Making competition easier in this space is another way to solve it. If Stripe had 15 competitors all of whom were API compatible so you could switch in 5 minutes, any bad PR would drive customers away in droves.
Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.
Government hasn't made entry to this space hard, the banks that Stripe partners with have. Because they don't want to deal with high-risk transactions. They are the gatekeepers here, and Stripe has to bend over backwards to make them happy. They'd much rather burn individual customers, than jeopardize their entire business.
Are we still pretending that USA government is a distinct entity from USA's large corporations? If the banks didn't like the regulations, the regulations would change. If some random elected official didn't like how the banks operated, after the next election she would be an ex-official.
Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.
Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.
And that day was less than 100 years ago. "Money laundering" as a concept was invented during the Prohibition (as were a lot of other private rights violations) in order to not let alcohol sellers - which the government was not able to prosecute directly - to use their money. But most of the current US AML regulations are based on the Bank Secrecy Act from 1970.
> Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.
Except the operationalization of those rules is: here are some vague guidelines that you have to follow, and if we don't like you we'll retroactively decide you were committing a crime even if you followed those guidelines to the letter. See HSBC for a case in point.
> Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.
No, that's wrong. Firstly, as others have pointed out, society long predates any such notions.
Secondly, determining what is illegal activity, and putting a stop to it, is ostensibly the job of law enforcement and the courts, not the bank.
Might be time to build an analytics.js equivalent, but for payment processing. A single API lib that you can then use to process payments with Stripe, Braintree, etc.
From what I understand, the government introduced legislation sometime in the past 20-30 years (Was it the PATRIOT act? I can't remember) - which I believe put the onus of blame on the credit card processing companies instead of the government when it came to fighting fraud.
I assume the government didn't want to put all the work in of making sure the currency they've societally coerced the world to use isn't being used for fraudulent transactions, they'd rather pawn it off onto the banks because it's easier for the government to not do anything about it.
Now the banks have been shooting anything and everything that has even a semblance of fraud with account locks/funds freezing/etc., because if they don't the government will go after them.
How does this system make any sense to anybody? So frustrating. Let me exchange currency with anybody for any reason at any time.
Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.