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Comment by GDC7 | Hacker News Reader

Why can't these websites simply find other banks to do business with?

I mean also overseas, for sure the extra costs (if any) are better than basically killing the golden goose.

The odds of Onlyfans becoming the huge phenomenon that it is were so slim, it seems like a waste of luck to just throw it all away because of banking problems.

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Because it's Visa and Mastercard saying no, not the banks.

Do people chargeback the 50$ they spend on OnlyFans?

Besides PR in the age of revenge porn, what's the technical or legal element which changed compared to 2019?

Can't be social because if anything society is in love with porn.

It shouldn't matter from Visa/MC's perspective because they put the cost of chargebacks (and more) on OnlyFans.

For some reason payment processors have always viewed themselves as morality police.

Visa and Mastercard allow adult. They just force you to pay the "high-risk" category. Which is much higher fees. OF can't get away with only charging models 20% if credit card processing is taking more than half of that.

I suspect they are currently not classified as adult and the banks are saying, look, you are almost entirely adult so you have to pay us more.

I mean, yeah, that's one of the mechanisms. Charge you close to an order of magnitude more for being "high-risk", while also putting all the actual risk on you as well. Visa/MC are more than compensated for each chargeback with the additional fees the charge the vendor for each chargeback.

And this is typically offset by maintaining a rolling-reserve too. Any merchant doing over 200K in transactions is considered high risk.

Why hasn't someone started a bank and/or payment processor without these puritanical moral qualms about adult content? Seems like the real golden goose, waiting to be had.

Because that sounds more like an ideologically-driven venture than something that would be good business.

Call it "providing financial services to a neglected/stigmatized sector of the entertainment industry and bringing the benefits of official banking and regulations", then. Yes my first comment was probably worded with an inflammatory bent, but this does genuinely seem like an underserved sector.

Akin to the problems legal marijuana grows and dispensaries have with accessing banking services (though in that case due to federal regs), the stances of the entrenched industry leaders seem to bring more negatives than would come from providing the needed services.

I understand, but there's usually a good reason why the underserved sectors are the way they are. For the payments industry I would imagine this market is simply not large enough to allow for economies of scale, so the services can't be priced at a level where it can be sustainable.

It seems like an obvious area for crypto to stake a claim, but that doesn't appear to have happened.

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