PayPal nears deal for Braintree Payments

Wouldn't be the first time someone said that prior to being acquired, only to realize later that they do not have the influence over upstream decisions that they imagined they would.

So while I understand the necessity of the linked blog post, it doesn't really address my concern - which is that PayPal has notoriously awful customer service, and the thing I value most about your company is your customer service. And despite all of your best intentions, the culture of very large companies inevitably affects (or replaces) the culture of the companies they acquire. I've been acquired before. I know how it goes.

At the end of the day, all I care about is that I continue to get the same level of customer service from your company. The moment that changes, I'll go somewhere else (probably Stripe).

And we just notified our entire customer base that they can kiss their Paypal problems goodbye because we've switched to Braintree. How does that look now?

I have my fingers crossed that this sale does not go through.

However realistically, since all of our production code is already completed and tested against Braintree, we are not going to switch unless they do something really dumb like close their api.

For me as long as Braintree continues:

+ Using their 'vault' for credit cards

+ Continues having a great api

+ Continues have great customer service.

I'm going to watch and see what happens.

I don't see how you come to that conclusion. This is not the first time PayPal has acquired a popular payment processor. In 2005, they purchased Verisign's payment processing business, Payflow Pro. I don't recall them making any noticeable changes to it after acquisition other than changing the word "Verisign" to "PayPal" everywhere. Is there some reason to believe that a Braintree acquisition will not be treated similarly?

I wouldn't be very surprised if Braintree decided to be acquired because they learned that doing "enough" fraud protection requires the sort of fees that Paypal charges – _plus_ a dataset like eBay to mine for patterns and to instrument up for real-time triggers.

Thinking about it (as in, this is not some long-held considered belief, just some random thought that's just popped into my head), it'll kinda surprise me if anyone smaller than Paypal/eBay, Amazon, Facebook, or Google, will be able to compete longterm as a payment company. If you don't have firehose-sized transaction data to monitor (Paypal/Amazon) or strong social network signals about identities (Facebook/Google), I doubt you're going to be able to create fraud protection as effectively as those players, and that's going to cost you and your (non-fraudulent) customers and be reflected in the transaction fees you'll end up non-competitively charging.

Random thought number 2 – I wonder if there's now some opportunity to start up a non-US based payment company, and lobby for privacy law changes in the wake of the post-Snowden knowledge about how the PRISM-linked companies are mis-using personal data, especially of "non US persons"? I wonder how hard you'd have to push the Brazilian government to make using PRISM-linked or US based companies as payment services illegal - for domestic privacy reasons? (Unfortunately, I suspect the opportunities for me in Australia to lobby for laws protecting Australian citizens from surveillance by the NSA won't get any support at all from our in-bed-with-and-beholden-to-the-US government.)

Probably related.