Thanks for your thoughts. I think you're right that taking payments and comparing it to a normal software model is a little unfair. That being said, the margin

Thanks for your thoughts. I think you're right that taking payments and comparing it to a normal software model is a little unfair. That being said, the margins are low no matter how you slice it. It's hard to run a business on thirty or forty bps, before risk and marketing. And, recall that PayPal almost collapsed because of risk. It's a volume business as you say and you need a ton of volume for it to make sense. I am not saying that Stripe, Braintree, Balanced, etc, are bad businesses. In fact, I think they're very impressive exactly because they operate in an extremely tough, highly competitive, razor-thin margin business. It's interesting that you point to PayPal in the way you do. I would agree that they have a small part of the ACH and card networks. I would also argue that the parts that they do have are very lucrative. They make the vast majority of their money through charging too much for ACH and through their foreign exchange fee. Ultimately, most of the ACH network's transactions aren't going to go through third parties no matter what you do. Comparing the growth potential of an independent sales organization like Braintree and Stripe with a card network like VISA or Mastercard is an apples/oranges comparison. If you can create a payments network that meets the three criterion for a a good system - ubiquitous, perceived to be secure, and successfully transmits value - then god bless. I think you'll have 14-16% CAGR. I'm not sure anyone can do that though - and many have tried. I'll eat my words by being so categorical but talk about a schlep business. I think you're absolutely correct that if a processor could intermediate itself and become a consumer brand, that it could be the next Google. In general I am skeptical that one company will win. I think there will be a ton of large, public, companies in this space but between different processors, pay by GMail, Square moving in to this space, MasterCard's Simplify, etc, I am not sure that there will exist a monolithic winner that will get to that size.