CONCEPT
Payment Rails
The financial infrastructure through which software revenue flows — concentrated in a small number of payment platforms that serve approximately a quarter of the world's countries and exclude the majority of the global population from the formal technology economy.
Payment rails are the financial infrastructure that allows software to generate revenue at scale. Stripe, the dominant platform for online payments to software businesses, operates in approximately forty-seven countries. The world has approximately 195 countries. PayPal extends to more jurisdictions but with significant restrictions in many. The payment infrastructure of the global software economy is built for the formal economy of the developed world — requiring bank accounts in supported jurisdictions, identity verification that assumes government-issued documentation of specific types, and compliance with know-your-customer regulations that vary by country. For developers in supported jurisdictions with supporting documentation, onboarding is administrative. For the majority of the world's population — 1.4 billion adults who remain unbanked, plus the many more in supported countries without the required documentation — the payment rails are inaccessible. The software works. The money cannot flow.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The payment gap is a specific instance of a general problem