Happy to help refine the message

It doesn’t seem like a small barrier to me!

One thing that struck me was my Dad’s observation that if you want a bank to help you, ask for something insanely large. If you’re a modest risk they’ll spurn you as a matter of procedure; do something huge and the senior managers will take a punt. Maybe I should be walking around asking for millions of dollars.

Transferring into and out of currencies doesn’t work because part of what I do is take payment from party A, hold it for a month, then transfer to party B. If I move USD into AUD on the 1st and then back out on the 31st, there could be a big spread. I don’t have the money to hedge with and besides it would just piss people off.

I was only interested in the AUD and major currencies anyway — probably USD, GBP, EUR and JPY. Other currencies I can deal with later on. The USD is the most important, really; my core market will be stateside to start with.

There are several disadvantages to holding card details myself. The first is PCI-DSS compliance. It’s not anything I can’t do technically, it just adds overhead, complexity and paperwork to what is still a one man show.

The second disadvantage, and this is the one I care most about, is that holding card details makes you a target. If I accumulate a lot of card numbers, people will try to break into my system. I want to make the incentives for fraud and intrusion as low as possible. If someone else holds the details, that risk is off my books.

Provide multi-currency support. I need to be able to charge an amount in a currency and hold it in that currency ie, it cant be billed in USD and received in AUD. It has to be billed in USD, held in USD, then payed out in USD.

This is one is hurting you, remember that the banks see you as a small fish and expensive to service. If you were a retail store, doing the sort of over-the-counter transactions that they easily understand then you would probably be rubber-stamped by now and away. Production-line orders are cheap to service: no brains required. And think about it, suppose they design a product that fits your needs perfectly, who else is going to buy that product?

If you are willing to carry some risk on your own shoulders, I suggest that you just get any account that can accept foreign payments and let it all convert over to AUD. Then you will be more “normal” and on average the currencies will bounce around and average out. If you find yourself too far out on a limb then buy a decent chunk of foreign money (or shares / assets denominated in foreign money, whatever works) to hedge. If you can hedge against USD, Euro and Yen then maybe the exotic currencies don’t matter too much. The problem with hedging in this way is that the minimum workable chunk size is probably kind of large and if you hedge with cash (e.g. over the Amex counter) then there’s a transaction penalty on that too.

Have some method of recurring billing where I do not hold credit card details.

Many of the ISPs I’ve known were willing to keep credit card details month to month. I’m not going to pretend to know exactly how dangerous this is, but lots of people do it. The other thing that some of them do is direct bank debit, so they keep bank account details on file rather than credit cards (is this any safer?) There were a few famous cases where big lists of credit cards were stolen and the business in question just shrugged it off, I’m guessing you don’t have the connections to get away with this

I have concluded that Australia is a terrible country for entrepreneurs who arent doing something ordinary.

LOL, Tasmania is even more odinary.

I went through all htis bother some 6+ years ago. Amazed it hasn’t changed at all.