Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
theregister.com
theregister.com
The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
[2] https://frontierfintech.substack.com/p/55-send-pix-brazils-i...
[3] https://brazilstockguide.com/behind-the-lines/the-cost-of-pi...
> This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation.
> There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day.
> The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics.
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44753626
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Because it is a grift ("regulatory capture") [1] [2]. The "overbearing system" is the result of regulation to bring the consumer excess of cheap payments to an entire country's financial user population. Why does Jamie Dimon not like stablecoin yield [3]? Because JPMC makes almost $100B/year in interest income taking customer deposits and lending against them, which stablecoins would compete against by operating as a form of narrow bank, parking the underlying deposits in risk free US Treasuries [4].
As a US financial services consumer, it is hard for you to avoid the rake of the machine built to skim off of you as you hold onto fiat or move it, but the rest of the world can avoid being captured by it (as this piece demonstrates). Also, Europe can't regulate Stripe as easily as they can Adyen. You don't have to be the biggest or the greatest, it just has to work "good enough".
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-109-billion-bank-hust...
[2] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-cantillon-effect-and-...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/29/dimon-jpmorgan-cryp...
UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
(I don't have a finance background.) There any multiple instances of a one-size fits all user experience decision which strikes me as a result of the centralization and removal of competition (in efforts to drive up adoption).
I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
The Indian government has mandated this for strong identity assurances. Your only hope at "innovation" (ie violating financial services regulators and laws) here is cash or something like Monero.
> UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
I haven't used UPI recently, but I imagine this is a UX issue around aliases (phone numbers, email, and other human identifiers that associate to an underlying account).
TLDR People problems cannot be fixed with tech (in this context, regulatory requirements or alias UX, submit a public comment to the regulator if you can).
> I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
Because without regulation, it turns into Monopoly (the board game). Sometimes, competition can be encouraged, but in some cases (broad, shared infrastructure) it cannot and regulation must fill this gap to ensure the target outcome. This is why we regulate electric utilities similarly. Happy to help, I am very interested and curious on this topic.
Except for blockchain based ones
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/08/18/solana-briefly-h...
[2] https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/securi...
[3] https://solana.com/learn/understanding-solana-transaction-fe...
As mentioned in one of my other comments, Pix in Brazil costs ~$10M/year. They process ~6-8 billion monthly transactions and roughly $6.7 trillion in payment volume a year [1]. That's roughly ~$0.0015/transaction based on the math in this comment, and we don't know what the ceiling is based on existing capacity (which would drive per transaction costs down further). Choose boring technology, when possible [2].
The innovation in this context is nuking the profits of Visa and Mastercard (their margins are ~45-50% [3] [4] [5]), replacing them with central bank instant payment systems run at cost. The reduction in their revenue is money back in the pockets of everyone paying unnecessarily to move value around. I highly recommend the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" on this topic [6].
[1] https://www.ebanx.com/en/insights/articles/five-years-on-pix...
[2] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2023/289/arti...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/visa-vs-ma...
[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/mastercard...
[5] https://aftabborka.substack.com/p/over-50-profit-margin-how-...
On fraud management:
Pix: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...
Most recent indicator of peak Pix transaction volumes I could find [1] was 227M/day (=2700 TPS). You can see yourself that Solana does 130-140M/day consistently. Pix fees you quote are still triple Solana's.
Not to mention there is the entire decentralization aspect, which means the government does not control your money as with other blockchains.
[1] https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/economia/noticia/2024-09...
[2] https://blockworks.com/analytics/solana/solana-onchain-activ...
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services.
Well, as a brazilian who is used to pix and has also faced the bad payment ux in american, I think a possible solution should be adding the missing Pix-like layer above the existing US rails.
One of the best part that makes Pix an incredible experience, It’s that the app almost doesn’t matter. I can use one bank, you can use another, a merchant can use a different provider, and it still works through the same basic language: QR code, Pix key, payment request, confirmation screen. I can even transport my "pix key" to another app/bank provider.
So maybe the US opportunity is a agnostic interoperability layer on top of FedNow/RTP/Zelle/bank APIs: universal aliases, QR payments, routing, fraud checks, receipts, and reconciliation. Making instant account-to-account payments feel universal before the government forces a universal standard.
I don't think consumers broadly should be the main goal first, the best initial path should be small-business, marketplaces, rent, etc.
If someone could own that neutral UX/addressing layer, that seems much closer to the useful part of Pix than just another closed wallet.
Why would anybody willingly lower their own margin?
> It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries
It’s almost like regulation can sometimes achieve good outcomes in a not very competitive (due to network effects) market…
https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea...
https://www.emerald.com/cemj/article/33/4/575/1248919/The-ri...
Even then, not mentioning those who pretty much started / invented instant transfers still seems odd :) but no need to apologize haha, maybe I was a bit too abrasive.
I get why you prioritized to mention those though. The Chinese and Indians have leapfrogged us. No more fussy legacy (digital) cards, just scan a QR and go. Even illicit food stalls and street wanderers have accounts, when they wouldn't be able to get a 'real' bank account.
And the Chinese and Indians don't have to pay tribute to the Mastercard-Visa overlords either. Although Wero and the digital Euro might eventually change that for Europe too.
Every new entry would open up an opinion around “if you included that, why didn’t you include this?”
In such cases we’ll always up at Kevin Bacon.
UPI is a bit more centralized, where the NPCI does the top-level routing between banks, so their operating budget is likely much higher than Pix. It also is drastically more simple to be a participant in UPI compared to Pix.
For Pix adoption: you can thank Covid for that. The Brazilian government said if you wanted to get free money from the government, you had to set up and use Pix.
US Financial Innovation: I'd say the hard thing here is that the government is extremely strict (lots of regulation) when you start looking like a bank. Lots of companies have tried to innovate here, but regulation makes it really hard to do. There's a lot of regulator capture going on.
In Brazil, the Central Bank overpowered the coordination problem. In the US, it may be the opposite: the government seems to have less power over the payment lobby, or at least less willingness to confront it directly.
[Payer bank] ──(1. Lookup key)──> [ DICT - Name Service] (Returns account data)
│
(2. Send order)
▼
[ SPI - Central Ledger] ──────(3. Real time settlement over Financial Institutions account: Debt/Credit)
│
(4. Notification Message)
▼
The ledger doesn't keep individual accounts, but a Instant Payments account for each institution. This account is not the master bank account in the Reserve Transfer System (Sistema de Transferencia de Reservas) which is the system of record for banks funds, so the banks need to allocate funds from the STR to the SPI every day to be able to honor PIX transfers. The STR system doesn't work out of normal banking hours, so the banks need to predict how much money they will need for PIX transfers and move that money from the STR to the PI (pagamento instantaneo) account during defined liquidity transfer windows, to avoid banks double-spending the same funds over different rails (traditional vs PIX). If a bank finds itself without funds on its PI account in a saturday night, it can loan the funds from another bank who still have excess liquidity on his PI account).
As you can see, between the SPI, STR an DICT, it is a very centralized system.
Also, the system operates in a dedicated zero-trust networks which is completely isolated from the internet. The messages between banks and the central bank follow the ISO 20022 format. IBM MQ is used to route messages back and forth between banks and the BCB.
If you know Taiwan’s history, and you understand China - there’s no surprise to be..
There’s a light board game called Timeline where you have stuff like this and there are so many surprises. Temporal stuff is hard to reason about and the game catches that. But with large numbers one loses intuition easily: NYC’s subway vs. all domestic and international US air travel is closer in total passengers than one would think. The median American did not fly last year.
Stuff like this. It’s just Gladwell-fodder but numerically fun.
It’s because many times the obvious intuition is incorrect
He could’ve compared Singapore and China too
EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.
It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
This naturally protects the artificial oligopoly of visa/mc/discover systems.
The moment you allow Merchants to charge cc fees (even 2-3%) and allow customer to choose low processing option (ACH/debit card/cash), the whole scheme falls apart and Visa/MC will slowly go bankrupt
This is only true in 4 states.
and most small/med businesses dont have clout to protest that, so they have to accept these terms in order to earn money
These clauses would be illegal in many states and countries these days, so they don’t.
absorb and then pass on as general "costs have risen". It's not like it's coming out of their profits, exclusively.
I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.
2.9% + 1.5% (intl card) + 1% (currency conversion) + 0.30
Payment amount (€1.00 EUR = $1.15253 USD)
€10.00 EUR -> $11.53 USD
Fees
Total: - $0.93 USD
Stripe currency conversion fee
- $0.12 USD
Stripe processing fees
- $0.81 USD
Net amount
$10.60 USD
in US, the government is more protective of private monopolies due to lobbying
1. regulatory bloat, artificial increase in cost of business to prevent new competition
2. lack of anti-trust enforcement, government fails to protect the consumer and instead protect the monopolies' income
(And I don't think it applies to US merchants like you anyways)
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_15_...
You lose a lot of consumer protections and many cashback rewards by using only Debit cards. The only drawback to credit cards is the interest, if you don't pay it off at the end of the month. So long as you're responsible with your spending, it's a direct upgrade.
That in turn is not surprising – the split is very much correlated with socioeconomic status (to the point where quite a few of the people working on debit card products have never themselves used a debit card to pay, in my experience).
> The only drawback to credit cards is the interest [...]
Which is a significant drawback if your bank account balance regularly oscillates around zero and/or you've seen your peers get in financial trouble from credit card debt.
My day-to-day wallet just contains a debit card so that gets used for almost everything else.
Internet transactions are usually done using Revolut because then I can use a disposable card number.
All of our card transactions are with a debit card.
I've never needed instant-access debt so it's not really an attractive proposition. Perhaps the added consumer protection rules could be worth it, but it's not been an issue to date.
I hope that rewards cards go away, because they distort the market, but I'm going to use them while they're here. Rewards cards push costs onto customers that don't use them, and I don't want costs pushed onto me.
The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).
Means one payment from my savings account a month to cover all daily expenses.
I also haven't examined the various contracts, but I'd be surprised if there was no option to dispute transactions below a certain limit as that could be exploited by banks or thieves (but I repeat myself) or shops. An unscrupulous shop could double up transactions or change the amount paid and customers would not be happy if the bank turned round and said "it's below the £50 limit, so we don't care". The bank is more likely to push the problem onto the retailer and simply refund the customer and charge the retailer.
Personally, I don't like contactless due to the change of responsibility between the customer and bank and prefer to use PINs. As far as I know, I can't get just a PIN card as they all have contactless enabled.
Do you have a link to the comment you're thinking of?
Also the government doesn't really do card transactions. I imagine this is for fairly rare things like renewing your passport, booking a driving test or buying a title copy. Oh and visa fees maybe? Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.
If it isnt it would be one hell if a headache with reimbursement and the accounting and reporting around it.
Has to be a personal debit (not credit) card - https://www.gov.uk/pay-corporation-tax/debit-or-credit-card
But regardless this contract is _not_ for HMRC payments, its for gov.uk pay which is basically a centralised service that other services can use.
https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/
A very crude calculation for £1B a year in payments (thats probably too low) would mean a payment to Ayden (contract is upto £25M over 3 years) of 0.8%
I do. If I’m going to give the government a big pile of money, I may as well earn some points for my trouble.
The gov.uk runs card transactions for dozens of services - which add up - from car tax, driver license renewal, passport replacements, to paying previous NI years (do you consider this tax?) and so on..
I feel this is worth correcting as "don't bloody pay road tax" is a common form of abuse aimed at cyclists which is wrong on a number of levels. A lot of cyclists also drive a car and non-driving cyclists would fund roads if they pay tax. Another way to think about it is that the emissions tax for cycles would be zero anyway.
I'm with a rather small company (~ 250 people) in the US and we pay about $1,2mm-1,4mm yearly on GCP alone.
Thus by definition that company wouldn't be mid-sized over here anyway.
edit: in-fact after checking even in the US, the IRS for example declares a large business as one with more than 10 million in assets, though there is no set rule like in the EU to be used by other gov orgs.
Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.
The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.
From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?
ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.
The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.
Because it's my impression that either Stripe doesn't support it or it's so hard compared to the rest of their API that no one does it...
Stripe takes care of that for cards that are enrolled into 3D Secure (I think it is a Visa thing - the naming) and other kinds of card 2FA validation (Mastercard has their own and so on).
The ones i've tried to pay on bull rush to charging me with no 2FA and my bank just rejects them.
Thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback.
I have taken a look at the information you have provided and unfortunately, at this time, Adyen is only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year or businesses which are currently supported by a Plugin built by Adyen. The reason for this is so that we are able to provide the right level of support and resources to our merchants at the right stage of their company growth.
If you would like to stay up to date with our payment offering please do sign up to our newsletter here.
In the interim, I want to ensure that you find the right provider, so I would like to direct you about payments. They are specialists in finding the most relevant payment solutions for all business models and I have no doubt they will offer you several great options.
I wish you the best of luck with your business moving forward, and hopefully we can reconnect in the future.
Kind Regards,
Ana Sales Specialist
Shedding low value users to others makes you stronger and them weaker.
Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.
Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.
Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.
And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).
Stripe has a Get started button. You click it, fill out a form, get your site approved in maybe a day, and start making money.
Adyen has a Talk to our team button. You close the tab and never think about it again until you’re making serious money.
---
Edit: that is, of course, by design. Adyen doesn’t want small businesses. From the sibling comment:
> only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year
Mollie B.V. is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Dutch Central Bank (relationship number: F0038). Mollie UK Ltd is licensed and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution in the UK (FRN: 977968).
https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/lightspeed-integrated-pa...
Since Stripe operates by working with a BIN (banks that sponsor them within each country) generally like all payment providers. While the decline rates for new customers are not public, they are very high, especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling [1]. Also revocation of existing accounts can happen often if KYC systems flag anything, like Stripe Identity, Connect, and Radar.
Well, it does makes sense. I’d be more interested in the rejection rate for businesses that are allowed but are just starting up.
Only gripe is no embeddable checkout but its not a huge deal, and they have superior test platform than even Stripe. The test cards are right there in slide in panel, and you have option to select paid/cancel/fail etc to test different outcomes.
They have to comply with the same regulations.
Stripe only outpaced after last year 34% vs 8% growth. Volume 1.9T vs 1.6T
More importantly, Adyen doesn't have a messiah-like founder. Patrick is like the second coming of Jesus.
As I see, there are many payment providers in the EU, just not API first as Stripe ever was.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
So still Europe’s.
Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.
So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.
But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.
It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.
It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .
And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.
Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!
This is why we tend to use collective pronouns when referring to a company - Meta just announced that they are planing share dilution (though to weaken my own case, one can also use singular nouns, likely due to the increased modern perception of a company as a single entity due to the increased anonymity afforded by the internet)
If you are looking for payment processors that are ultimately owned and incorporated in the EU: https://eualternative.eu/categories/payments/
Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?
Also running payment processor per country would not be an easy feat or probably feasible.
British payment processors usually sell out / get taken over by US firms
Checkout.com isn't terribly British just headquartered there (Swiss guy founded it in Singapore, tons of foreign investors). They opened a SF office last year, after a big US push prior, so if their financials stay adequate I imagine it'll be another that sells out to the US
The UK tends to punch well above its weight in FinTech, but PSPs are high-volume and very low margin so not really an attractive proposition unless you can be reasonably sure of grabbing a decent share of the global market.
Started in 1997, got bought out by a US company in 2018. RIP.
The founder, Nick Ogden claims "His career began when he pioneered ecommerce in 1994, inventing the first online shop, the Wine Warehouse." [0] Big if true! UK has a long, rich history of inventions.
[0] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nick-ogden-founding-father...
im amazed that stripe is able to handle small guys like me
They basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies.
In the UK it’s the system the law imposes on everyone.
But there are two projects (why one, if you can have two!?), one being Wero by different banks, the other being the Digital Euro by the European central bank. If either finds good adaption (Wero is rolling out slowly and for quite a bunch of banks every customer already got a Wero account automatically) this could move things around ...
Then I offer an all-in price and take your customers.
so the ticketmaster model?
Customers paying the price would: 1) induce scrutiny from the public on visa a Mastercard (the monopolies) 2) encourage the competitive market amongst issuers to compress prices
I would prefer they take this money and either build a payment processor or use an existing UK company. The UK government is addicted to offshoring all contracts it can, and then is surprised when the cheapest possible quote actually ends up ballooning over the agreed amount.
Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
> use an existing UK company
Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
These projects are possible, it's just clear the current project management structure of the UK government is not up to the task. I would lean heavily towards a UK-based private sector solution.
> Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
This is the point, there should be one, and the UK government could heavily put their thumb on the scale to ensure that payments are processed within the UK.
It seems mad to have foreign companies make money on UK government fund raising activities.
It's entirely possible, the fact that the UK government lacks imagination is at great cost to the tax payer. There is no serious long term investment into UK tech, past building AI datacentres for a bubble economy with some of the worst energy rates in the world.
This site regularly dunks on European tech as being subpar, but when an American company gets ditched for a European one, barely anyone can find nice words to say. You really reveal yourselves in times like this, I've got to admit.
I don't follow ?
Don't they have Wise (previously known as Tranferwise) in Spain ? Or a similar platform ?
Its 2026 and for most people the answer is just to use one of those platforms to pay wire transfers instead of your bank.
Sure there will still be fee of some description, but it will almost always be much lower than what your bank charges for international transfers.
HMRCs digital services in general are pretty good, but refunds not so much.
And it's not been a matter of waiting. The money just sits there for the better part of a year before people have noticed.
i guess i expected it to be more significant seeing that its the UK gov
Stripe globally will be worried as countries seek to cut out the card payment middle man and do direct bank to bank account payments