[johnhaddock]

John here from Stripe (I lead our Risk product area). As OP noted, we try to spot unexpected spikes in processing volume, which are often associated with risky activity. In this case, that was in error — we were too fast to act and (much) too slow to unwind. In particular, we erred in not taking congruent action across OP’s related accounts. We’re working on a fix for this. I’m following up with OP to make sure we fully digest this one, so that it doesn’t happen again.

Since I came onboard in Sept, the team has made a lot of progress (e.g., mistaken actions like this one are down by 75%), but we have a lot more planned to further improve. We’re always on the look out for additional examples of mistaken action - please email me at [e-mail] so I can take a look.

[iam-TJ]

In a former business I had several 'customer advocates' who were tasked with representing customers to internal teams. Difficult/complex/delayed issues could be escalated to the advocates by customer support.

I view customer support as a marketing opportunity via goodwill and word of mouth.

Accounting for customer support as a debit against the marketing budget is an incentive to prevent incidents.

In another comment I asked the OP if it could have helped if they were able to notify ahead of time of expected spikes in turnover (due to marketing initiatives, etc.) that could be factored into the risk management equation.

[Rastonbury]

Stripe knows this, when they were smaller the founder used to reply to threads like this or patio11 who they hired (but he just wrote that he is no longer there!).

Makes me wonder what's going on in there post-layoff, the business model is sound and they are market leader. No pressure too IPO quickly in the down market

[paps17]

If Stripe doesn't acknowledge they made a mistake, one could say mistakes are down 100%.

It's tough to track metrics like that.