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Comment by cloakedarbiter | Hacker News Reader

> Several large new customers have also been listed on Stripe's website this week, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Uber Technologies Inc.

If Uber is now running payments exclusively through Stripe instead of Braintree, that is a significant blow. I heard that Uber's payments through Braintree was a significant portion of Braintree's total revenue, don't recall the exact number I heard, but it was something on the order of 25% to 40%.

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I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive. At the scale of Uber, it may be worth keeping both systems running and split usage between the two to negotiate the best rates.

That also has the benefit of system redundancy, in case one goes down.

Large companies typically do payments in batches, not one-by-one, so the redundancy is not needed.

However, if they're trying to do per ride auths, then they might need redundancy there. Hard to imagine they do that.

I don't think they auth per ride. I definitely had a "you owe us money" flow after getting food successfully delivered though Uber eats on a deactivated card.

I get push notifications on auth on both my debit and credit cards. Weak evidence, but my hunch based on what I see there is that there's some dollar value where they pre-auth (somewhere around $25, I think).

"Goes down" could include things like "we're going to increase your pricing by 10 cents per charge". It's a much stronger negotiating position that Uber is in if they can say "we can switch 100% of our volume to Stripe in a minute by going to admin.uber.com and flipping a single feature flag".

Or even better: "we automatically route traffic to the cheaper option and this requires no human intervention, so don't even bother"

True, but they are also at a scale where they can negotiate long term rates and contracts for predictable, long-term results for both sides.

> I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive.

Ahh yeah, and also at the international scale. The article also states that Stripe is expanding internationally (Didi Chuxing, Grab), so it could be that Stripe handles Uber's international payments, whereas Braintree handles the U.S. ones.

Though Uber did add pay with Venmo, which is owned by Braintree/PayPal.

A lot of companies will have different payment solutions to deal with fraud and rebill failures. A charge may get rejected by one gateway and then accepted by the second or third.

I'm wondering when somebody from Braintree/PayPal will wake up and realize that this "developers first" strategy pays of and actually works.

Uhm isn't Uber using Adyen?

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