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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

There’s a huge difference for small business owners.

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.

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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

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Sadly pretty normal for European companies. The penalties they face for signing up a bad customer are so much harsher they won't risk letting just anyone sign up without actual KYC not just checkbox KYC. This is the same reason Hetzner turns away 50% of its customers.

I used to work at Stripe and they subject to the same penalties as Ayden. There is a misconception that Stripe is an American only company, they have dual HQ model in Ireland and San Francisco. Since they are an Irish founded company and they have an EU entity “Stripe Technology Europe”. They can be kicked out of entire countries and regions if they didn’t have an extensive KYC systems and be fined just the same.

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.

[1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses

> especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling

Well, it does makes sense. I’d be more interested in the rejection rate for businesses that are allowed but are just starting up.

Mollie (also Dutch) existed even before Adyen (and way before Stripe). They have no problem dealing with small customers, and have always offered a trivially easy to use API.

Love for Mollie - and literally had this exact theme last year at work. Stripe implemented, then customer A couldn't use it due to US base, so went to Adyen, built integration, rejected as less than $5 million as first responder said, then went to Mollie.

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.

Not sure how would that change for Stripe dealing with EU companies.

They have to comply with the same regulations.

Why don't they have a fax option so you absolutely never think about it again?

Adyen has resellers. Mollie is one example, they do have. Get Started and no lower limit. These smaller parties rely on the bank license of Adyen

Are you sure about that? From Mollie's webiste:

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).

Mollie also doesn't want small businesses, unfortunately. (We were rejected as too small.)

Matches my experience. They didn’t state any reason in my case, though.

Really? Must be a recent thing then..? I've used them for all sorts of small (and not so small) things.

Mollie doesn't resell Adyen, nor does it rely on Adyen's banking license.

Lightspeed is powered by Adyen and serves smaller businesses.

https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/lightspeed-integrated-pa...

Seems to be focused on retail / POS, not online payments. Though they do have eCommerce page and even API:

https://www.lightspeedhq.com/ecom/

https://www.lightspeedhq.com/pos/retail/api/

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