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Comment by stephanos2k | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing how quick they can expand something as complicated as payment processing to many - bigger and smaller - countries in Europe.

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One you get into one EU country, dealing with other EU countries is probably quite a bit easier...

Especially if that first country is Germany, as they're one of the economic powerhouses of the EU.

They were already in beta in the Netherlands for a while actually.

Given that we're quite similar to Germany except for being a bit more focussed on international trade, we might have been a test run for German deployment though.

Ireland was the first Eurozone country to enter Stripe beta, UK was the first EU.

Ireland is in the EU and uses the euro. UK is also in the EU but uses GBP.

Isn't that exactly what Kudos said?

Ah yes a little confusion has taken over on my part. Ireland is in the EU and the eurozone.

Well, you probably need some kind of foothold for legal reasons somewhere in the EU/EEC (probably some tax-haven like Luxembourg), but after that it's not really that easy, as each country has its own legal and technical banking peculiarities. A pretty big mess.

They've been talking about this for more than a year. Not sure if that qualifies as quick. That being said, it's awesome that they got there—I got into the Dutch beta and can say the process of dealing with Stripe is an order of magnitude better than dealing with Paymill (the clone that rolled out earlier).

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