If you understood how banking works you would be surprised, the reason why banks drool over potential technologies like BitCoin is because it can remove most if not all of the risk from those transactions as well as the need to have (the right, and this is very important for concurrent banking ;)) the funds to cover the transaction.<p>Everytime you process a payment with a credit card, PayPal or what ever they are paying for your transaction which means that not only that they need to be able to cover any potential risk on that debt but also actually have the funds available.<p>I don&#x27;t know about Stripe but PayPal works because they offload the fraud and funds availability off the credit card companies that requires quite big financial investment if Stripe works the same (and for the most part it does) the 2% fee isn&#x27;t that outrageous considering the amount of cash flow they have to maintain.