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I remember when we launched our Japanese tea service [1]: we wanted to switch to Stripe so badly that I was emailing them at the very least once a month, until

by Xixi 7y ago

I remember when we launched our Japanese tea service [1]: we wanted to switch to Stripe so badly that I was emailing them at the very least once a month, until we made it in their beta program. I'm not sure the youngest remember what the payment landscape was before Stripe, but it wasn't great. Stripe lifted the whole industry up from mediocrity. Around 10 years ago I had the pleasure of setting up payments with a French bank: instead of a web API we had to use an opaque binary installed on our server. In terms of setup it took many weeks and several in person meetings to get approved. There was a (big) setup fee and a (not so small) monthly subscription. And then of course transaction fees. In Japan for startups targeting foreignland it was even worse: only PayPal supported payments in anything other than JPY! [2] Interestingly it seems that with Stripe Japan everything coming from outside of Japan goes through USD. I have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY. So I would expect an EUR/JPY transaction to occur in the middle, yet oftentimes the USD/EUR exchange rates ends up leaking on our customer receipts... I wonder how it works behind the scene... [1] https://tomotcha.com https://tomotcha.com for those interested. [2] Maybe banks were offering this service directly, but for what was only an experiment at the time, I was expecting the setup cost to be prohibitive (at least in time, if not in money).

edwinwee 7y ago
The rates themselves show on your receipts? Are you using some sort of plug-in? Could you forward me a receipt at edwin@stripe.com? For the conversion itself, we automatically convert from whatever currency you've accepted the payment in, then send it to your JPY bank account. The conversion rate is the average of whatever people are buying and selling the currency at that hour, but some financial institutions add a small markup on top of that along the way.
- Xixi 7y ago
  The rates were not showing on our receipts. They were showing on the bank statements of our customers. They were charged an extra 2 EUR by their banks as a FOREX fee on the Tomotcha payment, on a line showing the USD/EUR forex rate, despite us charging in EUR. Very weird. That issue was only ever reported by two customers in France. This is on top of my head, but I will forward you the relevant and exact information.
  - delfinom 7y ago
    Some banks are extremely greedy and charge you for forex just because the merchant is not located in the same country, regardless of currency.
aidos 7y ago
“Wasn’t great” is an understatement! I dealt with it as a developer both in New Zealand and the Uk and it was outright terrible. Oh, you didn’t apply for a merchant account 6 weeks ago...yeah, you’re not gonna go live this month. You just go right ahead and book in a meeting with you bank manager and get down on your knees to plea for an account.
- gridspy 7y ago
  I know right? But I thought I would just set up stripe here in NZ just now and it was... wonderful! I just needed to offer business info and it's ... done? There is nothing else to worry about?
huac 7y ago
My guess is that Stripe has a service internally which predicts "how much of each currency am I going to have, and how much of each currency do I need to pay out at the end of the day?" Then, they balance whatever currencies they can internally, and for the rest, convert to USD, before paying out to customers. The reason here is because Stripe wants to mitigate exposure to non-USD price fluctuation, e.g. if EUR dives against the dollar. Many companies do (or should do) some version of this rebalancing, e.g. FB cited on an earnings call last year that they lost a large amount due to forex fluctuations.
eps 7y ago
> I have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY. We charge in USD, we pay for services in USD, but with Stripe we can get payouts only in our local currency. This leads to us losing twice on pointless currency conversions to the tune of 10-15% of the volume. It's been an ongoing headache for several years now and the only response from Stripe to all our asking to fix this has been that "it will be passed to the respective team."

by Xixi 7y ago

edwinwee 7y ago

The rates themselves show on your receipts? Are you using some sort of plug-in? Could you forward me a receipt at edwin@stripe.com? For the conversion itself, we automatically convert from whatever currency you've accepted the payment in, then send it to your JPY bank account. The conversion rate is the average of whatever people are buying and selling the currency at that hour, but some financial institutions add a small markup on top of that along the way.

Xixi 7y ago
The rates were not showing on our receipts. They were showing on the bank statements of our customers. They were charged an extra 2 EUR by their banks as a FOREX fee on the Tomotcha payment, on a line showing the USD/EUR forex rate, despite us charging in EUR. Very weird. That issue was only ever reported by two customers in France. This is on top of my head, but I will forward you the relevant and exact information.
- delfinom 7y ago
  Some banks are extremely greedy and charge you for forex just because the merchant is not located in the same country, regardless of currency.

aidos 7y ago

“Wasn’t great” is an understatement! I dealt with it as a developer both in New Zealand and the Uk and it was outright terrible. Oh, you didn’t apply for a merchant account 6 weeks ago...yeah, you’re not gonna go live this month. You just go right ahead and book in a meeting with you bank manager and get down on your knees to plea for an account.

gridspy 7y ago
I know right? But I thought I would just set up stripe here in NZ just now and it was... wonderful! I just needed to offer business info and it's ... done? There is nothing else to worry about?

huac 7y ago

My guess is that Stripe has a service internally which predicts "how much of each currency am I going to have, and how much of each currency do I need to pay out at the end of the day?" Then, they balance whatever currencies they can internally, and for the rest, convert to USD, before paying out to customers. The reason here is because Stripe wants to mitigate exposure to non-USD price fluctuation, e.g. if EUR dives against the dollar. Many companies do (or should do) some version of this rebalancing, e.g. FB cited on an earnings call last year that they lost a large amount due to forex fluctuations.

eps 7y ago

> I have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY. We charge in USD, we pay for services in USD, but with Stripe we can get payouts only in our local currency. This leads to us losing twice on pointless currency conversions to the tune of 10-15% of the volume. It's been an ongoing headache for several years now and the only response from Stripe to all our asking to fix this has been that "it will be passed to the respective team."