they ignoring? My understanding is that most of the things people gripe about with PayPal are borne out of PayPal's attempt to stay in line with regulations.
You should have alternate payment channels - even if you don't want to use them now, even if they're twice as expensive, if you need that money flowing then you want to have a solid alternate payment channel. Even if you don't want to advertise them to your customers due to e.g. costs, then you want to have all the legal agreements and technical integration in place so that you can turn it on right now if you needed to.
Their brand risk department obviosly tries to optimize the brand for someone big, someone nameless, and not for the customers.
This itself leads to questions about paypals business model. Are they in business to provide payment services to users, or are their primary customers actually not end users, but someone buying something else?
Compare this with setting up a merchant account to take payments (here in the UK), which takes weeks, involves finding a payment gateway, all sorts of paperwork and hoop jumping.
Fortunately companies like stripe.com have appeared here and will now eat in to PayPals user base. I can't wait for PayPal to go away.
The sad truth is that Stripe is behaving exactly like PayPal. What's worse is that Stripe's fraud protection is non-existing. In other words, Stripe is actually worse than PayPal, as you risk the same account freeze, closing etc, but in addition, you will be swamped down with fraudulent purchases and chargebacks.
We're constantly working on product & performance improvements, but feel free to get in touch with me directly (tara@stripe.com) to ask questions or share feedback on our models (and fraud product in general).
Though I'm sceptical to this approach. In machine learning 101 we learned that there always exist a statistical method that would beat a neural network. In this case, a system that gathers actual relevant data for statistical scoring. You know hard data, like an up to date list of stolen credit card numbers, a history of chargeback per credit card etc. PayPal has this and of 1000 transactions, we have 1-2 fraudulent chargebacks. Compared to Strip this is the difference between heaven and hell. PayPal sucks, but at least they have a working fraud protection system.
Nothing kills an online business faster than being swamped in fraud and chargebacks. I mean, good APIs are great and Stripe certainly has that, but a working fraud protecting system is what really matters to those of us who sell online.
Good PayPal competitors have existed in this space for a long time. PayPal still remains.