[joosters]

Then on top of that I got questioned because I don't have any credit (I purposely made a life choice not to use credit cards), so they demanded 3 months of my most recent bank statements.

That's not Braintree's fault. In fact, that's them being sensible. The problem is that having no credit records makes you harder to tell apart from a fraudulent user.

[nickjj]

Yeah but Stripe just asked me for my bank account number and last 4 digits of my social.

There was no background check and having to send over copies of various bills, statements, license, etc..

I felt like Stripe requested the least amount of info to legally accept payments where as Braintree requested a million things to build up some type of profile that they'll benefit from later.

You know, it's like the guy who sends you to a form where you need to fill out 4 pages of crap when in reality all he needs is your name to perform the service you're requesting.

[ianhawes]

Ultimately they're both going to want the same information. If you had started processing more than, say, $10K per day, Stripe would freeze your account and demand the same information. The difference being that Braintree wanted that information upfront and without the stress of frozen funds at risk.

[nickjj]

I can't speak from experience but I doubt Stripe would just freeze everything and demand my full social security number instead of the last 4 they requested.

If they ask for bank statements and other pieces of info, that's fine. The user experience is just better with Stripe because they know 99.999999% of people won't be doing 10k+/day.

[lcarlson]

Actually, they do run a form of background checks on you. It's a process called KYC. Both payment vendors have to get a certain amount of information before allowing you to process. Stripe has made it much easier however. I don't think either company is collecting your personal information for anything other that underwriting and would ask for less if they could.