An open letter to Stripe: please come to Europe
Many people may not realise this, but Europe is the largest economy in the world according to the IMF, who know a thing or two about this stuff.Since I saw Stripe last week, I've been wondering why no one in Europe has managed to put something similar together. We have the technical expertise and the world largest economy, so what's stopping us?Sadly, it turns out that Europe is so fragmented and disparate when it comes to banking practices that the benefits of working in the worlds largest economy are completely obliterated by the difficulties of working with all the countries involved, many of which are so fundamentally corrupt (I'm looking at you Italy) that any sane legislation is unlikely to go through.Stripe may well cobble together solutions for individual countries like Germany, France and the UK, where there's enough money flowing around to warrant it, but the return on investment quickly starts to diminish as you tackle the smaller countries, which is not really a great incentive for Stripe to "pull their finger out". I'm not saying they wont (they've already said they will), I'm saying the incentives aren't all that great. And they're even worse for anyone wanting to implement a homegrown solution because we don't have competitive advantage of the US economy to start from.It would be nice if everyone in Europe had the Euro, and everyone in Europe also had the same banking practices, but if you rank that possibility on a scale of 1 to 10, the scale explodes.One alternative I can see happening however is for some savvy EU state to make it ridiculously easy to open up business accounts, with multiple currencies that anyone in Europe (if not the world) can open and run their business through, with the easy transfer of cash from country to country. Other than bureaucracy, I don't see what's stopping them.In fact, the commercial banks could well be eliminated from the equation. The value of the digital economy is important to any countries future growth that the central banks could plausibly take the initiative here.