My company is currently using stripe as payment processor. As a side project, I want to explore the possibility of creating my own payment processor at home (i.e. become my own stripe). Does anyone know what’s involved?
I can probably develop a stripe clone by myself. But I want to focus on the legal/financial aspects.
Pls don’t tell me to accept bitcoin. Already got that rolling.
Working for a bank i know there many aspects that come with being a PSP. Think about fraud detection, KYC, technical as well as well as financial audits. When you work with card processing you need to abide with Mastercard policies for example(which is a few hundred page rulebook). Same goes for various other payment methods with each their own rules, fraud rate tresholds. Then there are security aspects, risk apetite, chargeback policies as well as possible liquidity requirements.
My 2 cents is that this is a bit much for a side project. But I don’t know how much time and resources you have on your hands. As there is a reason people usually use larger payment providers and smaller payment providers usually attract a certain type of customers(p*rn, gambling, “research” drugs etc)
If you want to do this solely for your own company, perhaps the way to go is to tie a few existing psp API’s together. But in Europe since the wirecard scandal regulators have become more strict on PSP’s.
Hope this info helps you a bit and doesn’t encourage you, if you are really set on this you’ll find a way. But handling other people their money and payment infrastructure comes with great responsibility.
Hey tks for the detailed answer. Care to elaborate what you mean by tie existing psp api together? Some kind of proxy existing psp?
Yes indeed, i think that’s the phrasing that does it best. For example if there are some cheaper psp’s around for 1 specific payment method but you’d like to offer more. You could proxy different psp’s for different payments all into 1 API and offer that as a service perhaps. I don’t have any concrete ideas for that but suggested it as a point to get you started somewhere and if you have a working business model you could use the profit to start building everything in-house to work towards becoming your own PSP.
The only easy way is to have customers transfer payment directly to your bank account. Other than that, dealing with credit cards, frauds, audits, chargebacks, etc… will be more than anyone can do as a “side project”.
Lordy. That fact that you think this could be a side project is a huge red flag in and of itself. You can start out with SAQ D to get a little taste of what you’d be in for…
https://listings.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/SAQ_D_v3_Merchant.pdf
I can probably develop a stripe clone by myself.
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I built a payment processor many years ago for a large bank.
Spoiler alert: you won’t be self hosting something like this. The regulatory and compliance aspect alone will financially destroy you. You’d have audits, auditors in your home, and they will fail you. You won’t be able to be in compliance and thus you won’t be allowed to process financial transactions.
You will need an intermediary, like stripe or square or similar, to accept payment. Shop around for a solution or start investing into a large education on SEC, FDIC, and PCI regulations before you even get into the technical and physical challenges of financial transaction processing. I am guessing there are quite a few additional regulations now.
Good luck