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Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-making-change-simple-on-gov-uk-pay/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk
- toomuchtodo 5mo agohttps://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-making-change-simple-on-gov-uk-pay/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m... https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/182de6c9-d246-421a-8204-5d50922b30de https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/182de6c9-d... https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/roadmap/ https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/roadmap/ https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/ https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/
- gaiagraphia 5mo ago[dead]
- dividendflow 5mo ago[dead]
- wg0 5mo ago[flagged]
- arjie 5mo agoSurprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoBrazil's central bank operates their instant payment network Pix [1] [2] [3] for ~$10M/year [4]. Its not that these are small contracts, but that large, inefficient, unnecessary contracts have become the norm (I argue). Similar example from India's UPI payment system [5]. The US has FedNow to move instant payments for pennies, but banking and payment system participants in the US ecosystem are avoiding it to continue to private payment system rake [6] (cc networks, Zelle commercial bank network, private wallets, etc). The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) [2] https://frontierfintech.substack.com/p/55-send-pix-brazils-instant-payment https://frontierfintech.substack.com/p/55-send-pix-brazils-i... [3] https://brazilstockguide.com/behind-the-lines/the-cost-of-pix/ https://brazilstockguide.com/behind-the-lines/the-cost-of-pi... > This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation. > There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day. > The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44753626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44753626 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface [6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fednow&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- telesilla 5mo agoStripe allows for these kinds of payments, we've been updating our store to support Wero etc. It should give better conversation and processing rates than the US credit cards.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoAssociated Adyen post: https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk
- oakinnagbe 5mo agoI'm curious whether this will materially reduce costs for local authorities or whether the benefits are primarily in expanding payment options.
- siren2026 5mo agoI wish Adyen was as good at marketing and hype as Stripe was. Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.
- Oras 5mo agoWhich part that makes them look bigger than they are? Which services are larger than stripe?
- 0x59 5mo agoStripe has a useful tool and markets it well. With that said, I'm glad there are other options.
- theturtletalks 5mo agoA big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion. The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.
- indymike 5mo agoAnother reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.
- bostik 5mo agoLike with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages. From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points? ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.
- thomashabets2 5mo agoSo maybe it'll stop taking three requests, 1-2 months, and a certified letter every year to receive your tax refund? HMRCs digital services in general are pretty good, but refunds not so much.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5mo agoForcing people through all that means they collect more interest and I assume some people don’t bother.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoMy self assessment refund came through within days of submitting my assessment.
- alibarber 5mo agoYes I have also received payments for refunds of PAYE automatically within a month or two of no action on my part.
- tikkabhuna 5mo agoYeah, this has been my experience too. I don't know how much easier it could be.
- thomashabets2 5mo ago2-3 years ago they changed something and I know tens of people (and I don't know that many people) say that now filling in bank details in the SA itself has become a no-op, and that they (and I) now had to explicitly request a withdrawal of the balance. Often 2-3 times. And it's not been a matter of waiting. The money just sits there for the better part of a year before people have noticed.
- m101 5mo agoThe solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs. Then everyone will start using bank transfers.
- Silhouette 5mo agoThat would seem like a logical solution. So wouldn't it be convenient for the expensive payment methods if legalities prevented merchants from charging higher fees to customers using them?
- m101 5mo agoThat’s exactly the system the card companies try to impose on vendors (mostly successfully). In the UK it’s the system the law imposes on everyone.
- Silhouette 5mo agoIndeed. It's a triumph of consumer protection laws failing to protect consumers. Merchants here have to set their prices a bit higher to compensate for the fees and you still have to pay those higher prices as a customer even if you're using a more efficient payment method. I will never understand why the law wasn't set the other way - requiring explicit disclosure of payment fees to end customers and prohibiting payment services from incorporating these kinds of anticompetitive terms in merchant agreements - so that everyone could make an informed choice and market pressures would push the transaction overheads down.
- m101 5mo agoI would say it’s regulatory capture. Some others would call it incompetence. Probably both in the UK
- Silhouette 5mo agoIt might have been regulatory capture - though I have seen no specific evidence of that myself. It might simply have been the old story about a road and good intentions. At this point it doesn't really matter how it happened - it would be better if the situation were fixed in any case.
- maelito 5mo agoAdyen refuses small clients, under the million :/
- zuzululu 5mo agothey probably dont have the scale for support for anything lower vs stripe im amazed that stripe is able to handle small guys like me
- trumpdong 5mo agoThey can't afford it because they have no customers, because they turn down small customers and then Stripe already has them when they become big enough for Adyen.
- ExoticPearTree 5mo agoI wasn't with the company when it started using Stripe, but there's really no need to interact with Stripe besides setting up your account and using the API they provide. Since being involved with Stripe, I don't we need to talk to them more than once a year on a "so, all good?" type of emails. They basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- greggsy 5mo agoThey have resellers
- zuzululu 5mo agodoesnt seem like stripe has anything to worry about here the total contract value is of irrelevant scale i guess i expected it to be more significant seeing that its the UK gov
- johannes1234321 5mo agoWell, it is signalling. It's signalling that there are competitors which are trustworthy enough for a government and it signals the overall trend one can observe how European governments detach from US companies. With some lower hanging fruit and some larger projects.
- aiisjustanif 5mo agoMost government processing is prohibited at Stripe that is why it always tends to be small. Too much risk being exposed to more regulatory scrutiny that is not worth it as payments processor. > “Prohibited Businesses… Government services… Disbursement of government economic support, such as grant” [1] [1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses
- fsuts 5mo agoThey have moved as it also allows payment by paybybank which is the uk direct bank payment service Stripe globally will be worried as countries seek to cut out the card payment middle man and do direct bank to bank account payments
- gib444 5mo agoGot to love the people taking a swipe at the company. They found their market, can't you just be happy for them? They're hardly the only company in the world to only deal with bigger clients. This site regularly dunks on European tech as being subpar, but when an American company gets ditched for a European one, barely anyone can find nice words to say. You really reveal yourselves in times like this, I've got to admit.
- benced 5mo agoIt's pareto better, all else equal (which, fair, it may not be in this case) for a company to serve businesses from $1 and up than to only serve $5M and up.
- throwyui 5mo agoAll are ditching american tech and what not as much as they could
- madhacker 5mo agoGood for them. Self-reliance is a good thing especially weaning off hostile Americanism.
- aiisjustanif 5mo agoStripe is an EU and US company dual headquartered in Ireland and subject to the same EU regulations as Ayden. They spend a lot developing and maintaining talent in Ireland.
- vanviegen 5mo agoI'm sure Stripe EU is subject to EU regulations, just like Adyen. But unlike Adyen, they are also subject to some US regulations due to being a subsidiary. And, highly likely, they run software systems build by their US counterpart, meaning data exfiltration or even sabotage is trivial.
- xp84 5mo agoIt seems to me like whole Western countries, especially Britain being outside the EU and Eurozone and with its own currency, ought to have at least one big domestically-based option for something this fundamental. It’s an odd thing to have to rely on foreign countries for. Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?
- aiisjustanif 5mo agoYes, the 3rd competitor to Stripe and Ayden being Checkout.com Also running payment processor per country would not be an easy feat or probably feasible.
- gib444 5mo ago> Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”? British payment processors usually sell out / get taken over by US firms Checkout.com isn't terribly British just headquartered there (Swiss guy founded it in Singapore, tons of foreign investors). They opened a SF office last year, after a big US push prior, so if their financials stay adequate I imagine it'll be another that sells out to the US
- roryirvine 5mo agoWorldpay was the biggest by far, but it never really shook off its legacy image (it had its origins in a couple of 1980s-era payment gateways). Stripe had overtaken it by the mid 2010s, and it has since been dismembered and partially rebuilt by (American) private equity. The UK tends to punch well above its weight in FinTech, but PSPs are high-volume and very low margin so not really an attractive proposition unless you can be reasonably sure of grabbing a decent share of the global market.
- gib444 5mo agoYeah agree with the legacy image of Worldpay. The payment page is straight out of the early 00s. N.B. though, the Government does/did use Worldpay Started in 1997, got bought out by a US company in 2018. RIP. The founder, Nick Ogden claims "His career began when he pioneered ecommerce in 1994, inventing the first online shop, the Wine Warehouse." [0] Big if true! UK has a long, rich history of inventions. [0] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nick-ogden-founding-father-of-fintech-112839272.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nick-ogden-founding-father...
- kvgr 5mo agoGood luck with integration.
- taffydavid 5mo agoIt hurts a little that stripe is an American company since it was founded by two Irish brothers. It could have been an EU company to begin with
- halapro 5mo agoPeople don't make a company. Stripe exists as is because it's not a EU company.
- chinathrow 5mo agoWhy though? Because they raised a lot of capital in the US? Or because they had access to better talent in the US? As I see, there are many payment providers in the EU, just not API first as Stripe ever was.
- pembrook 5mo agoPeople will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures. When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company. Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in. Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance. If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US. Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
- mathgeek 5mo ago
- jeffrallen 5mo agoGood on em. Ayden rocks, and improves European sovereignty.
- bArray 5mo ago> Adyen will take over GOV.UK Pay card payments for local authorities, police forces and armed forces units from Stripe, as well as pay by bank services, under a three-year contract worth up to £25.3 million. I would prefer they take this money and either build a payment processor or use an existing UK company. The UK government is addicted to offshoring all contracts it can, and then is surprised when the cheapest possible quote actually ends up ballooning over the agreed amount.
- mft_ 5mo ago> and either build a payment processor Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". > use an existing UK company Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?
- bArray 5mo ago> Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". These projects are possible, it's just clear the current project management structure of the UK government is not up to the task. I would lean heavily towards a UK-based private sector solution. > Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities? This is the point, there should be one, and the UK government could heavily put their thumb on the scale to ensure that payments are processed within the UK. It seems mad to have foreign companies make money on UK government fund raising activities.
- dbbk 5mo agoI'm sorry? Did you just say you want the UK government to "build a payment processor"?
- bArray 5mo ago
- huflungdung 5mo ago[dead]
- antaviana 5mo agoWill it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain does not work because there is an address verification which is not possible because Spain's credit cards do not share customer address information, so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.
- traceroute66 5mo ago>Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain .... so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost. I don't follow ? Don't they have Wise (previously known as Tranferwise) in Spain ? Or a similar platform ? Its 2026 and for most people the answer is just to use one of those platforms to pay wire transfers instead of your bank. Sure there will still be fee of some description, but it will almost always be much lower than what your bank charges for international transfers.
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