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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

no new company should take its own payments?

No new company that isn’t a payments company should take its own payments, IMO.

It is probably a waste of time and resources to file for a banking licence in multiple jurisdictions, become part of the global payment system, seed deposits with central banks and establish swap credit lines globally - all to facilitate the $2.99 no ads plan on their iPhone app.

Do you really want to deal with the legal and compliance hurdles of handling credit cards/debit cards/etc. right out of the gate? (Assuming that isn't what your new company is about).

No, I do not.

However, I've heard (too) many stories like "our payments/ads/infra vendor banned us out of the blue for suspicion/politics/obscure-AI-decision" to ignore this. It could be fine for a start-up that is inherently risky, intended to fail early and risks Other-People's-Money (TM), but not always.

Unless your business deals exclusively in cash and/or cryptocurrency, I don't think you can really avoid that. Even if you are dealing with a credit card company directly, that company could ban you out of the blue for suspician/politics/obscure-AI-decision.

Using Stripe etc. adds another point of failure.

But yes, the fact that essentially all payments are bottlenecked through two vendors with no legal supervision is quite troubling.

Maybe we should form a co-operative of payment recipients? It doesn't need to operate anything, but rather be a "suicide pact" that will extoll a high price from payment processors if they try to unfairly ban a business. Some sort of a smart contract could guarantee fair enforcement.

Every hole in the wall restaurant and convenience store somehow manages to do it... are they so much better at all that??

I think they usually use some sort of point of sale device and service to handle credit cards. That is pretty analogous to using a payment processing service.

That is a payment processing service.

They pay a bank for merchant services. They don't become their own payment services.

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