So if a customer pays us $100, we are getting $91 to our bank account which is absolutely ridiculous.
If anyone looking for next $10B-$100B business idea, work on making the transaction fees to 1% and you can take business from stripe and PayPal immediately.
Wise.com is doing this and I hope more such companies work on this.
The disruption has to come from bypassing credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard.
In India, almost every merchant is using UPI which saves them fees of credit card processing.
The world banking is getting more advanced and technical and I am sure payment gateways can bypass the credit card and currency conversion fees with direct bank to bank transfer.
For larger Amount, we are asking our customers to use Wise instead of stripe or PayPal as the saving for us is significant.
When I checked about 2 years ago, transferring bitcoin from one wallet to another was negligibly cheap, although I think it took about 20 minutes for the seller to be certain that the bitcoin had been sent to them (too slow for most website payments).
Curious to know if crypto could solve this problem though, if not now, maybe in the future. If some of the 9% fees were passed on to customers in the form of lower prices, it could be quite appealing and give a price advantage (if only a few %) over competitors.
At scale your Fx fees can be less than 2% of the conversion amount, I know that at scale the fees can get down to <0.2% if you're moving multiple millions (USD) in a month.
I know that both Adyem and Braintree will capture into local currency, so you can avoid Fx fees by the payment processor themselves.
Why Stripe isn’t partnering with them, I don’t know. My bank partners with Wise to get the best exchange rate possible (Bunq) when I’m out of the EU. It’s fantastic.
Can you add a bank account which can handle alternative currency payout and let your bank handle do conversion?
In not sure about India, but in AU, we have the option to receive USD payouts to USD accounts in Australian banks, so you can avoid Stripe's conversion fees. But now you have USD in an AU bank. What are your options? Convert to AUD at the bank's terrible exchange rate. Or send the money to a US bank (or Wise), paying horrendous international transfer fees.
I hope I'm missing something but I don't see this offering from Stripe as being very useful.
I tried that, didn't work. I opened a local USD account in my non-US country and tried to add it for payout to Stripe. Stripe only allows (at the time I checked, please correct me if that has changed) US based USD accounts with ACH routing information.
You can also get a multi currency bank account. There are some options available to Indians which provide US based ACH and IBAN. Be careful with FEMA compliance.
If you can offer subscription model and can do bank to bank transfer with 0.5% fees, you will disrupt the whole subscription industry relying on visa/Master card monopoly. Not only this, banks also charge very high currency conversion fees which you can disrupt.
You of course need to build lot of things from scratch but with most of the banking now a days going online with new APIs, it is possible.
You're right also, I live in Germany since a couple years and and businesses taking money off your bank account is definitely a thing here, I don't know for how long. But mostly it's done by your electricity utility or by the tax man, various fees e.g. the fee for public tv etc. I don't know if there are costs to it, but probably yes.
A workaround to Stripe fees for FX card payments would be to have a set of Wise accounts to receive the money in the local currency (one account or wallet for each currency) but then you'd still need to pay Wise conversion fees, once you want to gather the money from the different wallets into a master account