Ask HN: Stripe is asking for bank statements to check financial health
Isn’t stripes job to simply process payments? What kind of liability would stripe need to account for any merchant processing 1$ on its behalf?
Most processors (Stripe included) evaluate financial health, history, and risk exposure before they commit capital/credit on your behalf. Chargebacks can be held for 6+ months, and if a merchant account doesn’t have good coverage or history, the processor actually faces liability — that’s why they ask for statements, cash flow info, etc.
Also, many business owners never see their true effective processing costs — they simply look at “2.9% + $0.30” and assume that’s what they pay. In reality the effective rate can be a much higher blended % once interchange, payouts, chargebacks, refunds, and dispute fees are included — and most merchants don’t realize this until it’s over $10k–$50k/yr they didn’t plan for.
If you want to quantify what you’re actually paying to process payments (including true rate vs sticker price), we built a free Effective Rate Calculator that highlights hidden costs and helps you compare processors and pricing models: https://effectiveratecalculator.com/
Happy to share insights on how different processors treat risk, chargebacks, and what you can do to improve your effective rates or negotiate better terms as you scale.
The most obvious one for processor to merchant is chargebacks. The window fo those can be up to 6 months.
Bank statements might also be used for fraud prevention and kyc requirements.
Disclaimer: I used to work at stripe but not in this area and I don’t know the specifics of why Stripe is asking for these documents.
In short, i recommend using local providers, not these multinationals. Each country has a bunch of them, so there is plenty of choices, they are just not world renown brands.
Which is a factor worth considering for medium to big business, but certainly not for small timers.