what do payment processors have to gain from severely limiting their usage around NSFW content? is it about public image? genuinely anti-sex values overriding business sense? theyre being bribed by somebody else? ive always been stumped on this one, shouldnt they want as broad a net as possible when it comes to what transactions they can make money off of?
i follow ana valens on bsky and im increasingly straight up flabbergasted by the decisions being made by payment processors. why do they care, genuinely, about somebody buying hentai or donating to an onlyfans? why do they choose not to profit off of sex work and related industries? is it not bad business??
payment processors aren't really the ones mainly driving the cart here, they largely follow banks' risk assessments & banks consider porn risky because it is legally contested/controversial, which in turn means it often operates with little regulation and is considered more likely to attract labour trafficking, money laundering, and in turn prosecutorial scrutiny. additionally, social stigma means porn tends to attract clients on both ends of the financial transaction who seek some degree of anonymity, which can stymie the know-your-consumer (kyc) practices that financial institutions use to offset legal liability. banks calculate that porn brings more legal scrutiny & potential economic sanctions than it does profits, and de facto impose this calculus on payment processors by refusing to work with them if they handle risk-prone industries (the banks, under US and EU law, have legal liability if they handle illegal transactions knowingly or by failing to perform due diligence; banks outside EU and US are still subject to EU/US law if they transact with customers or companies inthose jurisdictions, as this requires maintaining correspondent accounts in a US/EU bank).
other industries that are frequently 'de-risked' include crypto, money transfer services like western union or moneygram, and the private prison sector; additionally, entire regions of the world are derisked (blocked from accessing mainstream banking), such as occupied palestine, much of the MENA region, somalia, etc. strategies of 'inclusion' seek to bring these industries and areas back under white-market legal oversight by mitigating financially risky behaviour, increasing client surveillance, and reducing legal liability for banks and financial services firms. however, porn's socially contested status does complicate this in comparison to things like crypto and prison contractors, and additionally there's a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle here: porn being legally marginalised fuels its exclusion from the financial sector, being excluded from mainstream economic activity is further impoverishing, and individual transactions like buying hentai continue to be seen as drops in the bucket relative to the massive amounts of money on the line in more established industries or potential criminal prosecutions.
if/when this does change i would expect it to happen mainly in the form of massive companies like pornhub cooperating with backdoor surveillance deals, customer data handover (like for age verification lol), and performer scrutiny in exchange for enough legal status upgrade that banks assess them as acceptable clients -- continuing to leave actual porn performers, other sex workers, and even the proverbial indie porn artist largely out in the cold.
