Review Stripe for new functionality

[damiankay]

@ScottDowne @cadecairos Can you please have a look at Stripe to assess whether they have added any new functionality to their offering that we may be able to harness for our fundraising?

For example

1. One thing that was discussed last year was tracking donations by language #1002
2. Fraud protection #1412
3. Bank address & card address mismatch problems #1209

I'm sure you'll know of others!

Let's debrief with @valianttry August 12 / 13.

[cadecairos]

One thing that was discussed last year was tracking donations by language #1002

It looks like we can do this independently of stripe - not only are we getting analytics data that should contain the page locale, but we can see which locales completed the donation flow successfully. This information is also contained within our charge data, because we pass the locale as metadata when creating charges.

Fraud protection #1412

As far as I can know, we're using all of the tools Stripe provides us for fraud protection. All I know they can offer us now is the ability to automatically reject yellow (risky) charges. Otherwise it's on us to implement a third party or first party fraud check in-between our servers and Stripe.

Bank address & card address mismatch problems #1209

It looks like Stripe doesn't provide anything to help here. As Jon pointed out in that issue, we'd need the donator to contact us directly to complete the transaction with the card (but we don't do that)

[damiankay]

Awesome - thanks @cadecairos Just to clarify, those were only a few random examples pulled from open issues. If you and @ScottDowne have time to look at the Stripe releases and see what might be applicable to our fundraising that would be amazing. Thanks!

[cadecairos]

@damiankay I think this might be the only feature we'd be interested in trying out: https://stripe.com/blog/accept-ach-payments

[damiankay]

That's pretty huge, @cadecairos. I know that @valianttry had been talking about hoping to figure out how to accept bank transfers. Seems like this might be the solution.

[cadecairos]

(dev) relevant: https://stripe.com/docs/ach (legal) relevant: https://stripe.com/ach-payments/terms

[rkent]

From my experience with bank transfers, they are mostly requested by non-US customers, as payment by bank transfer is the norm in many countries around the world. The Stripe ach system though is only for US banks: "You can only accept funds in USD and only from US bank accounts. In addition, your account must have a US/USD bank account to accept ACH payments."

The payments that I accept for my own business are described better here: https://support.fastspring.com/hc/en-us/articles/207438346-Types-of-Payment-Bank-Transfers

[valianttry]

I am meeting with Stripe on Monday to chat about our account / fee structure, I'll ask about ACH / international bank transfers.

FYI @stephaniemcv did research on incoming donor requests and 25% of our donor cases were requests for bank transfer. She estimated potential loss without this option to be between $15,000 and $90,000 USD annually.