[creshal]

The situation in Europe isn't quite as rosy. SEPA is a huge PITA, usability wise, and closer to US ACH transfers; and so most countries have their own special sauce online payment solution that serves as central point of failure for that country's customer base. Belgians use Bancontact, Austrians use EPS, Germans use giropay, Dutch use iDEAL, … or, more often, don't, and just use Paypal or credit cards anyway, since it's so much of a hassle.

And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.

[heartbeats]

SEPA isn't great, but there exist functioning country-wide systems as you mention.

> And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.

No. Payment providers like Stripe have to comply with the rules placed upon them by the card networks. If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list. This removes 95% of the censorship issues.

[creshal]

> SEPA isn't great, but there exist functioning country-wide systems as you mention.

Great, except each country is tiny and cross-border commerce common, so you end up having to implement all of them…

Or, much more likely, you give up and just go with Paypal + Credit Cards again, especially since more and more banks in Europe are rolling out Mastercard Debit as their regular banking card (on top of Apple Pay and whatever Google is pretending to be supporting today), making credit/debit card payments more popular than ever.

> If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list.

I'm not aware of any payment provider that gives me all European networks, but not credit cards.

Not that it would be helpful, since most people use credit cards anyway.

> This removes 95% of the censorship issues.

Together with 95% of your customer base, realistically.

[heartbeats]

> Great, except each country is tiny and cross-border commerce common, so you end up having to implement all of them…

Yes, and this can be done by software firms. You don't need to roll your own solution, but taking the payment networks' fees out of the equation drastically reduces costs.

> I'm not aware of any payment provider that gives me all European networks, but not credit cards.

That's true, since most sellers can access credit cards. But for EU-only sellers of "sensitive products", of course there is a market. (It's an open question if people on the MATCH list can use those payment providers as long as they don't accept cards.)

> Together with 95% of your customer base, realistically.

Most people where I live are comfortable using mobile payments and use it on a regular basis. I see mainstream retailers offering to take it (alongside cards) very often.