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Comment by djajshgsjja | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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"

> 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.

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.

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