Use Stripe (or similar) or develop our own payment processing solution for FCOS?
Value Proposition
The task is to evaluate the payment processing solution for Fab City OS. This is
- I’m talking with Jaromil about the current stat of the project. It appears to us that, given the nature of payments (example: a design with 3 contributors, where each wants 1 EUR, and a producer that wants 12 EUR for the physical product, for a total price of 15 EUR that needs to be distributed among the 4 actors) choosing the right payment system or payment processor is crucial for the outcome of the project. (by @andrea_dintino )
Notes
Banks/Services solutions
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by @haus: In germany there are several startups building upon Solaris Bank https://www.solarisbank.com/ (Banking-as-a-Service platform) like Tomorrow https://www.tomorrow.one/.
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by @benedikt: FCHH bank https://www.gls.de/unternehmen-institutionen/konto-zahlungsverkehr/paydirekt-fuer-haendler/ they are friendly, but rather small and sometimes not very professional, also only oriented towards the German market, so probably the worse option compared to Stripe/Paypal. We have just started talking with elbstack.com (a Hamburg-based company) that may assist us here. INTERFACER will probably get a higher budget from which we could pay elbstack. Adam may recall Moritz Stückler (moritz@welcome-werkstatt.de), our contact in that company and one of the main administrators of Fab City Hamburg.
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stripe
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paypall
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An alternative could be that we do the payment processing directly, using the APIs of a bank. -> e.g. solarisbank
Risks
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I have a strong impression that the stakeholders we are talking to, would join mostly because of the prospect of getting paid for their work… I sense that If we introduce a cryptocurrency which is not perfectly exchangeable to EUR, we’d be lowering their interest to join the platform.(by @andrea_dintino )
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To be able to directly process wire transfer with our bank would lead us to implement a lot of those requirements of a Payment Gateway. And if I’m getting it right, it would also mean that every transaction would not be directly between the participants and put us in the role of a kind of proxy or bank itself, which does not seem to be the right approach to me. (by @swendel )
opportunities
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having a bank or a service (such as Stripe) managing the payments in EUR, would (maybe) be easier for us and let us offload a large part of the liability.
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Developing or integrating an Open-Source Payment Gateway "one day" would be great, to not be dependent on this dominating service providers and to not lose share. (by @swendel)
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Stripe seems to be a reasonable Payment Gateway Provider with a wide range of supported client implementation for their API's (also on Drupal).(by @swendel)
Acceptance Criteria
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We need to investigate, the legal complexity behind issuing a cryptocurrency and making it perfectly convertible to EUR -
What we know is that currently most of these payments are processed through https://stripe.com/, so we need to explore that, along with its competitors.