Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer-buy-paypal-more-than-53-billion-sources-say-2026-07-15/

by rvz • 8 days ago

494 305 8 days ago

Trying to create a monopoly before the lack of antitrust enforcement window closes.

No reason it can’t be broken apart in the future. States will likely file suit, as twelve already have regarding the Paramount Warner deal.

pessimizer• 7 days ago

You mean that Paramount-Warner deal that people waited and let happen so they could break it up in the future?

ergocoder3• 8 days ago

I doubt Stripe is anywhere near the monopoly status.

nickjj2• 7 days ago

Back when selling online tech courses was viable (pre-AI), about 30% of transactions in the US were from folks using PayPal on the platform I used. There's a huge of people who use PayPal, it's even more outside of the US.

seanclayton• 7 days ago

How else would you accept credit card payments on your website? Who are the competitors you would reach for?

dlcarrier2• 8 days ago

In the US, PayPal has nowhere near the adoption of other countries, for making payments directly between accounts, and Visa and Mastercard have enough regulatory capture to ensure it stays that way.

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.

digitaltrees7• 7 days ago

What is the regulatory capture? Visa and master card have contract terms that ensure retail capture. That’s a private moat not regulation.

BiteCode_dev• 7 days ago

With wechat in china, pix in south america and wero in europe, I think it's quite the opposite. All continents want to see visa and mastercard dead so they can bring back those transaction fees in house and it will work as the phone is the low friction payment method now.

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.

Jblx2• 7 days ago

FedNow

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.

brikym• 7 days ago

If there is a cartel it's at the Visa & Mastercard layer surely.

reddalo2• 7 days ago

I can't wait for Europe to come up with an alternative for Visa & Mastercard.

European business pay a "hidden" tax to the US on everything, in the form of Visa & Mastercard commissions.

digitaltrees7• 7 days ago

I agree with this for in-person payments. But surely stripe has a monopoly on development api payments and PayPal on e-commerce. What i would expect is that visa Master card try to buy the stripe/PayPal.

chirau2• 8 days ago

That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.

pstuart• 8 days ago

Gosh, with such efficiency of operations consumers will win because pricing of their services will be more efficient! Todays Feds will try selling that story.

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 8 days ago

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now

bluedevil2k2• 7 days ago

States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.

xp845• 7 days ago

Quite true. Or honestly, it's really barely about direct financial bribery anymore[1] - all the recent ones have just hinged on incredibly naïve (and easily manipulable) readings of how a merger might affect culture war / red vs blue partisanship.

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!

pc862• 7 days ago

Do you have any evidence that you can just bribe your way past antitrust regulations (which are enforced by hundreds or maybe even thousands of attorneys across the political spectrum) or is this just how you feel because you don't like who is in the White House right now?

esskay• 7 days ago

You think they'd only have to go through antitrust in the US? These are global payment processors, and the EU loves getting involved in this kind of thing. And no they can't just ignore it if they want to keep the majority of their customers.

mlrtime• 7 days ago

How is Spirit airlines doing with your witty remark?

dlcarrier2• 8 days ago

If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.

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.

chirau2• 7 days ago

Not true. Visa and Mastercard don't make the bulk of the commission. When a merchant pays a standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee on a credit card transaction the issuing bank gets roughly 1.5-2.5% for interchange, which is the bulk. The processor or acquirer gets anywhere from 0.2-0.5% and the card network gets only about 0.1-0.15.

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.

ThePowerOfFuet• 7 days ago

If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.

3DS2 is the solution to that problem.

mbesto• 7 days ago

Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission

They are not. Payment facilitators (like Stripe) are.

https://images.prismic.io/sacra/30d7bd58-8149-461e-a3c2-8a4a...

arjie• 7 days ago

The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is a measure of the concentration of a market based on the market-share of the firms participating in it. Very much like the Simpson's index that tells you the probability of two organisms in a place being of the same type when randomly drawn.

It's just \sum_i^n h_{i}^2 sum of squares of market-share.

Enjoyed that. Thanks for the discovery.

zombot• 7 days ago

Why does the `i` after `h_` need a curly but not after `\sum_`?

A pity that HN can't render TeX or MathJax or whatever.

dfee• 6 days ago

HHI and Simpsons are neat new finds.

There's also this other variant of the Simpson's Index: https://www.thesimpsonsindex.com/

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe2• 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_index

damienmeur• 6 days ago

With all these new banking methods, also "Hero" more recently, I really don't know where this new "Numerical Euro" stuff from the ECB is going

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe2• 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman_i...

soerxpso• 6 days ago

Seeing as payment processing is already a highly regulated industry, I hope that the anti-trust issue is simply ignored, as a consumer. I don't really want to maintain six different payment processor accounts, or have thoughts about which payment processor I prefer. I just want there to be one that everyone uses and that doesn't get in the way. Some countries have a single government-controlled online payment processor, and that seems to work. The ideal American way might be to have a single technically-private-sector highly-regulated one.

nitwit005• 6 days ago

In the US that would just mean you'd get to enjoy absurdly high fees.

goofy_lemur• 8 days ago

I mean less competition is probably not good for anyone.

ergocoder3• 8 days ago

Except for Stripe and other payment gateway companies, of course

verdverm• 7 days ago

and their oligarch financiers

mertbio• 8 days ago

Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.

solarkraft• 8 days ago

I have not tried Wero, but I have tried the german predecessor (paydirekt/giropay). It was ... not much less smooth than PayPal.

But I’ve only ever seen a single vendor offering it. 0 for Wero so far.

LelouBil2• 7 days ago

I don't think vendors can offer Wero yet. I think it's part of the merger with other European companies.

ahoef• 7 days ago

Wero is essentially iDeal. iDeal is great.

fallingbananna• 7 days ago

In most countries, Wero is still in incubating stage. i.e., banks anouncing that in the next 3 years they will support it.

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.

juujian• 7 days ago

I don't know if popular is quite the right word. It certainly is widely used though...

janpio• 7 days ago

I like your optimism.

okanat4• 7 days ago

Paying with Paypal is as easy as logging in. With Wero/iDeal you always need a phone or a code. People trust PayPal more too.

Sayrus2• 7 days ago

Wero has a for merchant/commerce part that integrates with PSPs. For instance Adyen: https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/wero

But we aren't there yet.

edelbitter2• 7 days ago

Logging into PayPal is easy except on one of those days when it is not.. and nothing can fix it other than waiting ~24h.

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.

SkiFire134• 7 days ago

Loggin into Paypal for me requires a 2FA code sent through either SMS or Whatsapp, both of which require a phone.

selfmodruntime5• 7 days ago

PayPal Germany is a different beast. Germans are the only country that majorly doesn't rely on Credit Cards when doing online payment.

nikolay• 8 days ago

PayPal owns Venmo, though.

kayo_20211030• 7 days ago

Wow! TIL. Totally ignorant is I.

kotaKat• 7 days ago

So... I got banned from PayPal (with no explanation) and Stripe closed my account (with no recourse for 'crowdfunding' after linking to Ko-Fi).

Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.

1970-01-01• 7 days ago

I've been thru 3 or 4 'lifetime' bans with PayPal. Just ask to be reinstated during the next big shakeup (now) and they'll let you back in. They want your money. They want your business. The exact same things you couldn't sell 25 years ago, the things that got you banned, are now listed online without care. They literally forget.

charlieyu14• 7 days ago

PayPal user for 20+ years and it is time to end that dross

nolok• 7 days ago

Nah, I hate them with a passion as a merchant but I absolutely love them as a buyer and customer.

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.

bastawhiz• 7 days ago

As a buyer I don't trust Paypal. They use dark patterns to try to get me to sign in, then make it hard to sign out, and for whatever reason my account is wedged and even though it has the correct payment details, the payments all fail. The UI is antiquated and the embedded version that has the animated progress bar GIF is sketchy at best. The Venmo app (which Paypal owns) is jammed with crappy ads and an often-broken UI.

dqv2• 7 days ago

Nah I thought I liked PayPal as a customer until I found out that they favor large merchants against the consumer. I had a problem with a product and the company was playing games with the warranty. I only had it for 3 months and it was already falling apart. I made a complaint with PP and it was auto denied.

I will never use PP for a large purchase again.

KomoD• 7 days ago

I don't trust either one.

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)

ceejayoz• 7 days ago

Yeah, any subscription I can push through PayPal, I do so, because I can cancel it directly on their end. I don't need to go through a ten click justification process with the merchant.

quantummagic2• 7 days ago

... because buyers trust it.

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.

dabinat2• 7 days ago

The advantage that PayPal offers me as a buyer is a middleman between the vendor and myself that I control. The vendor does not get any of my card or bank info, and if it’s a subscription I can easily cancel it at any time on the PayPal side without having to go through whatever dark patterns the vendor might have to prevent you unsubscribing.

frollogaston• 7 days ago

As a buyer, I like something that's good for the merchant, because 99% of the time I'm buying from merchants who I trust way more than I trust the other buyers. Don't even want credit card middlemen if I have the choice.

SmolSpideritito• 6 days ago

You're lucky that isn't Australia/SEA and you don't have to deal with Ezypay

BoingBoomTschak• 7 days ago

Sadly still chained to it for Discogs...

PaulDavisThe1st3• 7 days ago

Let me know where I can get PayPal's micropayment rates for the 80%+ of transactions (below US$12) that support ardour.org ...

We save almost US$0.25 per $1 transaction because of PayPal.

analog312• 7 days ago

For better or worse, PayPal is the only service that works for my business, and it has worked flawlessly for upwards of 2 decades. I casually look for alternatives to PP once every couple of years.

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.

whatshisface• 7 days ago

I can never seem to find this API when I look for it. What's the feature you're using called? Thanks in advance.

izacus• 7 days ago

Less competition is always amazing for consumers. Who needs that in capitalism, let's just keep one corporation for everything.

ck2• 7 days ago

I really do not grasp business when PayPal is somehow worth over $50 Billion

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?

rwaksmunski• 7 days ago

It's a bank in Europe

jc_811• 7 days ago

If you look at their financials, they’re clearly making money. In 2025 they had 33B in revenue with a net income of 5.2B

hyperbovine• 7 days ago

PayPal is sort of the Facebook of digital payments: they stopped being directly relevant years ago, but own many of the things that you or someone you know continue to use. Venmo being the obvious one, but also Braintree, Xoom, Honey, Bill Me Later, etc.

wyre• 7 days ago

According to Wikipedia they hold $80 billion in assets.

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.

tmtvl• 7 days ago

Doesn't PayPal confiscate your money if you forget to withdraw it in time?

coredev_2• 7 days ago

Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.

rglover• 7 days ago

Consolidation (move toward making Stripe the only game in town).

coredev_2• 7 days ago

PayPal seems to me like something from the past that no one uses. But sure, they have a market and a profit, but a future?

Will Stripe move customers from PayPal to Stripe or will they fix PayPal?

nozzlegear• 7 days ago

If I'm buying something from a website and they don't offer Apple Pay, I'll opt for PayPal instead since I already have my credit/debit cards saved there and don't want to hand over numbers to a random website. Also, when I used to do more freelancing, all of my clients preferred to be invoiced and pay through PayPal (who skimmed a decent chunk of change off the top).

Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.

xp845• 7 days ago

Don't forget Venmo - PayPal smartly gobbled that up many, many years ago, and it has a great amount of mindshare (though I don't know how profitable it is). Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users, but unlike Venmo, Zelle is a steaming pile of sh*t of user experience, due to it being a consortium of all the famously-tech-backwards big banks, which stood it up out of fear and jealousy that those "Internet" guys might find a way to disintermediate them somehow.

onlypassingthru• 7 days ago

Zelle was built to preempt FedNow. The banks saw what was coming and wanted to own instant payments.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

toast0• 7 days ago

Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users,

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.

kelvinjps10• 7 days ago

what's the problem with zelle? it works in my bank app, it's fast, no fees, it's really easy to use

muvlon2• 7 days ago

Interesting that you'd mention Brazil. I consider it one of the very few examples of countries successfully replacing PayPal with a publicly owned service. Pix is ubiquitous in Brazil and has been for years. It has not only displaced PayPal but also cash and (in large parts) Visa/MasterCard, even in the face of US tariff threats.

usrnm• 7 days ago

It's actually pretty common for local payment systems to exist, it's not just Brazil. I've seen such systems in Europe, Asia, Africa and I'm sure they exist in other places I've never been to

zuzululu• 7 days ago

thrilled that stripe is buying paypal

thunderfork• 7 days ago

Everyone rushing to get these consolidations done before America starts having anti-trust law again, huh?

Topology1• 7 days ago

Do the processing fees really add up? Can't fathom that Stripe is big enough to buy PayPal, but maybe I'm just 10 years behind on this industry.

nailer• 7 days ago

Yes. People are prepared to pay Stripe 1% of all their revenue, same way they're prepared to pay card companies 2%.

khurs4• 7 days ago

1.5% - 3.25% + 20p

https://stripe.com/gb/pricing

khurs4• 7 days ago

Privately held Stripe is among the industry's most valuable companies. It was valued at $159 billion in a tender offer for employees and shareholders in February, a more than 70% jump from a similar share sale a year earlier.

nickjj2• 7 days ago

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?

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.

dfunckt• 7 days ago

The dystopia that PayPal is we’re cheering and paying trillionaires to bring forward faster. Can’t wait.

novia• 7 days ago

Paypal offshored all of their support staff.

geden• 7 days ago

They've been abysmal and borderline criminal since the start.

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...

paytonjjones3• 7 days ago

informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same

This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.

bdcravens• 7 days ago

Of course, but that's the thing about "informal" agreements: presumably there's no record of it. Price collusion happens way more than most realize. I was at a trade show for my employer when a competitor walked up to our booth and out loud proposed that we should all fix our prices. We didn't of course, but the brazenness of saying something like that out in the open like was what surprised me.

yawniek• 7 days ago

This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical;

Not if you pay a bit of dividends to jared or dtj

doctorpangloss• 7 days ago

i just wonder why you think fees are high. seemingly the only thing that keeps fees low elsewhere in the world is regulations.

Rebelgecko• 7 days ago

Is it? I can imagine scenarios where they're better off accepting a duopoly if it allows the profit margin to be 3x higher

gigatexal• 7 days ago

But there are many competitors no? Adyen at least comes to mind.

benmorris2• 7 days ago

Braintree was a legit competitor, last time I checked they won't even onboard you if you don't have an established business grossing over 100k/yr.

selfmodruntime5• 7 days ago

Braintree also is and isn't compatible with the legacy PayPal stack, of which there are 3 layers, depending on whom you ask.

tempest_• 7 days ago

I remember about 10 years ago I switched our billing / subscription code from paypal to braintree. Braintree was better than paypal but that wasnt saying much. Then paypal bought Braintree and started fucking around with it, asking for conference calls because they wanted us off one of their old flows so they could get us on webhooks that preformed worse and were a pain to implement.

Anyway we switched to stripe. Don't love stripe and they take a big cut but I hate paypal.

carlosjobim4• 7 days ago

what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?

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.

account424• 7 days ago

There are many card processors but how many of them provide services equivalent to stripe?

elevation• 7 days ago

I typically use paypal for paying contractors, but try to "load balance" across a couple competitors because you never know when one of them will flag your account, nor for how long it will be flagged.

Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.

motoxpro• 7 days ago

This would be amazing! Its such a pain having to set up two payment solutions as a merchant and as a buyer it would be great if I could use my paypal credit on whatever purchase I want. Consumers want paypal and merchant want stripe. I really want this to happen.

carlosjobim4• 7 days ago

PayPal has been a payment option offered by Stripe for merchants for a while now. I don't know if there's more setting up than clicking the activation button.

taylorbuley• 7 days ago

My worry is that fees might go through the roof without any other options

pembrook• 7 days ago

Not great tbh.

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?

baranul• 5 days ago

The point about crypto is worth exploring. Many would prefer to cut the middleman out and crypto can be a way to do that.

benmorris2• 7 days ago

I'm not sure how this is a good thing. There are already very limited options to accept payments online, consolidating two of the major ones is not a great thing.

carlosjobim4• 7 days ago

There are many options. If you make a lot of online payments, you'll see myriad payment processors.

edoceo12• 7 days ago

Not good. Stripe makes restrictions that PayPal allows (cannabis adjacent, adult adjacent) that Stripe blocks. Many vendors will be negatively impacted by Stripes morality police and selective application of their policies.

3uler• 7 days ago

In my experience, having worked at several large PSPs, it is Mastercard and Visa who are the morality police. Stripe are just enforcing the rules insisted on by them, and PayPal forgot about them 3 layoffs ago.

edoceo12• 7 days ago

Then how do other processors go over the Visa and MC rails for these transaction types? How does Stripe allow some and then block others?

root_axis10• 7 days ago

Why do people think this? Since when do giant corporations care about morals?

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.

decimalenough• 7 days ago

It's not about morals, it's about regulatory heat and risk. Cannabis in the US remains illegal on the federal level, and the chargeback rates on adult services are through the roof.

edoceo12• 7 days ago

Or, because as you say it's money (I agree) the Stripe will put their "morals" in place - with the financial result they reduce risk, get less chargebacks and lower costs - then pass the savings on to the C-suite.

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.

arcticbull• 7 days ago

It's pretty easy, you get hit with a surcharge on your other transaction volume if you allow something that V/MC don't want you to allow, and if you keep doing it you could get cut off which effectively makes you irrelevant to many of your customers.

As others have said, it's about perceived brand risk (V/MC allowed X terrible transaction to take place) and regulatory risk.

thephyber3• 7 days ago

There are many bank and bank-adjacent companies who contractually enforce morals standards. It doesn't matter if the underlying reason for the morality is profit maximization, the effect is the same.

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.

dingdongditchme• 7 days ago

There is a good podcast on this topic: hot money (2022) from the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...

spoiler: visa and mastercard do act as a morality police.

burnte2• 7 days ago

Stripe can be ridiculously restrictive. A few years ago at a psychiatric company that (among other things) offered therapy, TMS, and also esketamine/IV ketamine that was only offered in office, prescribed by a psychiatrist that has determined it is a medically prudent treatment, and closely monitored. They also offered some seminars during the year that other doctors could pay to attend that counts towards their CE credits per year.

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.

edoceo12• 7 days ago

And yet some on this thread seem to think Stripe wouldn't shut off valid, law abiding paying customers.

burnte2• 7 days ago

Note: We never had an issue with Paypal and did not sell any pharmaceuticals. Just wanted to be clear on that.

threecheese• 7 days ago

This presumes that they won’t maintain those, which would be a valid choice to maintain PayPal’s market penetration (if that’s the goal). Diverse offerings etc

olalonde3• 7 days ago

It has nothing to do with morality. It has to do with compliance and fraud risk.

mrguyorama3• 6 days ago

What fraud risk?

AlanAzarkin• 7 days ago

Reading about Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions is funny. X uses Stripe, but Stripe on X doesn't accept my Bybit stablecoin cryptocard for a Pro subscription, ads, or boost purchases.

whimsicalism2• 7 days ago

In some ways, I would rather Stripe have the market power here to negotiate against Visa & Mastercard than Visa/Mastercard holding the reigns over a fragmented digital ecosystem.

xiaodai• 7 days ago

how things have changed! the grand daddy is being acquired!

dorianmariecom• 7 days ago

that’s great

ceautery• 7 days ago

If I worked for PayPal right now I'd be printing résumés. Stripe recently laid off 300 of their IT people. To paraphrase Petey Greene, I wouldn't trust them to wash my car.

selfmodruntime5• 7 days ago

I am so so glad to not be at either PayPal or IBM right now.

whimsicalism2• 7 days ago

why should i disprefer rails with lower fees and fewer employees?

kasey_junk• 7 days ago

PayPal announced 5k layoffs in May.

kypro• 7 days ago

Extremely weak bid, no?

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?

gonesilent• 7 days ago

Honey lawsuits still might be a feared liability?

ksec• 7 days ago

Paypal was worth near $50 when it IPO again in 2015, and it is still worth $50B today?

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.

selfmodruntime5• 7 days ago

Competition is fierce and there's only so much innovation you can do as a payment service provider

edelbitter2• 7 days ago

For starters, they could have made at least every website related to customer-facing payment flow as fast as stripe managed to deliver pretty much right from the start.

hibikir• 7 days ago

What I find weird about this is that JohnC has been saying for decades that large mergers are pretty bad for both companies. You spend 2,3 years in limbo, figuring out what in the world to do with the other large organization. When Stripe makes acquisitions it's historically been small companies, doing things Stripe isn't doing. It's the kind of situation where pc is unlikely to speak publicly here, but I sure would love to understand what the plan is, if just as a shareholder.

LeifCarrotson• 7 days ago

On the other hand, reducing competition and consolidating the market within the combined organization is good for the misshapen franken-org that comes out at the end...

The question is whether or not they can weaponize the regulatory system to prevent smaller competitors from taking advantage of their confusion.

fnordpiglet3• 7 days ago

What I find interesting about this isn’t acquiring the flow from PayPal but the fact that PayPal has a bank charter and stripe doesn’t (not a real one, all that Georgia bank stuff is shenanigans). Properly structured this gives stripe a lot of interesting opportunities that they’ve had to delegate to partners and that dilutes not just their margins in the fee stack but restricts the types of transactions and merchants they can host, beyond the minimal regulatory constraint.

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.

dataflow3• 7 days ago

but the fact that PayPal has a bank charter

When did it get one?

fnordpiglet3• 7 days ago

2008 in the EU and last year in the US.

molsongolden• 7 days ago

There are much cheaper ways to acquire a bank charter though?

fnordpiglet3• 7 days ago

Not necessarily - the compliance side would open up stripe entirely unless they very carefully structured as a bank holding company. Stripe has been trying to gain a charter in Georgia for years and just got it last year. I think this taught them it would be easier to acquire one. Additionally PayPal has been a EU bank for 12 years and just recently got its US banking charter. A global bank is pretty compelling.

ravenstine• 7 days ago

I will support this idea if they allow changing your PayPal handle! When they first introduced that feature, PayPal made it seem more frivolous than a username. In fact I don't even think they called it a username at the time. I decided to use it for a side project that didn't work out, then came to discover that the handle had become my permanent username for my personal account with no way to change it whatsoever. If you call your small ballpoint pen business @penisland but realize the lack of wisdom behind that handle, you're stuck with it for life. Paypal does not care and will not provide you with support.

I'm no longer a fan of Stripe, but if they fix that one issue I will happily use PayPal again.

jervant• 7 days ago

What's so important about retaining your existing account? Remove payment methods, change the account email address, then close the account and open a new one.

nativeit• 7 days ago

Why wait? Let’s just jump straight to “StripeX” and get it over with.

khurs4• 7 days ago

The future is direct payments without middlemen.

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).

dedoussis• 7 days ago

What if you are a merchant that needs to sell to O(10) countries? Integrating with each country's domestic payment rail is not feasible.

drdexebtjl• 7 days ago

O(10) = O(1) so you would be fine.

dbbk• 7 days ago

Stripe is already building itself out to be essentially a global bank, your income stays within there and you can pay vendors directly out of your Stripe balance to theirs.

yuppiepuppie3• 7 days ago

Payment Orchestrators help solve this problem.

source: I work at https://primer.io

sschueller• 7 days ago

No worries, lobbyist are working day and night to prevent anything like what Brasil has with PIX ever making it.

KaiserPro2• 7 days ago

The future is direct payments without middlemen.

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.

jraby3• 7 days ago

In the US, Zelle payments are accepted by most major banks and are free and instant. I'm not sure how it could be better than that.

It would be nice if more smaller banks used it as well, but the US has 5k different banks.

n4r9• 6 days ago

In the UK you can send someone a Monzo link allowing them to pay directly and instantly into your account.

petcat• 6 days ago

But, in the US your level of direct payment options are frankly shite.

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.

bellgrove• 6 days ago

As a consumer what is the incentive to not use a card? In North America, at least, there are points programs that heavily incentivize my usage of credit cards plus other benefits like travel insurance. I also trust in the consumer protections that the major credit cards offer. On the flip side, merchants incur a fee but I doubt that even in a world with all direct payments that they would pass any savings along to the consumer.

sanex• 6 days ago

I'm seeing more and more 3% credit card surcharges lately. While frustrating, at least they're transparent so I'd expect them to cancel that upcharge.

mhb• 6 days ago

I doubt that even in a world with all direct payments that they would pass any savings along to the consumer.

Shouldn't you think that about every way companies save money? And yet they do compete on price.

selicos2• 6 days ago

Many places near me have different cash/card pricing from a % to a flat fee on the transaction. I've used debit cards to pay car repair bills to skip the 3% fee (sizeable on a $2500 repair).

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.

spacebanana7• 6 days ago

This makes stripe more valuable. No company on the web wants to manage dozens of local payment methods with slightly different rules and possible local bank account requirements.

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.

JimsonYang• 7 days ago

If paypal goes? wheres the competition? Surely this isnt going to past ftc?

And as much trump friendly the ftc is, theres still the state attornies like we see with the paramount deal

dmzxnico• 7 days ago

they should kill paypal

anymouse123456• 7 days ago

Mark the date.

If this passes antitrust review (unlikely imo), Stripe is about to be destroyed by a culture virus that they *paid* for.

HuLu_Wang• 7 days ago

Stripe won't be holding a monopoly for long now that Airwallex is entering the US market. Healthy competition is always welcome.

WhereIsTheTruth• 7 days ago

lmao "if you can't compete, you buy your competition"

This should be blocked, and Stripe should be investigated for trying to build a monopoly

nottorp• 7 days ago

Another geek darling on the path to a dangerous monopoly?

Hello Cloudflare btw.

Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

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