EU payment giants Stripe and PayPal are still not operating in Ukraine not only because of the war or «complex regulation.» It turned out that they had not taken any formal steps to enter our market at all.
EU payment giants Stripe and PayPal are still not operating in Ukraine not only because of the war or «complex regulation.» It turned out that they had not taken any formal steps to enter our market at all.
In a large DOU article on international payment services, the regulator explained that to work with Ukrainian residents, a company must go through the authorization or registration procedure of a payment system in accordance with the Law «On Payment Services.» According to the NBU, as of now, Stripe and PayPal have never applied to the regulator for a license or other permission.
Unlike them, Revolut at least entered into a dialogue with the NBU: the neobank temporarily opened registration for Ukrainians, and later suspended it precisely because of the need to go through all the licensing procedures. The National Bank emphasizes that the rules for such players actually repeat the European PSD2 directive, that is, the entry conditions are similar to EU markets.
PayPal, before the full-scale war, operated in Ukraine in a «reduced» mode: it allowed you to pay for purchases abroad, but did not allow you to legally accept payments or withdraw money to cards of Ukrainian banks. Only in 2022 did the service temporarily open the possibility of receiving transfers and withdrawing funds, but it never became a full-fledged financial service in Ukraine. Stripe, on the other hand, did not operate at all and did not publicly announce plans to enter our market.
Experts interviewed by DOU attribute the caution of global payment systems to a combination of military risks, currency restrictions, and a relatively small and low-profit market. For such companies, launching in Ukraine means significant start-up costs for compliance with regulatory requirements, while the payback period still looks uncertain. An additional factor is strong local players such as monobank, which have already covered the basic demand for convenient digital payments.
For the IT community, the absence of Stripe, Wise, Revolut, and a full-fledged PayPal means additional barriers to exporting services: freelancers and startups have to open companies in other jurisdictions or use «workaround» schemes to legally accept payments from abroad. Analysts emphasize that the emergence of global payment services in Ukraine could reduce the share of «gray» transactions and simplify the entry of small businesses and developers into the international market, but so far this issue remains open.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how PayPal signed an agreement with OpenAI to integrate its digital wallet into ChatGPT so that users can pay for goods found using artificial intelligence.
