Amazon-Stripe partnership

I had a short period where I worked in Amazon payments. Max Bardon was the L10 or whatever above me.

Amazon likes to diversify their payment processors. They don't have one payment processor for one region because it's an availability issue for them. Cost of payments is big. So this is likely some agreement to help Amazon reduce their cost of payments, by essentially redirecting costs to the AWS side of things. India likely isn't being processed because India has regulations that most other countries do not. Adyen, Braintree, and maybe not even Stripe can be payment processors there (if they are, they're likely just a proxy for another processor).

It's also party because India has a robust ecosystem of local companies that handle payments, including real-time payment methods such as UPI that are specific to the country and these are already well integrated into Amazon.in

Honestly the ubiquity of UPI and the rate of it's adaptation in India always surprises me. I hear stories of how small, often illiterate vendors selling tea for 10 cents on the streets would insist on getting their payment through UPI and not cash because it's more seamless.

UPI handles about 200 million transactions a day in India. I think Visa does like 150 million on their global network?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

> It's also party because India has a robust ecosystem of local companies that handle payments, including real-time payment methods such as UPI that are specific to the country and these are already well integrated into Amazon.in

Just to add, UPI is actually no longer limited to India. Several other countries either are currently using it or have contractually agreed to and are in the process of integrating it and rolling it out.

The UPI system is great, unless you are a tourist, who doesn't have access to it. On a recent trip to India we came across many weird payment rules that made our trip much harder than it should have been, it felt like going back to the early 2000s where you had to pay cash for everything if you travel abroad.

Although Visa is everywhere, most places do not accept foreign cards. We stopped in a rest stop on a highway and they had a large food court with a mixture of Indian and Western brands - had to pay cash for all of it, as my card was always rejected by their bank.

One time I had to pay for my accomodation by cash, as their bank would not allow them to accept foreign cards or foreign bank transfers. I had pay 70,000rs (around $850) which meant going to a cash machine and taking out repeated transactions of 10,000rs (the ATMs also have limits for foreign cards). If you aren't familiar with Indian cash, that's a big stack, around 160 notes. It felt like I was doing something illegal :D

If you try to buy something online, almost everything expects you to use UPI. If they do accept cards, then they almost always have the same rule about foreign cards. For example we wanted to buy bus tickets from Red Bus, but couldn't. The only places we found that consistently worked was Swiggy and Uber.