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morjom

What are the alternatives to PayPal?

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Wise is the best from where I stand as someone taking payments from various jurisdictions.

There's also revolut and payoneer but they have a few red flags looming over them that make me hesitant.

What red flags, exactly?

Revolut (if it was a real bank would be the 5th/6th biggest in the UK) has failed dozens of times to get a UK banking licence, it is expected that they will be rejected again on their current application. UK ministers (motivated by donations and board seats from Revolut?) continue to put pressure on the regulator to grant the liscence.

Revoluts auditors BDO stated that they were unable to get a complete picture of some of Revolut’s revenue and as a result it, or other financial balances, could be “materially misstated”.

Former holders of UK banking licences include SVB.

It should be noted that, if I understand the situation correctly, the "SVB" with a UK banking licence was a subsidiary, and it was solvent when sold because the parent company went under.

12 Mar 2023 — The Bank of England (the BoE) will apply to put the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB UK) into Bank Insolvency, which is a modified version of liquidation under Part 2 of the Banking Act 2009, on Sunday 12 March 2023 unless a buyer can be found for SVB UK’s business and assets.

When Parent Co goes bust Child Co credit lines go to zero. Even in the UK where ringfencing and regulation makes it very difficult to have more liabilities than assets (as happened with parent co), banks still have to borrow overnight / short term to fund longer term lending. If you cant borrow from the market you are in trouble.

Thanks, i just registered with Wise.

In the US, Zelle for bank transfers, but they also have customer service issues. Also, the recently launched FedNow service offers instant transfers and should begin to eat into PayPal/Venmo/Zelle's business. What they are not is a payment mechanism for purchases, however. There is AdYen, Apple Pay/Google Pay, Stripe and Square for that.

I would like to know that to, lots of my payments go through paypal.

Very few, because operating as an internet money transmitter and also keeping your customers safe is hard. People love to hate PayPal but most of the things they hate are necessary for them to stay in business.

money transmission is hard only because the states make it hard (but mostly just expensive -- IIRC, a license in all 50 states costs about 1.5-2 million bucks a year).

It's not technically hard. It's not even hard to do the KYC. It's only "hard" because it costs an enormous amount to pay off the right people.

Stripe, bank transfers, crypto

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