> In the US Stripe charges 2.9%. That's 66% more than in Australia. Do you think it costs Visa that much extra to process a payment in the US? No, it clearly does not.
The extra interchange in the US doesn't go to Visa but instead to the banks that issue the cards -- much of which then, in turn, gets passed to consumers in the form of rewards. So, whether it costs more depends on your definition of "cost" -- but Visa itself does indeed incur much higher fees in the US (since they're paying more to banks). To a large degree, it's just a different equilibrium.
That aside, I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. We're not beholden to credit cards: Stripe was the first major payments company to support Bitcoin; we support Alipay; we support ACH. We funded Stellar. And we have more in the works.
But we should acknowledge that credit cards are by far the dominant instrument today. The purpose of this partnership is to help build products that improve the experience of accepting credit cards on behalf of the businesses that use Stripe. (And there sure is plenty of improvement possible there!)
The extra interchange in the US doesn't go to Visa but instead to the banks that issue the cards -- much of which then, in turn, gets passed to consumers in the form of rewards. So, whether it costs more depends on your definition of "cost" -- but Visa itself does indeed incur much higher fees in the US (since they're paying more to banks). To a large degree, it's just a different equilibrium.
That aside, I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. We're not beholden to credit cards: Stripe was the first major payments company to support Bitcoin; we support Alipay; we support ACH. We funded Stellar. And we have more in the works.
But we should acknowledge that credit cards are by far the dominant instrument today. The purpose of this partnership is to help build products that improve the experience of accepting credit cards on behalf of the businesses that use Stripe. (And there sure is plenty of improvement possible there!)