[henrikschroder]

Thanks for the writeup, but we think that any US presence for the company presents unknown liabilities that simply aren't worth it at our size. The risk simply does not outweigh the potential savings of the few percent we lose in exchange fees.

I know other payment processors don't do this either, and I remember the bad old days when you had to have your own merchant account and separate agreements with the card companies, and I wouldn't have expected this flexibility back then.

But, the way Stripe presents itself to its customers is that payments are made in whatever currency of the user, and it all drops in a bucket over at Stripe. You can accept payments before you've setup a bank account with Stripe. After that, and unrelated to whatever currencies users paid in, you can then transfer your Stripe balance to your bank account, in a few select major currencies. It looks like those two activities are completely separate, and one would assume the normal rules for transfers from one bank account to another would apply, i.e. it can be done in any currency regardless of the nationality of the bank accounts. But apparently that's not the case.