Comment by strnisa
4 days ago
Requiring money upfront would classify the platform as an e-money institution, which is highly problematic from the legal perspective.
4 days ago
Requiring money upfront would classify the platform as an e-money institution, which is highly problematic from the legal perspective.
How does tarsnap handle it? I think there's lots of services that bill up front... Isn't it only e-money if you can convert it back to cash?
If you store funds for a specific service that you provide, it's fine. If it's for many services or services provided by others, it's legally problematic.
What if you inverted the trust equation by giving the money to the service provider immediately, rather than holding any of the up front payment?
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Ah neat, thanks for the clarification.
> Requiring money upfront would classify the platform as an e-money institution, which is highly problematic from the legal perspective.
What if you just reserve it on the card?
Online card holds typically expire in ~7 days (often sooner, depending on the issuer), which is too short for our use case.
I thought 30 days are an option at least when you can explain the reason/necessity to stripe?
Could be an option to funnel default-risky (as distinct from chargeback-risky!) customers to a customer-selectable hold amount rolling the per-transaction flat fee into basically a per-bill flat fee thus indirectly giving volume/commitment discounts to those that select 30-day intervals with large holds?
I guess ideally offer an option to force a billing (transaction finalization) to release the hold if a customer changes their mind (or just happened to use a debit card)...
Though even with 7 day holds it'd allow you to offer service to poor people (which mostly overlaps "people with bad credit") without the APIs having to maintain revenue margins large enough to just eat that default risk, and without having to hold onto any funds yourself.
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