Making money¶

Before the move, every supplier renewed on a card, so a US card network sat in every payment, and most of the suppliers were American as well. Money is infrastructure, and one of the less visible parts of the graph, because a payment looks like one transaction: customer, bank, SEPA, provider. Underneath sit several more companies. The scraps for this layer are less about where the bank is and more about how many financial intermediaries can turn a European service into a globally dependent one without anyone deciding to. The suppliers changed with the move. The money still has to reach them, and the questions on this page are about the road it takes.

Nobody asks the bank¶

The first scrap is a list of questions for the bank that nobody asks when opening an account: its legal domicile, banking licence and regulator, the country of the account, the payment rails, the online banking platform with its authentication and recovery, card services, foreign currency services, and the technology providers underneath. A bank incorporated and regulated in Europe is a different dependency from a US bank’s European branch, and a designation would find that difference. A European bank can still have US operations, US correspondent banks, US technology suppliers or US shareholders. None of that is a problem in itself. It goes on the map, and the thing to look for is where the bank’s own obligations could get an account restricted if a US person, company or designation entered the picture. That is a more concrete question than whether the bank is sovereign.

The US bit¶

Cards are separate from the account. A European bank can issue a card on Visa, Mastercard, another network, or a domestic scheme. Visa and Mastercard are US companies, in San Francisco and Purchase, New York. That does not make the account a US account. It means the card is a separate route through which US infrastructure enters the payment chain.

Where a supplier takes bank transfers, paying by transfer takes the card network out of that transaction. That is what changed. Small choices of that kind make a graph less interesting to hostile paperwork.

SEPA under another label¶

SEPA is the European escape route. A SEPA credit transfer moves euros between participating accounts without a US card network. A transfer and a card payment can end with money leaving the same account, and they do not have the same dependency graph, so SEPA went into the scraps as infrastructure and not as one payment option among several. Infomaniak showed the shape. Its checkout offers “Bank” and PayPal, nothing labelled SEPA, and the bank option is a transfer to Infomaniak’s euro IBAN, which from a European account is a SEPA credit transfer in everything but the label. The domain is paid that way: bank, transfer, registrar, and nobody in between.

The processor¶

A processor sits between merchant and rails and handles authorisation, fraud screening, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, reporting and compliance checks. It may be neither the merchant nor the bank. For recurring payments the processor is harder to replace than a card terminal, because changing it moves customer payment details, mandates, subscriptions, transaction history, reconciliation and fraud controls. The gateway, the technical doorway to the processor, is often the same company and occasionally a different one, and the scrap notes where two boxes are one firm, because concentration is a dependency.

The processor is also the part a supplier rarely names in public, and statichost is the example of finding out by paying. Its pricing is in euros and its Hobby tier is free for one site with no card asked for, which is where the main site went first. Adding a second site led to the pricing page and the Starter tier at 9 euros a month. The checkout offered SEPA, and card as well, and SEPA it was: a friendly welcome note from the company, a reply that the wait was for the transfer to come through, and a message back that it was fine to go ahead.

Then the mandate and the invoices turned out to live at billing.stripe.com. The SEPA arrangement is a Stripe one. Stripe’s services agreement names Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, in Ireland, as the contracting entity for merchants in Sweden, a subsidiary of Stripe, Inc. of San Francisco, and for US merchants the entity is Stripe, LLC under California law. So the card network is out of the path and a US-owned processor is in it, between a European bank and a Swedish host, on a payment labelled SEPA, and nothing on statichost’s public pages said so. That is this page’s whole point in one subscription: a European service, a European bank, a European rail, and an American company holding the mandate.

Paper¶

Conversion is where an apparently European transaction picks up a global dependency: who converts, at which rate, whether it is the bank, the network, the processor or another company, where that company is incorporated, and whether balances are held in another jurisdiction. Euro-denominated suppliers are convenient for that reason, less conversion and fewer intermediaries to trust, and every supplier on the new stack invoices in euros.

An invoice holds customer and supplier identity, VAT information, bank details, payment references and history. If invoices exist only inside a SaaS platform, the platform has become the archive of the financial relationship. For a one-woman company, PDFs in a folder with a sensible naming scheme are enough; nobody needs to build a financial cathedral.

Accounting adds a layer between bank transactions and tax reporting, and the questions are the same as for the bank: where the accounting company is incorporated, where the data is stored, whether records export, whether the accountant can work with another system, whether the software integrates with a US service, and whether bank synchronisation runs through another intermediary. The last one is easy to miss: a European package can still use a third party for bank feeds, identity verification, document recognition or payments.

Tax is different because some of the dependencies are governmental. VAT obligations connect to European and national tax authorities, and commercial tooling sits around that. The legal obligation and the government interface are not optional dependencies; the commercial convenience is. If a VAT service disappears, the obligations remain, so the underlying records are kept well enough to redo the calculation without it.

Empty boxes¶

A purchase is pay, done. A subscription is customer, payment method, billing platform, processor, bank, and the platform holds customer records, mandates, renewal dates, invoices, cancellations, discounts and usage. Purple Lantern sells no subscriptions, so that box stays empty.

Donations and small payments tend to run through PayPal, Stripe, Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi, most of them US companies; Ko-fi Labs Limited is registered in England. None of them is forbidden. It does mean that “people can support the project” can introduce a large dependency into what is otherwise a static website. Purple Lantern takes no donations, so that box stays empty too. For occasional support a SEPA option is remarkably unexciting, and unexciting is good infrastructure.

Under the bank¶

This is the second-order dependency that got the most attention, and the least answers. “European bank” says little about what sits beneath it: US card networks, US cloud, US fraud detection, US identity verification, US enterprise software, US security products, US correspondent banks, US messaging infrastructure. The full graph looks more like customer, bank, and then rails, card network, cloud, fraud service, software supplier and correspondent bank fanning out below. There is no sensible requirement for all of that to become European. Some is several levels down, some is shared infrastructure, some would be extraordinarily expensive to replace.

The question marks are what is left to find out. They are invitations to investigate, not assertions about somebody else’s infrastructure.

The bill¶

A bank account in a European jurisdiction with SEPA, the card an additional route and not the only one, transfers to the suppliers that take them, invoices kept independently, accounting exportable, tax records recoverable, one processor in use and known, no subscription platform or donation platform, and the bank’s own dependencies mapped as far as they can be seen from outside. Financial autarky is not on the list. Not letting any one provider, card network or payment platform be the only thing between the business and its ability to pay its bills is.

What could go wrong? Financial infrastructure is where a designation has consequences, without anyone touching a server.

• A bank closes or restricts an account, and the renewals stop.

• A processor terminates a merchant, and the supplier cannot be paid the way it wants to be paid.

• A card network blocks transactions, and every supplier still on the card stops being paid at once.

• A compliance provider refuses service, a correspondent bank stops processing, or a European company decides that continued service is legally or commercially uncomfortable.

The chain runs designation, financial intermediary, restriction, a European service that cannot renew, and then the domain, the hosting or the software expires. That last step is the interesting one. Financial infrastructure is not only about receiving money. It is about being able to keep paying for everything else, and a blocked payment account eventually turns a healthy domain, mailbox or hosting account into an expired one. The bank is out of the picture, what now? Can the invoices still be reached, the upcoming renewals seen, the critical European suppliers paid from another account, money received another way, the accounting records reached, VAT and tax redone, and the critical payments made without a US card network? The answer does not need to be yes to all of it. The useful part is knowing which answers are no, and whether each no is an accepted dependency or an accidental one.

Witches are not paid. Eggs appear on the doorstep, the wood gets chopped by somebody’s son, and nobody in Lancre has ever had a payment declined.