Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.
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.
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?
Then Stripe have historically been pro-Palestine but recently Collison has taken part in Israeli propaganda [2].
Can't wait for these two evil companies to team up.
[1] https://paypal.7amleh.org/ [2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/cal...
haven't been following the drop because otherwise I thought that Paypal was more valuable than Stipe + Advent combined (which seems to have previously been the case) - and so I would have thought Paypal would have been buying the other companies and that this was some weird way to try to devalue a competitor by offering to buy them
Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.
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?
Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.
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 would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Not if you pay a bit of dividends to jared or dtj
3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
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.
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.
But I’ve only ever seen a single vendor offering it. 0 for Wero so far.
I will never use PP for a large purchase again.
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.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
Will Stripe move customers from PayPal to Stripe or will they fix PayPal?
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
If you want purchase protection you need to use a card that offers it.
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.
We had many customers that would buy a 1 month sub then chargeback the whole amount after using it heavily for a few days, with a nonsense reason like "item not as described" or "unauthorized charge".
https://www.propublica.org/article/paramount-mergers-fcc-ken...
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.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/navigating-...
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...
It's probably the most inconsequential merger, from a consumer standpoint.
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.
[1] https://viewfromthewing.com/passengers-demand-court-undo-ala...
So once it has really broad support and can be used as merchant, is when it'll maybe become interesting.
* 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
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
But it's been confirmed they are merging with companies that are already B2C in their own countries to bring a european B2C system
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.