@MrMaker, that’s great. Thanks for offering to chip in!
I had about 6 or so folks reach out to me via PM, so I am just now beginning to vet them. Feel free to PM me some of the requirements you might be looking for in it. I am going to draft out the same and will share it with you.
I’ll also let you know on pricing details, etc.
Any other bubblers that want in on chipping in, let us know!
hey thanks this was really helpful. Looking forward to more posts like this
For those in the US, check out Hypur. Again, this is very industry-specific but is one example a somewhat legit fintech solution for industries ignored by traditional payment providers.
Paypal (i.e. Braintree, Venmo, Paypal…), Stripe, etc. aren’t going to touch high-risk payments with a tenfoot pole and they most likely have legitimate reasons for refraining from doing so.
Banking/Finance tends to be built on relationships (ask anyone in IB that works their way up to MD within their bank), which isn’t ideal for us innovators, but is ideal for a highly regulated industry like finance. Good rule of thumb when filtering for legit high-risk payment processors - the good ones tend to have at least a few stogy, old, banking-type guys on the board 
These guys are needed for form legitimate relationships with legitimate banking partners.
For the sake of curiosity - If we look at the type of folks that Stripe hires internally, they’re using the traditional hyper-growth startup playbook: hire tons of data-driven ivy grads, GSB/HBS grads, ex-Google/FB, etc. who have been previously vetted by a well-branded school/company and in turn already have some public-facing narrative of credibility (I emphasize ‘narrative’, which does not necessarily correlate to reality). Not the most progressive talent strategy, but it does help with talent retention/acquisition in a place like Silicon Valley and also relationship building and BD within finance (both important considerations for growing as fast as possible while disrupting stogy old banker-type organizations in the payments sector). Stripe’s values and goals are clearly not aligned with the branding and risk that will come with entering into high-risk payments. The dualism between innovation and elitism/bureaucracy is really frustrating, I completely agree - although, there is usually a practical reason that it exists.
IMHO - if we want to disrupt anything, we have to play by a different playbook than the one currently being used by everyone else. If your narrative doesn’t fit into the current playbook, use a different playbook. If you can get customers to use an unregulated currency, then the current playbook no longer applies. If your customers will only use traditional bank accounts and credit cards, then model your playbook after another company successfully operating in your space. If the business is operating within the limits of the United States, please make sure you understand the limits of a new playbook - the online poker platforms learned about that the hard way in the early 2000s.
If we think outside the box on high risk payments - is it possible to facilitate and subtly encourage offline payments? Facebook Marketplace does that really well. Even eBay allows users to manually mark items as ‘paid’ before moving ahead with shipping. This strategy moves the KYC/compliance responsibility onto the individual user rather than the marketplace itself. It takes LOTS of work for a marketplace to manage/operate/and comply with high-risk payments, but it may not require so much work at an individual user’s level. Stripe technically has ‘standard Stripe accounts’ (i.e. individual accounts where KYC and compliance is handled by Stripe…in the same way that PayPal does both of these things for Venmo users). Although Stripe and PayPal do NOT want high-risk transactions going through their platforms, do you think think that Stripe and PayPal (with customers like Uber and up until recently, Pornhub) are preventing users engaging in high-risk payments themselves? …just something to think about. If there is money to be made in high-risk payments, Stripe/Paypal probably won’t be out of the picture entirely - they just won’t be on the front page.
I’m hiring a dev to build a Braintree integration that supports ACH payment methods. @marktuff did you go forward with this plugin development?
