Stripe Vs Moneris

A curiosity: why is Canadian fintech Venn, which provides modern banking like corporate cards, invoicing, and payments, using US-based Stripe instead of Canada-based Moneris for its payment feature?

Some background: I bank (partially) with Venn and recently discovered they'll generate invoices our clients can pay by credit card, through a Stripe integration. In SaaS circles, Stripe is famous as the simplest way to set up payments.

But Canada has its own payment processor in Moneris, which at high volume has decently lower fees. Shouldn't Venn, priding itself on its Canadian-ness, offer a smooth integration with it?

I can't read their minds, but I've got a strong guess. Signing up with Stripe is a few clicks: five minutes and you're receiving payments. Signing up with Moneris is your typical legacy banking application: talk to people, fill out forms, send over documents, wait days for approval. Venn cares more about dragging business banking into the modern age than about its Canadian origins. Moneris's signup process doesn't fit that picture.

The lesson: painfully slow onboarding is a silent killer. Even with lower transaction fees, I won't be switching to Moneris any time soon, because the payback period on all that time and hassle is too long. And if your product can't avoid painful onboarding (enterprise software, say), you have to be insanely better than your competition, not just marginally better.

Venn didn't choose American over Canadian; they chose five minutes over five days.