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Comment by maratc | Hacker News Reader

Most merchants don't want a rule engine, or rules. Most merchants want either a declined transaction (possibly with explanation -- possibly), or an accepted one with a guarantee against chargebacks.

If Stripe is sure that their models work, they should offload the chargebacks from the merchants.

A friend of mine worked for a startup that did exactly that. They were sold to an online payments behemoth in about 2009.

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-- Most merchants want either a declined transaction (possibly with explanation -- possibly), or an accepted one with a guarantee against chargebacks.

Well in fact their is an issue of misaligned incentives here. Your chargeback insurance has a strong incentive not to receive any chargeback (of course), so they will be overly cautious and decline a lot of valid charges. Stripe on the other hand as perfectly aligned incentives with the merchant, as they don't make money on a blocked transaction.

(disclaimer: I work at Stripe)

This does not contradict what I said. Declines should be free. Accepts should be guaranteed (but not free). Stripe currently offers free declines, but not guaranteed accepts.

Unsure as to why you're being downvoted... as chargeback insurance is the predominant model used by anti-fraud companies. That said, it's not necessary for Stripe to take their cut that way as they already are the payment service provider and so already have taken a cut and their model allows them to just offload risk to the client.

If they limit themselves to be "payment service provider" it's not clear how this anti-fraud stuff really fits into their model.

Ending the bleeding they're currently suffering at the hands of accounts that exist solely to process fraudulent transactions.

That is effectively offering insurance against chargebacks due to fraud, and such products already exist.

But I'm not wild about the moral hazards of insurance. Merchants should always exert some customer-selection hygiene.

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