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by fnordpiglet 13 days ago
What I find interesting about this isn’t acquiring the flow from PayPal but the fact that PayPal has a bank charter and stripe doesn’t (not a real one, all that Georgia bank stuff is shenanigans). Properly structured this gives stripe a lot of interesting opportunities that they’ve had to delegate to partners and that dilutes not just their margins in the fee stack but restricts the types of transactions and merchants they can host, beyond the minimal regulatory constraint.

The next move would be to offer a stripe managed card network that captures the full MDR interchange fee stack, from issuance to processing to network to bank. They could offer deep discounts to merchants hosting their accounts on their bank issuing cards through them and processing through them by cutting out every middle man. It would instantly become the third largest network in terms of points of sale behind visa and Mastercard. They could further carve out heavy rewards for customers through direct relationships with airlines, hotels, and merchants through their existing issuer services. They would become the first fully integrated vertical in payments, and the efficiency that would give them in fees would allow them to crush the hodge podge payment stacks out there that exist. I’d wager in five years they would dominate the market.

2 comments

There are much cheaper ways to acquire a bank charter though?
Not necessarily - the compliance side would open up stripe entirely unless they very carefully structured as a bank holding company. Stripe has been trying to gain a charter in Georgia for years and just got it last year. I think this taught them it would be easier to acquire one. Additionally PayPal has been a EU bank for 12 years and just recently got its US banking charter. A global bank is pretty compelling.
> but the fact that PayPal has a bank charter

When did it get one?

2008 in the EU and last year in the US.
Citation needed? I'm not seeing anything indicating PayPal has a bank charter in the US.
I can see that they applied last year but not that they've been approved https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-12-15-PayPal-Submits-A...
Yes, exactly. It's kind of an... important distinction.