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by lindig 1054 days ago
What does your business do? Stripe might not have listed your business model explicitly but could still prefer to not have you as a customer if it is an edge case.
2 comments

IMHO payment processing is an 'essential service', and processors should be required to provide service to any lawful customer, regardless of their preferences.
Maybe they are doing some shady crypto stuff... (Maybe they participate in selling "numbers with certain properties" which are called Bitcoins, but are just numbers in reality...)
is it legal?

Not to get into that debate, but your bank account is just numbers too.

It may be illegal in some jurisdictions and the payment provider may decide to not deal with it because of legal risk...
That's my point, the provider should not be making that decision. Either it's legal or not, and if it is they should be required to provide service.
Things are not always black and white. Some things are "highly likely legal", other things are "highly likely illegal"...
We have a traditional SaaS business model. We aren't an edge case with a complex structure. We looked up their Restricted Businesses List and we are clean.
You have a SaaS that promises:

> Capture every crypto opportunity with a bot.

> Helping you towards a profitable crypto journey with the power of AI.

Which are not signs of a "traditional SaaS business model", yes, it is a service but you are leaving out the context of your service: cryptocurrencies. Which is enough to probably trigger some alarms inside Stripe, I've worked in fintech before and it's much better for the company to be risk-averse and blocking first, asking later than the opposite.

Given this context you should get in touch with Stripe and somehow explain how your business model isn't a risk to Stripe, unfortunately you are working in a domain with a lot of scams, and other fraudulent activities. You might not be doing it but Stripe has no way to know that, and won't be investing man-hours of cost trying to investigate your whole company to see if you aren't being sneaky and defrauding people with a seemingly legitimate business.

Edit: In fintech I worked on fraud detection, analysis, reporting and tooling for fraud agents to run their investigations, another red flag that a fraud agent would encounter when investigating your company is that the company is registered in Estonia, my best guess would be through the e-Residency scheme that allows for online business registering.

Neither of the co-founders (you included) seems to be from Estonia, or residents in Estonia. If I were a fraud agent looking at this case I'd flag it for further review based on all of these factors: company working in an industry primed with scams and frauds, using the e-Residency scheme from Estonia, while neither founders appears to be citizens or residents of Estonia. At the company I worked for (pretty big fintech in the EU) this would be put under a "manual review" and immediately block further transactions until the fraud review was done.