Just to be clear, I’m not saying ‘don’t do this’. It’s important that France continue to grow and that we implement the changes blocking Belgium.
France is already >50% of global OFN trade. We should support the growth and see if the models that work in France work elsewhere (documenting models in English would be a great win).
I filled in the slides - but fyi - in canada none of our users are on e-payments of any kind. They are all creating payment methods like "pay to invoice’. Its because they find editing orders and the payment mechanisms in OFN cumbersome. They don’t want lots of orders where they owe credits because they don’t trust how this works. This is partly my fault - I have not focused on showing people this either. The second reason is stripe and paypal fees. I think our users would be open to shifting - but I’ll have to coach them along (and learn myself first.)
Ok. So !
I talked to Ingenico, Stripe, Mollie and Paybox. Ayden said their offers were not adapted to us.
I summed up all elements in the ppt https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10dJjMwmLq274ecPByvhaCUUgUnNG7P7MUzRl_KkmBrA/edit?usp=sharing, including the discussion / negotiation I tried to have with the commercial guy from Stripe. I explained the ways we could get reductions on prices, but the fact that we are big open source and non profit project working for food sovereignty won’t give us better prices unfortunately 
@lin_d_hop I don’t think you got anything better from Stripe in UK right ? At least I should receive a quotation about the rates we could get if we switched from Standard to Custom and had all volumes of OFFrance as a base of negotiation… waiting for quotation.
I sent to Mollie and Ingenico an email with descriptions of seller most common cases and estimates of total volumes of transaction. I only did that on the French instance as it was hard to get data I can really use in this negotiation battle from other instances, but it’s fine !
My intention is to see how much we could get if we managed to get more users to use those payment solution, if it becomes really cheaper we could probably get much more hubs using those methods, who would make their life easier…
On the last slide, I shared my personal strategy given all those calls I had and information I could get.
Even with some hours on this topic it’s still not fully clear to me, it’s really a complex topic. I put @Rachel in cc of all my last emails with Ingenico and Mollie. I put in comments in the slide presentation the contact details of all the person I talked to. I’ll explain everything to Rachel so she can take over when I go into labour 
I want to make a last call with a French bank to clarify some points on cost when distance selling contract coupled with external Gateway. But in case I have to cut sooner than expected, You have everything to pursue the “product side” of the inception so you can choose a feature candidate to move forward on this.
I really think it’s a major topic and we are all concerned about it, and I’m totally convinced that it’s blocking a massive amount of potential users (in France for sure at least).
I had two other calls this morning, with Limonetik and Ingenico. Things are getting step by step clearer… what a messy field of investigation !
I updated the slide document, especially I think Limonetik offer is just a perfect fit to ALL our need for European vendors, which seems like … incredible, I didn’t think we could find that !
While integrating their single API, we could both propose:
This look pretty promising ! The sales woman I talked to is gonna send me the tech and product documentation and she proposed us a 1h workshop with our tech and product team to map things together and make sure we can implement their solution to match all our need in a simple way.
I’ll handover the whole investigation to @Rachel tomorrow morning, but if others want to have a direct discussion we can organize a quick call this week with more people so I can share all what I learned and you can ask all the questions you have in mind, and we can identify still the little things we don’t understand or need to investigate further in that jungle…
But to meet our need, for EU instances at least, Limonetik seems to meet them ALL for a single API integration that might not take more time than Paybox or Limonetik but unlock at once the GoCardLess need, marketplace “multi-vendor” escrow and dispatch AND Bancontact need
I’ll receive the last documentation by tomorrow normally, from Ingenico and Limonetik.
just added on Limonetik slides the tech documentation and list of all payment methods. Please check, and @Rachel it woudl be great I think in the next delivery pipe meeting to see if devs can check the Limonetik tech doc to see if it’s hard or not to integrate, and organize a product discussion to analyze the various options. Ii can be in that call if it’s this week, else I can’t promess but given the nb of hours I spent on it I think it would be great if I can be in the product call… I tried to write down everything but I have an understanding on the topic that I need to handover.
This is quite incredible news @MyriamBoure! How very exciting! You’ve done such amazing work finding this solution. 
It instantly makes me wonder if this is something we can co-finance. Are there are few partners out there that are willing to co-fund this implementation? We already agree this is in the priority queue (I think after mobile…?) and we know users really want this… is this the first example of a feature that we can also deliver with co-funding from our users?
This is great news - well done @MyriamBoure! I don’t suppose they have any plans to move beyond europe? I suspect they will, and given this is not urgent here at this point we’ll just wait
I’m now in back and forth “negotiation” exchanges with Limonetik and Ingenico. Limonetik apply after 12 month a “minimum invoicable of 1K€ per month” so that could be a bit problematic… but we can negotiate some more delay probably, we need to calculate how much and from when we can reasonably commit to a min invoicable. Ingenico doesn’t have a minimum invoicable but in their gateway or full service offer they have some admin cost and a monthly fixed fee the vendor has to pay (50€). As I said Limonetik was offering us a hybrid marketplace/gateway/full service option, Ingenico said they might be able to negotiate internally to propose us as well the marketplace option So potentially both of them could, with one API, answer all our needs, including GoCardLess option. I think we need some more discussions with both of them, and some analysis from tech people about both API, to decide with tech and product inputs which one is the best solution if both can at once meet all our needs.
About co-funding @lin_d_hop , well if it’s a priority for 3 instances which are contributing $ to global pot, I don’t see why it could be prioritized in global pipe somehow ? For OFFrance, our strategy with the creation of CoopCircuits is that if a user has a specific need and can invest money in making it happen, this use would “loan” money to the coop, who would develop the thing (through global pipe / team priorization of course) and then the user will be paid back by the coop as this feature theoretically will contribute to make our offer great to other users as well and will drive more transactions on the platform. So in theory, on top of the € CoopCircuits will drive to global pot through allocation of 40% of our turnover to global pot, we could on top drive some specific “investment funds” on some specific tasks. But we need time to implement all that, probably 6 months at least, we still don’t have the official registration of the cooperative, have not written our new website, etc. So many steps before that !
Just a quick reply - of course it can be funded by instances. But surely in a quest to be more financially secure we could also explore if additional funding can be provided by interested enterprises. If so then that means we have more money for tech debt while also delivering features our users want. Users won’t pay for tech debt but some will pay for new features. Diversifying revenue streams.
@paco and @luisramos0 had a look at Limonetik and Ingenico tech solutions.
You can find the complete findings here:
Main conclusions:
A. Adding one of those two gateways is expensive: we are looking at at least 2 weeks FTE for a dev (maybe a little bit less for Ingenico). This estimate does not include testing, product and maintenance.
B. The choice between Limonetik and Ingenico remains a product / business decision (which solution will be cheaper for the hubs?)
I believe this closes the 2 spikes we had prioritized at the gathering : Global Gathering 2019 - Day 8 - Pipe Prioritisation - DEV PIPE
I will move this out of the inception category and to the done cathegory (I will edit the title to reflect the spike aspect).
I will create a voting candidate for Bancontact (I just realized we might have mixed the spike and the work here).
In the next voting round, we will see if one of the needs (Bancontact, cheaper solution for hubs, split payments…) will make it to the top.
If yes, we will need to make the decision whether or not we take the opportunity to add another gateway in order to meet that need, given the type of work needed.
If someone disagrees with these conclusions, please shout