been fascinated with OTAs and how they pay hotels whenever you make a booking. one of the more common flows goes like this: OTA (like Expedia, Booking, etc) charges your card, issues a virtual card and emails it to hotel, hotel charges that card around check-in. two card transactions, each with processing costs + plus virtual card issuance. hotels want payment assurance at check-in without taking on the risk of ACH returns. so we’re using card networks to move money between two parties that already have a commercial relationship. feels like there could be a better way?

mood heading into the weekend after the week we just had at @frame_payments . a lot coming over the next couple weeks. new customers going live, new features shipping, and some of the coolest stuff we’ve built yet.

real question I know this is non-complaint. but what do you do when you encounter this? every time I challenge the employee about these sort of rules I get responses like “I don’t know, I just work here”

as we go deeper working with these platforms, one thing I keep coming back to is how much signal we see. we see more than most processors because we also handle compliance for a lot of these platforms. we see payouts patterns, spend behavior, location, and the identity data. when you put this together, it’s a fuller picture of a user. it can flag when someone might need limits imposed before it becomes a real problem. it's a realllllly fine line though. protecting users from fraud is our job. protecting people from themselves isn't. we're not deciding how someone spends their paycheck, but we can make sure platforms have the information to make that call themselves. the signal only matters if it turns into something they can act on.