Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

(And I don't think it applies to US merchants like you anyways)

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_15_...

in US, the government is more protective of private monopolies due to lobbying

Do you have a link to the comment you're thinking of?

https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/

A very crude calculation for £1B a year in payments (thats probably too low) would mean a payment to Ayden (contract is upto £25M over 3 years) of 0.8%

I feel this is worth correcting as "don't bloody pay road tax" is a common form of abuse aimed at cyclists which is wrong on a number of levels. A lot of cyclists also drive a car and non-driving cyclists would fund roads if they pay tax. Another way to think about it is that the emissions tax for cycles would be zero anyway.

[Payer bank] ──(1. Lookup key)──> [ DICT - Name Service] (Returns account data)

         │

  (2. Send order)

         ▼

     [ SPI - Central Ledger] ──────(3. Real time settlement over Financial Institutions account: Debt/Credit)

         │

  (4. Notification Message)

         ▼

The ledger doesn't keep individual accounts, but a Instant Payments account for each institution. This account is not the master bank account in the Reserve Transfer System (Sistema de Transferencia de Reservas) which is the system of record for banks funds, so the banks need to allocate funds from the STR to the SPI every day to be able to honor PIX transfers. The STR system doesn't work out of normal banking hours, so the banks need to predict how much money they will need for PIX transfers and move that money from the STR to the PI (pagamento instantaneo) account during defined liquidity transfer windows, to avoid banks double-spending the same funds over different rails (traditional vs PIX). If a bank finds itself without funds on its PI account in a saturday night, it can loan the funds from another bank who still have excess liquidity on his PI account).

As you can see, between the SPI, STR an DICT, it is a very centralized system.

Also, the system operates in a dedicated zero-trust networks which is completely isolated from the internet. The messages between banks and the central bank follow the ISO 20022 format. IBM MQ is used to route messages back and forth between banks and the BCB.

In Brazil, the Central Bank overpowered the coordination problem. In the US, it may be the opposite: the government seems to have less power over the payment lobby, or at least less willingness to confront it directly.

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea...

https://www.emerald.com/cemj/article/33/4/575/1248919/The-ri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment

Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).

> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.

Because it is a grift ("regulatory capture") [1] [2]. The "overbearing system" is the result of regulation to bring the consumer excess of cheap payments to an entire country's financial user population. Why does Jamie Dimon not like stablecoin yield [3]? Because JPMC makes almost $100B/year in interest income taking customer deposits and lending against them, which stablecoins would compete against by operating as a form of narrow bank, parking the underlying deposits in risk free US Treasuries [4].

As a US financial services consumer, it is hard for you to avoid the rake of the machine built to skim off of you as you hold onto fiat or move it, but the rest of the world can avoid being captured by it (as this piece demonstrates). Also, Europe can't regulate Stripe as easily as they can Adyen. You don't have to be the biggest or the greatest, it just has to work "good enough".

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-109-billion-bank-hust...

[2] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-cantillon-effect-and-...

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/29/dimon-jpmorgan-cryp...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331082

Why would anybody willingly lower their own margin?

> It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries

It’s almost like regulation can sometimes achieve good outcomes in a not very competitive (due to network effects) market…

Thus by definition that company wouldn't be mid-sized over here anyway.

edit: in-fact after checking even in the US, the IRS for example declares a large business as one with more than 10 million in assets, though there is no set rule like in the EU to be used by other gov orgs.

Since Stripe operates by working with a BIN (banks that sponsor them within each country) generally like all payment providers. While the decline rates for new customers are not public, they are very high, especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling [1]. Also revocation of existing accounts can happen often if KYC systems flag anything, like Stripe Identity, Connect, and Radar.

[1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses

They have to comply with the same regulations.

Mollie B.V. is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Dutch Central Bank (relationship number: F0038). Mollie UK Ltd is licensed and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution in the UK (FRN: 977968).

https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/lightspeed-integrated-pa...

Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.

And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).

https://docs.adyen.com/plugins#built-by-adyen

The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.

When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.

Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.

Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.

If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.

Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.

Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.

So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.

But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.

It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.

It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .

And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.

Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!

Started in 1997, got bought out by a US company in 2018. RIP.

The founder, Nick Ogden claims "His career began when he pioneered ecommerce in 1994, inventing the first online shop, the Wine Warehouse." [0] Big if true! UK has a long, rich history of inventions.

[0] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nick-ogden-founding-father...