1. A number of wine investment companies took card payments but never bought the wine. So the bank was liable for the money lost in those situations - and as a result that put a blanket ban on all fine wine companies. We were able to talk Barclays around on this.
2. Storage of wine would be handled by a third party warehouse. If they screwed anything up (e.g. broke the case, had a fire, and insurance refused to pay out), there was a chance that buyers could get the money back through their bank if they paid by credit card.
and for us when we did accept this:
3. Getting the fees to work with our model - we wanted to offer a fixed fee for trading cases, but all banks / payment services wanted to take a percentage, including for debit card payments (hence my point about doing more work to get the model to work payment charges).
Obviously fraud is a major concern, and is something that we do a lot of work on as we scale up (e.g. at the moment we're manually processing all orders, taking ID for anyone buying more than £10k total etc). It's not something that we're naive too and we're definitely not going to launch a completed automated system without adequate processes in place.