The Valve Strategy of “letting the competition shoot itself” spreads

Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.

There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:

• Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
• Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
• Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
• Use physical cash
• Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)

In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.

Oh, cool. A pity that it won’t be adopted