| As anyone with experience in payments will tell you, this is the easy part (and should explain why Google hasn't expanded the coverage in the four years they have been offering this). The reason that payments systems are all either expensive or inconvenient (usually both) is that the regulatory systems that underpin the international movement of money are very complicated, and are different in each country. Getting payments to users in the US and UK is relatively easy; you'll need a business entity in each country and you'll also need to register with the regulators in each country (e.g. as a MSB in the USA, requiring a $1m bond in some states). Note the phrase "relative"; this is not something that a couple kids from Stanford can disrupt, you need expensive lawyers and banking contacts. You can run all of that from your office in Mountain View though. You'll also need to comply with various "know your customer" regulations; the US government will not be happy if you wire money to O. Bin Laden, or anyone else on the OFAC watchlist. And even if you're sending money to a "gmail UK" email address, you will need some way of proving that you're not sending money to countries that have sanctions/restrictions on capital flows like Iran and North Korea. That's the easy part. If you actually try to make a serious international play, then you'll need a sizable team in each region that you want to do business in. The Eurozone is relatively easy to cover, but your regulatory requirements in South American countries will probably require one or two people per country (that's to keep your bank relationships warm, and to keep up with all of the paperwork that's required to operate a money transmitter business). This is why Paypal charges merchant fees of 4.4% _plus forex fee_ to receive money from an arbitrary country in the world. This system is hugely complex, and very resistant to change, due to the serious consequences of making a regulatory error. |