Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal(bloomberg.com) |
Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal(bloomberg.com) |
Outside the US many banks offer simple QR payment options, the direct transfer difficulties US citizens encounter that make services like PayPal and Zelle necessary are entirely self imposed.
Paypal has actively lobbied for legislation(or lack of) in ways that has hurt American consumers.
- Bizum for national transfers, you just need someone's number (which you usually have through WhatsApp) representing 90% of instant payments
- SEPA payments also make bank transfers free and trivial for your European friends
But I think their time has passed.
Meanwhile in china you just scan a qr code.
In europe you just send money to their IBAN or they send you a link
Instant payments, no commission...
You can, but at least in Germany people are reluctant to give their IBAN to others and prefer one degree of separation, so PayPal is still very common for transfers between friends.
Paying with CC: typing the 16 digits of the CC, expiration date, 'CVC', and then having your phone nearby for confirmation. Happens on a myriad of forms from various providers that may or may not save or log the CC number. Many times the text message doesn't arrive on time on your phone, which makes the transaction fail. Or you have reached your credit card 'limit' and the transaction also fails (without you knowing why).
Paying with Paypal: username and password (or password only if the username is saved), done. Happens only on the Paypal website. Funds are withdrawn immediately from your bank account if you want. Never fails.
Those few buys per week I can enter CC numbers directly, I don't mind since its my money being spent. Don't need some questionable middle man if I can avoid that.
This might work for you, but it's not a solution for less tech savvy/elderly people. These services are the easiest to scam people out of money on.
Also Austria, perhaps Italy, but I have less direct experience there.
In other countries Revolut is popular for the friends and family bill splitting, in places like Sweden they have a PayPal-like solution offered by local banks. There’s an upcoming initiative by Brussels to bring all these national initiatives under one umbrella, which would definitely hurt PayPal’s German revenue in future.
Many Germans don't have credit cards (I don't), so PayPal is pretty convenient as it can withdraw directly from a SEPA account and enables online shopping.
Google Pay cannot do SEPA, but allows adding PayPal as a payment method, so PayPal also gets you into the Google purchase ecosystem.
Revolut with its virtual CCs has been making some inroads lately, though.
The only thing easier than paying with a fingerprint is not paying at all. So their lifeline could be agentic shopping where you don't even shop anymore if this can ever become a thing.
I don't use mobile wallets. I've had a PP account since the time it was required to buy anything on Ebay.
The best feature it has is being able to cancel newspaper subscriptions without the hassle of calling and talking to a retention agent.
It is 2026, in USA people are not having access to IBAN in their bank accounts, usually they have to be personally present for international transfers out of their accounts and everyone have a checkbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...
WTF, I want my payments to work, no “innovation” necessary.
I've even had people refuse cash because they want me to "venmo" them or whatever stupid app they prefer.
I would call that outrageous. It is my money. I earned it. I paid taxes on it. Let me fucking use it.
That is what I like about crypto. What I have is actually mine. I can send it to whomever I want at any time.
> The takeover interest has helped it recover, with PayPal shares jumping more than 40% this quarter to give the company a market value of about $52.6 billion.
Seems like they tried to buy a struggling company and leaks of the talks made it too expensive.
If there weren't so many people hating PayPal, I'd expect a straight Stripe/Paypal choice to lean much more towards paypal, not a 50-50 split
Confirmation bias.
I have a side business that makes a gadget, akin to a guitar pedal. It has worked flawlessly for me, for well over a decade. Occasionally I casually search for an alternative (to have a backup) but have never found one.
PP lets me accept payments from a completely passive website. No code! While I love coding, maintaining an active web page is a cost. My IT costs are zero.
I think PP's buyer protections help my business too, by letting people feel confident that they can cancel a deal, and that I don't get any of their personal information except their shipping address. I don't want that information, and I don't want to be responsible for keeping it secure.
1 month ago: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915953
In Canada, we use Interac for more ordinary payments between ourselves, and the usual credit cards through card processors like Moneris or bank provided services in physical stores. I can imagine fewer uses for PayPal as time goes on, especially with the accelerated change driven by geopolitics. Visa and Mastercard may be at risk internationally for other countries seeking to keep payment processing entirely in their own yard.
This matter in particular made me wonder how things will go for Stripe going forward with these policy changes that may impact credit cards.
I'd love to delete my PayPal account and never log in again, but the use case for me right now is mostly that companies (outside Canada, and outside NA in most cases) usually only accept payment with PayPal.
Other than that, often you will then rely on in-between traders.
Only Stripe knows.
I never got into PayPal and these days I shy away from any Trump-tainted US companies - which basically means I don't want my money to go into US companies. Canada showed the way here.
Particularly to such a vastly more sophisticated company like Stripe?
I agree with you in principle but I don't think that market cap is the right metric. Market cap captures a lot of assumptions around product mix and growth rates that have been in Stripe's favor for a long time.
The most apples-to-apples comparison is just looking at payments volume and ignoring all their other products. In that case, Stripe just recently overtook PayPal! PayPal is enormous! But Stripe has that compounding growth on its side and GP's argument has become outdated in a short amount of time.
This is ignoring the bit about pc which I just disagree with.
But that value is not tested or backed by the wider market.
Market cap of paypal is.
Also having just spaffed "$8bn" on openrouter, I would be surprised that they have enough resources to get the ~$50bn to buy paypal. Much less the work it would take to integrate a much larger company in to the "stripe" way
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgp5ll3jd4o?app-referre...
It's still the only consistently supported thing I encounter online.
I'm aware things like Wero are poised to shake things up, but still have no real idea about timeline and impact.
Since then Apple Pay/Google pay/browser wallets have taken a big chunk of its fast checkout advantage
And mobile banking apps/instant transfer have taken out chunks of the private transactions, and more so as consumer to consumer transactions often had the parties using PayPal gift mode to avoid fees but that then had zero protection.
The 2020’s is much more crowded than 1990’s and 2020’s decades
Also it was its partnership with eBay that made it dominant and eBay no longer promote PayPal as preferred payment method.
online is dead too, no app uses paypal, and plenty of online merchants take credit cards more than paypal; they even offer their own credit cards.
paypal hasn't innovated at all in over a decade, and people are scared of the way it will hang on to your money with little recourse.
Generally I would use it on smaller / unfamiliar websites; I may be more hesitant about entering my credit card numbers but also it's quicker and easier as I can do it without getting my card out of my bag.
I also use it exclusively for eBay purchases.
It accounts for about 20% of my sales. I was about to write 'overwhelmingly Europeans' and I thought I better check. Nope.
Row Labels Count of Country
---------- ----------------
United States 54
Germany 12
Australia 10
United Kingdom 7
Netherlands 7I am guessing the millions of people they have on-boarded in the last decades are what makes the business worth something.
Within Switzerland there is zero need for PayPal do you don't see it as much, but if you ship to Germany or Italy things start to get more complicated.
[1]: Seriously though, I can’t find good data I trust on this so correct me if you’ve got a good source saying otherwise, or even if someone has something substantiating this better I would take that too.
Is that a good thing, or is it crazy that such a simple concept (if consumer claims they don't get a product, you provide proof of delivery or we take the money back) has been almost unique to PP for so long?
The Stripe interface with Link and whatnot is slick but it feels like I'm giving my credit card over to the merchant even though I know I'm not.
Increasingly, I'm seeing crypto as the best thing long-term. No one's going to deny me service based on who I am and where I live (or could be living,) let alone giving that info over to third parties unnecessarily. No false positives leading to rejection either based on that information which shouldn't even be asked for. Identity should be a choice, not a requirement or a coercion. Like this, even bitcoin enables a high degree of anonymity.
What's with this whole "Billing Address" bull^^^^? No one needs to know that when I buy something with cash at a supermarket or use a credit card at a gas station.
If someone wants to know exactly who I am and where I am (or could be) then there should be a card for that which will co-exist with the crypto. Does PayPal provide names of buyers to sellers? Also, a buyer's protection thing could exist as some type of adjunct escrow service for sellers to use.
Good read here: https://www.benzinga.com/crypto/cryptocurrency/26/07/6026974...
"He warned investors never to share their 24-word recovery phrase and said large holders should avoid keeping direct access to their full holdings at home."
That's the last thing that should be solved. Remove the temptation for crime.
/s
> Wero is a product of EPI Company SE > Available in Belgium, France and Germany.
Greetings from the rest of Europe.
You have already lost your plot with that claim. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it is not widespread.
PayPal is the payment method I use for Google Pay, so pretty much everything goes through it.
(I don't have a credit card, which is common where I live.)
Worse I had stripe trip on me the other day which resulted in a "card declined" message but when I logged into the bank to authorize there was nothing there. Because apparently stripe decided not to even notify the bank of the suspected fraud. Thus there was seemingly no way for me to correct the error.
I can't even use tap to pay without either a physical chip from the bank or proprietary software. We've had ssh keys and oauth since ~forever there's no excuse for any of this.
That estimates PayPal still has 40%+ online payment market share.
I'm assuming a lot of that is long-tail 'I put a PayPal link on my store in 2005' stuff, but I imagine those add up.
And they're also probably a sticky customer base, in the sense that anyone still using PayPal as primary today doesn't like changing things, which makes acquiring those customers worth it.
You can get back different match levels (matched the house number only, the zip code only, or both) which provide some insight into potentially sketchy transactions. Some payment gateways allow you to auto-decline based on the results, or the merchant can choose to follow up depending on their scale and risk tolerance.
Plenty of petrol stations ask for the zip code on the unattended keypad when making a purchase for the same reason.
Every time you make a cc purchase online, the seller, if they get your details directly can then go out and use your details to make purchases of their own from your card. That's insane, let alone having your name and address details. No wonder cc companies get fraud.
If I am going to use a credit card, let me hand over the number, and then send me an email to confirm the purchase. Not sure what the flow of that would be and if/how to use confirmation codes. Also, the last thing I'd want is another "app". Maybe optional 2FA.
Thanks.
Crypto debit cards are on the rise anyway.
Another idea would be to have a once-only disposable CC number generator. New purchase, get new number. Also, when new numbers are generated, the bank can record the who/when/where of the request and it can be matched with the when/where/how it is used later, and how many times to get a clue if an account is compromised as a fallback protection.
Imagine if those numbers went on a blockchain for merchants to use. They could see if/when a number was already used, but not necessarily need to use/integrate with it - but the bank would. Crypto address generators are commonplace now but addresses are very hard to key-in. So the blockchain would be a security layer on top of the conventional transaction, which could work without it if need be.
What's the problem with sharing your bank details? I don't consider those a secret at all. And if they were, chances are they've been compromised somewhere anyway.
I am always surprised that people use PayPal for privacy reasons. The company shares a lot more of your information with third parties than a SEPA transfer or card payment would.
Americans are super weird about dining procedures and expectations. Remember, we tip here. It's weird.
Moving to Germany from the US was like entering a timewarp. PayPal is still real??? People use it??
I get it now but it's a pretty big miss that GiroCard couldn't figure out how to displace them after all this time.
Not having a lot of credit cards and the associated rewards is actually healthy. Research has shown lower social classes "pay" for the rewards due to paying the higher transaction fees. There was actually a relevant thread here a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201 (How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer)
Well, I used to live and work in South Korea for many years, so both DE and the US are about equally oldschool in my book :)
Also, it's often the way people transfer money between each other.
Card number is standard, with an increasing amount of places supporting Apple Pay (thankfully)
To answer the original question, because Zelle is ran by a consortium of banks, they all trust each other enough to release funds immediately and settle up overnight if need be.
I mistakenly opened a Bank of America account last year, but they had so many fraud protections on Zelle it was nearly impossible to use without constantly getting transfers held up for days and having to make phone calls to banking support to approve transactions and verify my identity, and it was such an absolute nightmare I will never ever bank with them again or recommend them to anybody. The worst part was absolutely the phone calls, I could never dismiss or approve anything online I always had to make a phone call during business hours.
Then I moved to US Bank and they support instant Zelle transfers, recurring Zelle transfers (which both my credit union and Capital One didn't support!), approving fraud alerts online and more, the only way I could be happier with them is if they had less security theater (like Mercury) but I'll be moving to Mercury anyway once they support Zelle.
I have, but never use, a 'credit card'. The thing I use every day is a 'debit card', where the money comes straight from my account. But it still has 16 digits and Visa written on the front.
Since then MasterCard has tried to force banks into dropping GiroCard, by refusing to work with smaller banks that still support GiroCard, and by offering better conditions to larger banks that drop GiroCard.
This has increased the number of Germans with Visa/MasterCard, but it's still below 50%.
All the traditional large ones seem to have AFAIK.
Off topic but I really hate N26 and its ilk. They don't really follow the German laws that say that German residents can have bank accounts, so they refuse people that are still on work visas, which is a pain in the fucking ass when you have a startup and the young employees are telling the immigrants "get N26" or something else, but the immigrants can't have it and only learn after submitting lots of docs to N26.
My Girocard has Maestro integration, so I can use it overseas, but no number. Apparently this is gonna go away.
The Girocard naturally has ApplePay, which is what I use daily.
People used to use Paypal because they have only debit cards. But with better card security and alternatives like SEPA and Wero there is way less need.
If the supplier goes out of business / fails to deliver, the bank/credit card company is equally liable. A Section 75 claim is allowed for purchases between £100 and £30,000.
https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/consumers/complaints-...
It was bonkers.
Charities are anything but interchangeable. You might not want to sponsor one on ideological grounds, or concerns about how effectively they use the money, or just because you were seeking to support a specific cause. If you deposited money in a box that said "we're buying medicine for sick people in Somaliland" and they sent it to the RSPCA instead, wouldn't you be pissed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tipping_customs_by_cou...
Or even backward-compatible changes like requiring banks to give customers virtual account numbers that they can give to different merchants/people and turn on and off.
The abstraction of the middleman makes sense to me for some types of payments, I find bank accounts a bit too low level sometimes.
Well and commit actual fraud/identity they by forging my signature maybe... But we don't see that happen on a large scale because it just isn't feasible/worth it. We would see it otherwise as I'm sure there are plenty of datasets with those pieces of info to be bought..
They check during the KYC process via mobile phone camera, and will reject people without a residence permit (Aufenthaltserlaubnis, Blue Card, etc), and they claim several things, from "we don't accept work visas" to "I never saw this document in my life".
Legally, a work visa is an Aufenthaltserlaubnis according to § 4 AufenthG, so N26 is classifying it wrongly here.
But it gets worse because they're breaking § 31 ZKG, which says they're obligated to provide an account for everyone here legally. We have formally complained to BAFIN about it.
Just copied the above law paragraphs from an HR discussion, btw, this is a recurring issue...
And I know this from helping several others, since I'm the startup ecosystem. I'm European, but not German.
IIRC, real-time transfers commonly used to cost 50 cents (flat).
* Technically, they aren't allowed to cost more than regular transfers which cost 0 in ~all retail accounts
In Germany, cash is strongly preferred or was the last time I was there a few years ago.
In Norway, cash is nigh nonexistent.
Don’t mistake Germany as representative of the median European country when it comes to card transactions.
In 2026 I pay contractors working on my US house by logging into my bank and instructing it to mail a paper check.
The only exception is Venmo which everyone expects will be enshittified.
Next year we'll get this in the physical stores...
Wero is a great start but I suspect that PayPal will stay around for many more years.
Sure there are some that are against digital payments and they won’t accept Wero neither, but I would argue the number is very small. And sure in bars/clubs/nightlife it’s cash only but that also won’t change - it’s for tax reasons.
People don’t like PayPal and only use it for the lack of a better alternative. EC is widely used and I bet that Wero will be as well.
Source: lived last 15 years in Berlin
The European Central Bank is working on regulation regarding the "Digital Euro" which is a bit in a marketing hype loop using block chain and other terms as a hype, while fundamentally trying to come up with a Euro-Zone-Wide approach to create a mostly anonymous digital currency, with some offline capability. If they come up with a final working concept paper, this would become legally mandated with low charges.
Wero is a product by banks, trying to be faster. Trying to have an established platform under their control, which is well established before ECB is ready with D€.
Are they worried people might send them money without their permission?
I think I have the choice to pay a monthly fee, nominate it as my official account for receiving my salary, or pay for the transactions.
I choose the last option as it's a backup account, and I make perhaps 1 transaction per year.
Unless you don't care what transfers happen, that's pretty much always enough time
But yeah, it's a very high-trust society. Of course any charge can be reverted via your bank app in seconds. But it's still a nuisance to have to check, so people are wary of giving it away.
How does that even work?
So basically people outside can lock your online account.
I am shocked by how F** dumb this was ever designed.
The money you get that way isn't guaranteed, the account owner could do a charge back. And if that happens you have to show the signed authorisation from the account owner. If you don't have it, expect your bank to terminate the direct debit ability.
Basically you do this with your bank and not the other way around with the merchant.
Is it common to check all your banking stuff every month to make sure there is nothing fraudulent? I don't see how this is practical
Telecoms, kinda. They will try to force this on you via contract. You can say no, but they will lie to your face that it's impossible. You can always get a pre-paid, too. I witnessed the same situation (forced by contract) in some Gyms as well.
Vatenfall and other electric companies, the government itself, banks, landlords, Hausverwaltung, all are surprisingly chill about which payment method you use.
But then again, Telecoms and Gyms are always trying to cheat and steal from you in every country that I lived, that I'd call this the exception to the rule.
They're financially incentivized to behave, but that's it. The ability is there.
or dont do anything and direct debit by default doesnt work
I didn't know what it was so I clicked a few buttons in the app and the money was back instantly.
That was on Commerzbank. Dunno if others are the same!
When I was young, cash was beloved by some as a matter of principle because of the fact you didn't need any authority's permission to accept it; coupled with its anonymity.
If you were running the city's only LGBT bookshop, you didn't want your till full of signed, dated checks - and card processors wouldn't do business with you even if you wanted to accept cards.
Stalkers.
Abusive ex’s.
And if you think it’s assholes targeted this way, look at all the women being stalked via flock by cops.
And if you think finances aren’t abused the same way, why do you think the Germans are so worked up about this? The fucking stasi.
A certain type of person will use literally anything they can find against you, including to harass you if they literally can’t find anything you did wrong.
And what better for them than a nice list of all the places and people you have some kind of important vendor or business relationship with - which is why there is money changing hands.
Grocery stores. Gas stations/subway fees, rental payments or mortgage payments. restaurants, gifts or family transfers, work, you name it.
Also, ask an older German if you think I’m kidding.
I used to go to a bar in Copenhagen with that principle.
The bar with the privacy principle didn't accept cards, and had a sign to that effect on the bar.
So they send a polite email informing you of it and you pay it a few days late?
No reasonable entity would charge late fees as that's a great way to anger otherwise perfect customers?
For me to personally end up in this situation the bank would need to somehow SEPA out like 2 years worth of mortgages at once in a short timeframe, which is not a realistic scenario.
Also: it takes A LOT of letters and court orders for them to cut your utilities. I'm not joking, it's more than a couple of Mahnungs, then it goes to debt collection, then it goes to court. The court will then take the money out of your account.
That's all before power gets cut.
It definitely won't be because of a single missed payment.
Even in the situation above: if your in-laws somehow had no balance "at once on day x" because of a fake SEPA, they would be able to reverse via app, or go to the bank and reverse.