> "EU" is like a couple dozen countries in and of itself
From a regulatory standpoint (the big hurdle in fintech), not so, which is why I lumped them all together. A single team/office could handle all the EU countries.
> presumably it's harder to roll out in poorer, less developed countries.
On the contrary, the more developed a country, the more regulation and red tape there is to deal with in finance.
But the bigger thing is generally how advanced the existing finance infra is. Lots of countries have really slow bank transfers, processing a refund requires handing in physical paperwork, etc. Stripe relies on having underlying bank infra that's somewhat functional.
As far as the EU, the regulatory environment is manageble, but the payment landscape is very different from the US where Stripe originated. For example, in Germany only around 30% of users pay for stuff online via card [https://askwonder.com/research/german-market-what-s-breakdow...], that means for every country a ton of new payment methods have to be added for the service to be actually useful.
From a regulatory standpoint (the big hurdle in fintech), not so, which is why I lumped them all together. A single team/office could handle all the EU countries.
> presumably it's harder to roll out in poorer, less developed countries.
On the contrary, the more developed a country, the more regulation and red tape there is to deal with in finance.