Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
reuters.com
reuters.com
[1] https://viewfromthewing.com/passengers-demand-court-undo-ala...
https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2017/10/futur...
It's probably the most inconsequential merger, from a consumer standpoint.
Video media sellers are dime a dozen these days, and the barrier to entry for selling video media is basically none. Warner brothers and paramount are nowhere near the only business to buy and watch media, and it affects almost no buyers negatively if they merge.
For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.
Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.
[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!
https://www.propublica.org/article/paramount-mergers-fcc-ken...
Added up all the free market enterprise section completed deals where the purchaser was indicated as US based
Obama era:
2009: 6,
2010: 1,
2011: 4,
2012: 1,
2013: 4,
2014: 5,
2015: 7,
2016: 6
Trump term 1:
2017: 4,
2018: 8,
2019: 13,
2020: 7
Biden term:
2021: 4,
2022: 4,
2023: 7,
2024: 4
Trump term 2 so far:
2025: 11*,
2026: 9*
Obama average: 4.25 / year
Biden average: 4.75 / year
Trump term 1 average: 8 / year
*Most of the last two years are indicated as still pending, so not sure if they will go through or not.
Not exactly the most scientific data gathering or study. But it does suggest that large mergers and acquisitions have generally been made more frequently under Trump.
I don't mean to be snarky but "I counted things on Wikipedia" is not exactly slam dunk proof when the GP was all but saying Trump is selling antitrust immunity on the open market.
A thing happens in every administration regime where once it becomes clear that X is acceptable (e.g. renewables projects, LBOs, nuclear, oil drilling, etc), there will be a lot of submissions to do X without any bribes at all.
I’ll toss in some better evidence then: the Paramount lawsuit settlement that paves the way for the merger, which includes future payments for things like pro-Trump advertisements/PSAs:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/how-trump-sued-cbs-won-60-minu...
Paramount shareholders are suing over this and accusing the administration of bribery.
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/paramount-shareholders-a...
Here’s another giant unrelated article that details the Trump administration’s shakedown system:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/unco...
I’ll remind everyone that it has been well established fact that Trump was basically the real estate guy for the Russian mafia in NYC before he got into politics. It isn’t some kind of strange coincidence that a lot of what he does feels mafia-like.
The president is making a genuine, serious attempt to install his personal attorney to the office of Attorney General and he has a good chance of succeeding. This country is cooked.
Well... we certainly know that preemptive appeasement is a thing [1]. IMHO, this is equivalent to a bribe - a favor, just not in monetary form.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/sep/26/kimmel-controv...
The high level of financial corruption of the current administration is very well documented.
Let’s not forget that the president is a convicted felon, and his felonies were all financial crimes.
At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.
Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.
3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's jump out of the middle of checkout and go to a page which looks like they're trying to phish your bank account to continue, and by the way, you can just skip it. So customers did, and then merchants followed, except in countries that effectively required it because they cared about fraud.
One of the major selling points of 3DS2 was basically "we can guesstimate fraud with magic black-box logic behind the scenes so most of the time the customer is not disrupted."
But it's still lipstick on a pig because there are plenty of outs where you don't strictly need 3DS even in "countries that required it", and it's still window dressing around the idea that we're giving merchants an unscoped credential and hoping desperately it doesn't get misused or stolen elsewhere.
When we finally decide we don't want to get lapped by India and Brazil in payment tech anymore, I hope the camel-designed-by-committee it spawns is a push-only paradigm. If I want to buy something, let Newegg render a HTML microformat that browsers can detect and turn into a big clicky link to my bank's website/app with a pre-configured outbound transaction. Just as easy for the customer as a stored card, with less risk of abuse/compromise.
> I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US
Exactly, it has been a fiasco in the US, but it's working quite well in Europe.
> When we finally decide we don't want to get lapped by India and Brazil in payment tech
They are indeed ahead, but they still work based on some kind of user authentication that's not a plaintext credit card number. That's the same disruption as 3DS, except normalized and a better executed.
rarely a big transaction will go through without 2FA but I've never had a transaction declined outright without first asking me to 2FA from the bank app
Any idea why they implemented it like that?
In the UK you either get a text from your bank with transaction details and a code to approve it. Or the better ones you just open their app and tap approve.
3D-Secure long predates apps, including in the UK. I had to work on a Government Gateway integration for local council payments in the mid 2000s that included 3D-Secure. I still see it today, although it normally now results in a ping to an app approval.
Except that your bank has just sent you an SMS OTP with the details of the transaction, or has sent you a push notification via their app for you to confirm that it's you.
Nowhere do we enter credentials of any sort on the 3DS2 interstitial page.
They are not. Payment facilitators (like Stripe) are.
https://images.prismic.io/sacra/30d7bd58-8149-461e-a3c2-8a4a...
It's just \sum_i^n h_{i}^2 sum of squares of market-share.
Enjoyed that. Thanks for the discovery.
A pity that HN can't render TeX or MathJax or whatever.
You can test it here, if you like: https://www.mathjax.org/#demo
There's also this other variant of the Simpson's Index: https://www.thesimpsonsindex.com/
If the US had functioning antitrust laws it would be looking at their margins and be considering whether to break up some of the existing players, not considering when allow even more mergers.
So consolidation of these legacy players is not unexpected - their revenue whilst sizeable is going to continually decrease every year as people use cards less (Many countries have/are rolling out their domestic app2app or bank2retailer payment system).
source: I work at https://primer.io
Worked fine in Firefox.
I tried reproducing and was unable to, both in chrome and safari.
Thanks for the heads up!
direct payment can be good, but thats only part of the service.
First, this is not a "card vendors are good" they are a large buisness entity, with their own motivations. Visa/mastercard are outsized and should have proper competition.
THe point of card vendors in the modern era is to provide credit and protection for both consumers and buisnesses.
Credit is provided to allow instant settling of transaction, but it kinda morphs into escrow as well.
But, in the US your level of direct payment options are frankly shite.
In india, direct transfer is free and mostly instant, same in the UK/EU.
THe UK/EU its a bit more unweildy, as you have to know the name, sort and account number of the person you want to pay. however payment is "instant"
The problem is you don't really get fraud or protection. You can pay someone, and if you make a mistake you can phone your bank up and try and get them to reverse it. but there is no guarentee.
It would be nice if more smaller banks used it as well, but the US has 5k different banks.
This is completely untrue.
> In india, direct transfer is free and mostly instant, same in the UK/EU.
Zelle is an instant payment-by-email network created by the US banks and is accepted basically everywhere.
And there are still other options like FedNow.
Shouldn't you think that about every way companies save money? And yet they do compete on price.
Your incentives are paid by the retailer/vendor, if fees are covered by them. If you're paying that fee, which includes profit for the payment/card processes, you may be losing money using a credit card even with perks like points and cash back.
Stripe is a much stronger company when they're able to aggregate a large number of small payment networks rather than just relying on Visa/MC.
There is a reason why after all these years and other solutions they're still everywhere, and it's not because of their great tooling, their low fees or their awesome support for merchant. It's not because of market lock in either, at least here in Europe they're merely a middle man between my credit card or sepa bank account and the merchant. It's because buyers trust it.
Buyers don't trust stripe. Stripe is for the merchant.
I will never use PP for a large purchase again.
I have had PayPal work for me for refunds many years ago, but the problem is often how long the whole process takes and how long your money is held hostage. By the time you maybe get your money back, you've already had to pay off that money on your credit card (if you used credit for the PP transaction). I've found that when I do a chargeback via my credit card, they often give me the money back right away and then do an investigation. If it were to not go my way the money would get taken back. I think this feels more fair depending on the case. Some cases are pretty clear cut and there is no reason to hold your money hostage while they confirm what you said is truthful.
If you want purchase protection you need to use a card that offers it.
But yes, it's my mistake for assuming the purchase protection would... protect my purchase.
And now I won't make that mistake again. The value isn't there, neither with their aggregation service nor their credit product.
I can just use Google Pay with a credit card, both of which are more convenient and offer better protection than PayPal does respectively.
We had many customers that would buy a 1 month sub then chargeback the whole amount after using it heavily for a few days or right before renewal, with a nonsense reason like "item not as described" or "unauthorized charge".
We lost every single case.
And as a consumer, I especially hate PayPal because they always try to screw me with their currency conversion rates by hiding the toggle button (and it happens that I sometimes forget to toggle over to my bank's currency conversion)
And only once have I ever won a payment dispute there (and that was as a merchant, not a buyer... lol)
I did until October 2022, when PayPal published an update to its Acceptable Use Policy that threatened to fine users $2,500 for promoting "misinformation".
Like they were the arbiters of what is misinformation and worthy of economic penalty. While it was later rescinded, it was beyond the pale. It's proof that something is corrupt and completely out to lunch in their management, and I won't sign up again after deleting my account in protest.
Edit: So apparently they only removed the misinformation clause, and they may still seize $2,500 of your money if they alone decide you are guilty of "...the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime...". People are worried about authoritarianism, yet meekly cede such powers to a corporation? It boggles the mind.
The libertarian answer is that corporations cannot threaten your freedom because you always have a choice of whether to deal with them or not.
The libertarian answer is also mostly bullshit, but there is a kernel of a seed of a nugget of truth in there somehow.
We save almost US$0.25 per $1 transaction because of PayPal.
My business ships a physical product, and has a completely passive web page. It's about as bland as boring as it gets. My page has a "buy" button with a link to PayPal. Then you complete your transaction within PP's site. That way, I don't need to maintain a server anywhere, write any code, or be responsible for handling your private information.
Simply put: Stripe selectively applies their own policy about "restricted" transaction types.
What risk does Stripe take on in this situation?
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-26/how-to-bu...
Perhaps you are confusing cannabis with cannabis-adjacent business (grow lights, compliance solutions, etc)
As usual, everything is about money. You can be sure that part of the interest in a paypal acquisition is paypal's consumer wallet product which allows them to extend into lines of business that are currently constrained by Stripe's model.
No, chargeback rates are not the only reason banking companies like Mastercard are dubious about adult content. In 2021 they added contractual terms to ensure that adult content uses age verification, has the consent of the participants, and to remove illegal content before it is published at soon after it is reported.
But also, the financial industry has a history of discriminating against their customers based in moral reasons (or at minimum bowing to regulatory pressure which stemmed from upstream morality decisions).[1]
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing-ba...
Morals, generously interpretation of the usage, was just to indicate that Stripe has a more narrow risk window.
Only an idiot would think it was about actual human-grade morals or ethics. Let alone that there were actual morality police.
The tone of your original comment suggests you believe they're going to take over and start shutting off morally unacceptable money printers.
I do believe that Stripe will execute they same Stripe pattern in the merged company which will reduce choices in the market for businesses.
Correct. But do you understand why that is? What is the theory of mind you have that makes you believe Stripe would come in and shutting off paying customers?
> I do believe that Stripe will execute they same Stripe pattern in the merged company which will reduce choices in the market for businesses.
Why would they do that? This doesn't make any sense unless you actually think morals are involved.
They restrict the ones that are smaller and independent.
I think that Stripe will shut off paying customers BECAUSE I HAVE SEEN THEM DO IT. That is what first hand knowledge is.
The thing that really doesn't make sense is that Stripe selectively applies their written terms of service and policies. Do you understand that?
You are overindexing on your anecdotal experience to draw conclusions that make no sense. Paypal earns roughly 6x the net revenue of Stripe while processing a similar volume of transactions. Paypal has obviously figured out how to service these businesses profitably, yet for some reason you think Stripe would throw away billions for no reason.
Make that logic make sense.
You'd ignore a pence to pick up a pound.
However, even if it were only in the hundred millions, there's no reason to throw away millions of dollars. The reason PayPal services these lines of business in the first place is because they make money doing so (since unlike Stripe, PayPal's product isn't subject to the constraints of the card rails).
Anyway, if that's the quality of conversation you're offering then abandoning the conversation makes sense. Have a good one.
Stripe is currently passing on these revenues. Stripe has been hostile to these revenue streams for more than a decade.
You seem to think their behavior will change after an acquisition. An acquisition that is also a (dangerous) market consolidation. I don't think they will.
How is PayPal not subject to MC rules when MC is used as a funding source for a PP account that purchases cannabis-adjacent services? Is it magic? Is it some plausible denial thing?
Also, if their only motivation is money - and lets assume that is true - then taking a few billions in high-risk money puts their other even-larger billions at risk.
Do you see that? Yes, they could get new revenue of ~30B adding to their existing ~5B. And assuming several billion in high-risk (4B?) now the question is...would you throw away 4 dollars of your 40 dollars to reduce the risk of the remaining 36? While also knowing you can grow into other lower risk markets? Would you throw away 4 high risk dollars to replace them in two years with 4 new low risk dollars?
No. I'm explaining that PayPal as a business has their own risk models and contractual relationships with merchants that allows them to serve these lines of business profitably. This is the reason why PayPal services these businesses in the first place.
After a Stripe acquisition, that doesn't change, PayPal's model continues to operate profitably for high risk merchants while Stripe's continues to be risky due to the fact that Stripe is just a payment processor, while PayPal operates more like a bank.
> How is PayPal not subject to MC rules when MC is used as a funding source for a PP account that purchases cannabis-adjacent services
The card networks establish strategic partnerships with large businesses in order to cater to their needs. Since PayPal has already established a profitable risk model to service these merchants, the card networks are comfortable with more permissive checkout rules since PayPal is contractually on the hook for chargebacks and fraud.
> taking a few billions in high-risk money puts their other even-larger billions at risk.
How does that money put their larger business at risk?
As others have said, it's about perceived brand risk (V/MC allowed X terrible transaction to take place) and regulatory risk.
You seem to care more about the aesthetics of the sentence than the meaning behind it. We know that a company is not a person. It doesn't have a consciousness. It doesn't have a singular morality to work with. It borrows the decision making of its employees and contractors. We know that the "morality" of a bank or credit card company is really just a layer of abstraction for a group of decisions it makes to avoid bad press/sentiment/oversight/regulation. But if you analyze why people have morality, it's not that different; there are LOTS of things people would do that they currently don't if there was no underlying consequence.
Excuse me for interpreting the comment as written, but either way, the comment only makes sense if you believe that Stripe is going to take over paypal and shutoff profitable lines of businesses based on moral principles - otherwise, what's the problem?
If you actually understand that this is all about money, then it's obvious that this is not going to happen.
We all know it's a risk thing; we all know it's a money thing.
And from experience I think it will happen. It will match Stripes current behavior pattern - regardless if their motive is money or morals. In fact, I think it will happen because it's obvious it is about money.
I'll take the bet that you're totally wrong.
Good news is, this is one of the niche areas where prediction markets make sense.
I wouldn't mind seeing a few predictions around this acquisition and the longer term outcomes like the one y'all are discussing. I have no interest in participating, just want to see where folks are leaning.
That said, I wouldn't bet (if I were you) on something without clearly defining the terms. If Stripe simply homogenizes contractual rules that match their contracts with Mastercard, etc, which side of the bet would that fall on?
I'm not sure why everyone in this thread consistently ignores the fact that PayPal has been profitably servicing these types of businesses for years. The risk has already been mitigated.
> If Stripe simply homogenizes contractual rules that match their contracts with Mastercard, etc, which side of the bet would that fall on?
That would be me losing the bet. What you and others in this thread seem to be missing is that Stripe's risk factors are not the same as PayPal's because Paypal works directly with merchants rather than as a proxy for the card rails like Stripe. The idea that Stripe would take ownership of the platform and start shutting off paying customers is absurd, and as of yet, I haven't seen anyone acknowledge this fact in their explanation of why Stripe would throw away free money.
spoiler: visa and mastercard do act as a morality police.
We wanted to use Stripe to process credit card payments from doctors who would attend our conferences. Stripe flagged our account for review because they saw "ketamine" on the website. After an investigation, they closed our account because they said they can't allow us to sell ketamine online. I tried, multiple times, to explain that we don't do that and that it would be massively illegal for us to do that. For a month I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn't budge. They would not move away from the idea we were trying to sell ketamine online. They were convinced a 20 year old psychiatry business in 4 states and tens of thousands of patients a year with doctors who were recognized as leaders in their fields wanted to sell illegal drugs online.
We signed up for Paypal and never had an issue.
I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.
Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.
It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.
They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve.
And as for their actual website...
PayPal isn't a bank. They're a processor. People run afoul when they keep large amounts in their processor account instead of doing free nightly sweeps. They also run into trouble when they do weird things - like new accounts receiving large funds from international sources, etc. PayPal (and all processors) are required to investigate those instances until you have an established relationship with them - and they'll temporarily hold the suspicious funds while that happens. Business accounts have predictable, established patterns.
99% of the horror stories you hear fall into one of these categories, or both: 1) New Account 2) Unusual Account Activity
PayPal processed millions in annual payments for my previous company, without any issues.
Bird law in this country is not governed by reason.
If only there was a regulatory framework to turn that into an extremely simple court case, and to also punish attempts of PayPal to ban users who stand up for access to their money.
If they’re a near-monopoly they shouldn’t be allowed to set their own rules.
It's always funny when people say these big companies can't provide a good service because that "wouldn't scale" as if their ability to scale is a god given right and not something that should be pushed back on itself.
This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.
* it instantly brings them a ton of consumers * they have capacity to serve those customers
if they don't competitor can just keep higher price (especially if it is just small middleman fee most people might not care that much about)
And even if both of those are true worst possible case is them expanding to handle influx of customers and then competition following in few months, making their investment moot
The price is artificially high -> there's a ton of demand waiting to be unlocked by the "potential energy" gated behind the unnatural price
Capacity is easy to plan around; get too much and you can just raise the price again.
Price/cost is the last thing you compete on unless you have a wholesale advantage, which nobody in this particular industry does (visa/mastercard set core rates)
Source: I’ve worked with higher ups in numerous commerce operations.
Commerce is actually even worse than many realize. Look up pepsi and walmart as a small example.
In contrast, an efficient market with perfect price information means other cartel members would instantly notice and change their prices to punish the defector.
Not if you pay a bit of dividends to jared or dtj
They are better off cooperating, but if one defects first they can screw the other one, so it relies on trust.
Anyway we switched to stripe. Don't love stripe and they take a big cut but I hate paypal.
There's a big amount of competitors for card processing. Just because they aren't well known within tech circles doesn't mean they don't exist.
No, so that means McDonald's can charge 500 dollars for a burger, or does it?
But I’ve only ever seen a single vendor offering it. 0 for Wero so far.
So once it has really broad support and can be used as merchant, is when it'll maybe become interesting.
But it's been confirmed they are merging with companies that are already B2C in their own countries to bring a european B2C system
You're confusing fraud as in unauthorized payments with fraud as in you not receiving what you paid for. The latter is not prevented by 3DS in any way.
Ask anyone who tried to dispute a purchase that happened within the EEA, whether online with SCA or card present with PIN, card issuers often tell you to deal with the merchant directly. The interchange cap has significantly reduced revenue made on card payments, they have an incentive to avoid unnecessary manual work.
If I understand correctly it's developed by the same people: Payconiq.
Of course it's not widely used by vendors when it's still in development. I am hopeful that it will take off to some degree in the nearest 5 years though.
But we aren't there yet.
As a consumer I would like to avoid Master Card / Visa as much as possible and also giving numbers out as much as possible. Paypal allows that and I don't need to use my phone to approve payments. Moreover payment systems that prioritize the needs of merchants usually are horrible for consumers. If Wero becomes such a platform, I will avoid it.
In term of implementation, WeRo looks more like a response to mobile payments like WhatApp, WeChat, Alipay, ... than a response a provider like PayPal. However, I haven't seen anything that'd limit them from expending support if they wished to.
> and also giving numbers out as much as possible
In Person-to-Person, you don't have to share your number. You can use QRCode (Direct SEPA). I'm not entirely sure of the email implementation, but maybe these do not share the phone number either (Edit: seeing https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599201237..., it seems you may be able to do an email-only account). In Person-to-Merchant, I'm not sure what information are shared.
> Moreover payment systems that prioritize the needs of merchants usually are horrible for consumers
Supporting merchants flow to pay is different from prioritizing their needs so I'm unsure where you're going from there. It's also completely separated from Person-to-Person payments. PayPal supports Person-To-Merchant and I wouldn't say they are great for merchant.
I simply do not believe that EU banks will actually invest in a truly independent system with its own trust network. Majority of the banks complain and block you in Germany, when you have a unGoogled phone. It is simply not in the culture of Germany to make risky investments, especially banks. They always choose the options that milk normal consumers. Then EU comes and regulates them into submission. We only got guaranteed free instant SEPA transfers in 2025, while it has been possible for decades. So I am more optimistic for ECB's digital Euro as a consumer than Wero.
> In term of implementation, WeRo looks more like a response to mobile payments like WhatApp, WeChat, Alipay, ... than a response a provider like PayPal.
Wero is usually marketed as the alternative to PayPal: https://www.ndr.de/ratgeber/verbraucher/Paypal-Alternative-W... and I didn't know Whatsapp supported payments. I have never seen such an option.
> You can use QRCode (Direct SEPA).
If they fixed the mobile phone problem and provided a way that's functionally equivalent to Paypal usernames, I'm in for person-to-person transfers.
> Supporting merchants flow to pay is different from prioritizing their needs so I'm unsure where you're going from there. It's also completely separated from Person-to-Person payments. PayPal supports Person-To-Merchant and I wouldn't say they are great for merchant.
Indeed. I may have rephrased my sentence there. I don't trust payment providers that significantly prioritize the needs of merchants over persons. Yes Paypal may suck for the merchants, but its buyer protection is one of the significant reasons that I keep using Paypal for online payments. I do buy stuff from independent sellers in Germany and other EU countries and sometimes they behave less than ideal. Paypal keeps things fairer for the consumer. If Wero is targetting this market, they need to be competing with Paypal on equal footing.
With a proper bank account, strong authentication with some dongle or code generator means if I have it, I can depend on being able to pay. No regard for the number of bots currently pestering them.
With PayPal trying to guess whether its me, maybe I can pay. Maybe I'll get a captcha loop. Maybe there will be a nondescript error message beginning with "Oops". Or maybe the error message will ask to call.. a rep that is not trained and/or authorized to do anything other than password resets. Which is not exactly a useful solution for account lockouts unrelated to the correctly entered, unique password.
Many banks are equally employing the same "guessing whether it is you" techniques with their web UIs. Moreover many of them require Google Play Integrity when a phone is the TOTP. Definitely different ergonomics though.
The question is whether or not they can weaponize the regulatory system to prevent smaller competitors from taking advantage of their confusion.
Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.
The next move would be to offer a stripe managed card network that captures the full MDR interchange fee stack, from issuance to processing to network to bank. They could offer deep discounts to merchants hosting their accounts on their bank issuing cards through them and processing through them by cutting out every middle man. It would instantly become the third largest network in terms of points of sale behind visa and Mastercard. They could further carve out heavy rewards for customers through direct relationships with airlines, hotels, and merchants through their existing issuer services. They would become the first fully integrated vertical in payments, and the efficiency that would give them in fees would allow them to crush the hodge podge payment stacks out there that exist. I’d wager in five years they would dominate the market.
When did it get one?
Stripe isn't keeping all of that "1.5% - 3.25% + 20p", they're paying the network some portion.
Additionally, instead of using the blended pricing model you quote, they do offer IC+ pricing to (at least some) businesses. I don't know the criteria. On IC+, you're explicitly paying "whatever the network costs" + "fixed Stripe fees"
https://stripe.com/resources/more/interchange-plus-pricing-e...
> Larger and fast-growing businesses often choose interchange plus pricing because it passes through the true cost of each transaction. At high volumes, its net cost is often lower than that of blended pricing. It also gives finance teams true oversight because it shows where all the money goes. That makes it easier to forecast costs, spot inefficiencies, and negotiate or shop around for the processor markup.
TLDR This low regulatory period of the US political timeline will eventually end, and there will be a lookback/clawback period. Nothing is permanent. Rules can be changed at any time.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
Same thing with card payments. There are online card payments and in-store card payments and other kinds of payments. Stripe + Paypal volume is considered a fraction of it.
If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Some other countries don't have this issue for various reasons.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Wero in the EU is fantastic, albeit still very young. Once it's mature and deployed everywhere, I see no reason to use something else in my country.
In fact, in France, the CB system endured despite visa and mastercard for 4 decades, so we know how to do it already.
There is no recourse if something goes wrong with FedNow, right? Like you get scammed, and the scammer just keeps the money. Seems like a pretty big difference (in theory anyway) to PayPal. Although I'm apparently not the right guy to ask, since I really don't see the use case for PayPal vs. credit card.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/navigating-...
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...
This does not cover products/services not received at an online merchant, for example, just like how you can’t retroactively cancel a check. Cards do allow chargebacks in this situation.
European business pay a "hidden" tax to the US on everything, in the form of Visa & Mastercard commissions.
I hate feeling as if I'm defending Visa or Mastercard, but if we're going to attack them, let's get our storytelling correct first.
PayPal was worth 5x this a few years ago... Even pre-pandemic it was worth far more. Hell, just a year ago it was valued at ~$80 share.
$60.50 per share would value them at just 11x their current earnings. I get PayPal isn't exactly a growth company anymore, but I'm not sure I understand why shareholders would agree to this offer?
I'm no longer a fan of Stripe, but if they fix that one issue I will happily use PayPal again.
Will Stripe move customers from PayPal to Stripe or will they fix PayPal?
Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
At least for me, Zelle is something I can do in my bank app, so I don't need to work with anything I wasn't already using.
It feels a lot easier to use than Venmo, but I dunno. It's one of like 7 options I have to transfer in the bank app.
2. (Insert healthy amount of distrust of anything the banks all want, because there's zero chance it's in consumers' best interest)
3. We don't control anything, Zelle does. I have 5 bank accounts (multiple banks). I have one cell phone number, and of COURSE Zelle, like the banks that run it, insists on using cell phone numbers as basically their primary key and only identifier. When someone pays me by putting in my number, where will the money go? F--k if I know!
The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future.
The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might have a point." Still a ton of growing up that needs to be done by the industry.
But no company or country should be able to tax the global economy via payments monopoly and you should not be able to be arbitrarily banned from the economy by these global supra-national intermediaries that have no court system and no democratic levers to pull to reign in their overreach in your country outside of desperate social media posts.
Stripe brags incessantly about how much of global GDP they facilitate...which, cool. I don't doubt there's an insane amount of work required to herd all those global cats and make payments just work. But, they're literally taxing the entire world as a % of GDP due to this dystopian legacy system? Is that the best outcome for humanity?
And this isn't some inflated market cap either, apart from 2021 and 2022 they have been making $5B+ Net income in the past 6 years. I would love to dive into how Paypal makes money because that is an order of magnitude bigger than I thought. There must be some market in which Paypal is popular and culturally accepted as by default payment.
Which also makes me want to rethink how much Apple Pay is worth if it was a separate business.
And as much trump friendly the ftc is, theres still the state attornies like we see with the paramount deal
Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.
If this passes antitrust review (unlikely imo), Stripe is about to be destroyed by a culture virus that they *paid* for.
It doesn't have assets? It's not a bank
Is it because PayPal is integrated already into so many websites?
Wouldn't it take decades to make back $50 Billion in fees?
They also hold a lot of financial data of its users, which is certainly worth more than anything that could ever make sense to my pleb brain.
This should be blocked, and Stripe should be investigated for trying to build a monopoly
Hello Cloudflare btw.