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Why vocal needs to shift from Stripe and use Paypal or other digital wallets

: a call of the hour

By Arsh K.SPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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To put it simply there are many countries - like India for example, where laws in place prevent the transfer of funds from accounts that Stripe has to banks in the nation.

This prevents the contributors who develop the platform and bring traffic to it from their rightful share of the earnings by freezing their accounts.

There may be ways around such a conundrum such as the use of Payoneer which can make a virutal account for you with registration in another country, or so this article claims https://vocal.media/journal/how-to-make-stripe-account-on-vocal-media-to-make-money-as-a-creatorMy own story is one among them - my funds are frozen in vocal.media's ccounts because of its patronage of Stripe.

Alternatively there are other mainstream financial services companies which may to allied with to simply and easily address this situation.

All that were to be required would be to add another payment partner, such as Paypal or Google Pay, or PayTM - all of whom have far greater usability for the majority of the people on the plantet.

This is not only needfful for existing writers on the platform but will be key to drawing emmerging writers from countries which do not have ease of transactions with Stripe. There may be a concern regarding whether payment restrictions presently inbuilt into Stripe which inhibit transfers of money to third world countries are a form of screening which allows for users to keep their stories approximately within the confines of the industrialized world. This may be true, yet were such a policy to be implemented it would make more sense to be able to have on board the possibility of hosting any given article irrespective of its orgins and leave it to the editorial team to frame adequete content guidelines for the community.

The issue of inhibited transfers is not being raised for the first time. On the 19th of May, 2021 - Shamar M brought up precisely this issue https://medium.com/feedium/why-does-medium-use-stripe-5481de3b1fa3 And I tried to explain the situation in a video on Youtube which I shared on my channel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VznkzqKBXVQ&ab_channel=Arsh

This however is not a spectator sport and the authorities which run these platforms will have to confront such lacunae sooner rather than later and it is in everyone's best interest that the former is pursued.

I did try to contact the management regarding this and much of what I am relaying to you, I learned from them. Yet, when I questioned which laws were actually preventing the transfer of funds there was silence on their end.

I tried reading the agreement between Stripe and India myself and tried to point out that the agreement as it stands allows beta users (the only version of Stripe accounts availible in India) to avail of the services which the company offers. There was no mention of the restrictions that I am facing there, and I do not imagine that I am the only one here.

In fact now that I recall, I see that even prior to writing for vocal I had expressed the circumstances vis-a-vis Stripe and was informed that an integration with Paypall was ulready in the works. This is from an exchange of mails which goes back to 4th February, 2021. It is now approaching nearly a year and I find that not much has changed on that scope.

On these grounds, and taking into consideration the distress that is happening in our economy presently, I request that vocal.media take up this issue and resolve it so that we can all get back to posting exciting stories and make some pocket money out of it.

Cheers.

Arsh K. S

Chennai, 2021

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