| I'm confused. Are you trying to say that Stripe is violating their own policies by offering a clearing-house API to facilitate their customers getting loans from banks? Or are you trying to say that a Stripe customer would be in violation of Stripe's policies, if they used this facilitaton-of-loans to provide loans to their own customers? Because I think the first statement is obviously false; and the second statement is obviously true, but vacuous — in that that's not the service that Stripe is offering. (Or, I mean, it could be in special cases, but it's not pitched that way because for most companies doing that would be a legal impossibility.) Obviously, Stripe can hook your company up with a bank; and obviously, that bank can offer your company some loans. Those two processes, separately, are entirely normal things that happen every day in the financial world. Combining them doesn't change that. Obviously (to me, at least), your company cannot take a loan offered by a bank, and repackage that same loan to your own customers as part of your offering as if it was from you, with your company controlling+mediating that relationship — at least, not without you yourself being legally reclassified as a bank. (Which is why that's not what Stripe itself is doing here. They're just facilitating already-legitimate transactions between banks and businesses, without owning or mediating those transactions.) And that fact has nothing to do with any company's policies, Stripe's or otherwise; that just has to do with what activities are only legal for banks to do. Stripe isn't filtering these customers out. They're just telling them that they can't take do X with service Y Stripe provides, because they're not banks, and only banks can legally do X, regardless of how. |
I think your parent is expressing (among other things) frustration about the fact that Stripe is presenting this product as a very modern, very Internet-based, very progressive product that we expect will be governed by the same kind of opaque, sometimes capricious enforcement of ToS/AUP that google uses to unexpectedly lock people out of their gmail accounts or "de-monetize" their youtube accounts for no discernible reasons ...
... but at the same time, this isn't a free email account and it isn't a video service - it's serious, grownup business involving real money.
So the question becomes, what kind of people are manning the back end infrastructure and how much of it is driven by algorithms ? As your parent describes, he can go to an actual bank and sit down with a real employee and have a substantive conversation with nuance and understanding ... which you can't have with an algorithm.