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Comment by herenorthere | Hacker News Reader

Being in YC, I assume your plan is to be headquartered in the US, or at the very least, do business with US customers/entities.

I notice your team doesn't involve any compliance people. As you probably already know, you are a MSB in the US, do you have plans to expand your required compliance policies? Does your team already file on any potential BSA/AML concerns?

Or is this like a "when we get to that bridge we will cross it" type of thing?

As you grow larger, regulators will inevitably take notice. And I know this is probably a super boring question for mist people here, but as someone who works in BSA/AML compliance for a tech startup MSB -- I am very interested to hear what you have to say regarding this!

Love the site btw, the simplicity of the payment flow is A+. I could see this taking off.

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first off, thank you for the kind words!

Payment fraud and AML - we're a PayPal and Stripe Partner and do not hold the money that we process. We use their marketplace products to handle payments, fraud and compliance so that we can focus on the product.

Ahh interesting, thank you for the response. And yes the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you're basically a non-custodial payment processor (and idk even know if you'd be considered that). What type of business do you categorize as? Are you a payment processor? Or are you simply a UI markup for paypal/stripe? Im not implying one is better than the other, just curious

edit: now that I think about it, I would imply that one is better than the other. Because if you are just a UI/UX improvement on paypal/stripe, then you would be out of the regulatory umbrella of FinCen I believe.

>Payment fraud and AML - we're a PayPal and Stripe Partner and do not hold the money that we process. We use their marketplace products to handle payments, fraud and compliance so that we can focus on the product.

If someone pays with paypal, can I still get the money in my stripe account? If not, what's the main benefit over using your service versus just using paypal and stripe directly? Do I still need to create a paypal account and a stripe account to use your service?

Yes, you need a PayPal or Stripe account to start receiving payments. The main benefits are the community and publishing features. You can share rewards or exclusive content with your supporters.

Also, a significant portion of the activity that we see is driven by gratitude. People love supporting a creator and leaving a positive note.

When I started using buy me a coffee(6 months ago?), the payment portal was Payoneer. Is my payment portal still valid or I need to migrate to Paypal/Stripe?

It is still valid, but we'd recommend connecting PayPal or Stripe for all these new features like instant payouts :)

I’m sure they use a third-party payment processor who handles AML for them.

yeah good point. especially since they don't have a sign-up, makes me think they're more non-custodial in concept, which eases their AML requirements

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