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by edwinwee 1920 days ago
Edwin from Stripe here. Postmates started using Stripe as an SME, when they were probably smaller than your company. We’ve been scaling alongside them for the past decade, and the auth optimization features mentioned in the post weren’t built for them—they’re built for and used by businesses of all sizes. In fact, Radar’s ML was designed to become better as the network grows—the more card transactions it sees, the more effective it becomes (imagine the fraud data we learn from every Postmates transaction can be applied to your transactions too!). This is one of the principles of Stripe—and it’s our goal to help scale your company’s growth, just like Postmate’s.

That said, could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can take another look at the issues you mentioned? (For example, we honor rates for their negotiated term.)
1 comments
londons_explore 1920 days ago
Why is stripe doing fraud detection, when someone like Visa or MasterCard would have far more data and be able to offer much better fraud detection?
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edwinwee 1920 days ago
The card issuers do their individual basic fraud detection (e.g. security code) but we built our own on top after users asked for something more advanced. Imagine Stripe seeing data across all the card networks, compound that with customer info (like email or IP, which card networks don’t always collect) across all businesses on Stripe, then that’s fed into our ML network that’s constantly tuned by Stripe engineers. And then businesses have the opportunity to customize all that with Radar.
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londons_explore 1920 days ago
True, but the big networks process far more transactions than stripe does, have access to more data (where else has this card been used lately, has the bill been paid, has this customer used the card in a shop abroad, etc), and seem in a better position overall to combat fraud.

The network also has access to the account holders phone number so can actually call to validate risky transactions.

Lower fraud rates would also make issuing banks more likely to choose visa over MasterCard, so be a competitive advantage.

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