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Comment by markdown | Hacker News Reader

Hard to believe I've been waiting a decade to find out when they'll add support for my country. It's been almost two decades since Paypal did.

A decade has gone by and all they've managed are:

  US, Canada, Mexico  
  UK, EU  
  UAE  
  India  
  Singapore, Malaysia, Philipines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan  
  Australia, New Zealand  
  Brazil

Not a single African or SIDS country supported. Only one in Brazil and the Middle East.

There are billions of people who stand to benefit from greater access to participation in ecommerce, but who are left out in the cold because banks won't give them merchant accounts. I once spoke to a banker who didn't know what a merchant account was.

Congrats on your success, Stripe. Please consider doing good with it.

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It's not like they haven't looked at the region (re: Africa, at least)

https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/paystack-joining-stripe

Both having invested in the Series A, along with eventually acquiring 'em.

It's a pity Alipay was hamstrung by an impotent Winnie the Pooh. It could have been a great catalyst in the belt-and-road region, waking US payment companies to the opportunities in this region.

I'm glad Stripe is a making small steps.

"EU" is like a couple dozen countries in and of itself, so all told you're looking at having expanded to forty something countries in a decade? Seems pretty good to me.

And I doubt their attitude is like, "oh yeah, eff Latin America and Africa, they can rot for all we care", presumably it's harder to roll out in poorer, less developed countries.

> "EU" is like a couple dozen countries in and of itself

From a regulatory standpoint (the big hurdle in fintech), not so, which is why I lumped them all together. A single team/office could handle all the EU countries.

> presumably it's harder to roll out in poorer, less developed countries.

On the contrary, the more developed a country, the more regulation and red tape there is to deal with in finance.

This is just not true.

Tons of developing countries have super aggressive financial/general regulations, for example India requires all data be stored in-country so you can't shard across geozones [https://www.lawfareblog.com/key-global-takeaways-indias-revi...]. In fact, the countries with the most complex financial compliance are almost all developing [https://www.bnamericas.com/en/news/five-of-10-most-complex-c...].

But the bigger thing is generally how advanced the existing finance infra is. Lots of countries have really slow bank transfers, processing a refund requires handing in physical paperwork, etc. Stripe relies on having underlying bank infra that's somewhat functional.

As far as the EU, the regulatory environment is manageble, but the payment landscape is very different from the US where Stripe originated. For example, in Germany only around 30% of users pay for stuff online via card [https://askwonder.com/research/german-market-what-s-breakdow...], that means for every country a ton of new payment methods have to be added for the service to be actually useful.

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