So non-Americans are in fact building Stripe itself. Plus America is a single, relatively homogeneous market, whereas the EU and Asia are far more fractured, complicating things massively. So it's much easier to launch in America first.
You get my point though, don't you? It's not about Stripe or the specific problem of payments. It's about solving our own problems, instead of waiting for some American startups to do it for us. Fractured and complicated things are opportunities, not just problems.
" Fractured and complicated things are opportunities, not just problems."
Maybe, but when you are talking about dealing with different currencies, banking regulations, languages, laws, cultures etc. it's mainly just problematic.
From pg's essay on "Why startups condense in America":
8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.
What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. In the US they usually begin by making something just for the local market.
This works in America, because the local market is 300 million people. It wouldn't work so well in Sweden. In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from the start.
The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many different languages. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal with internationalization from the beginning. It's significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international.
However, for better or worse it looks as if Europe will in a few decades speak a single language. When I was a student in Italy in 1990, few Italians spoke English. Now all educated people seem to be expected to-- and Europeans do not like to seem uneducated. This is presumably a taboo subject, but if present trends continue, French and German will eventually go the way of Irish and Luxembourgish: they'll be spoken in homes and by eccentric nationalists.
So a payments company like Stripe (or any other type of company really) could be commercially viable in the US by capturing a certain percentage of the market there. But to achieve the same level of success in Europe, that same startup would have to gain a foothold in multiple countries. So expansion takes more time and is more complex and difficult.
https://stripe.com/faq
So non-Americans are in fact building Stripe itself. Plus America is a single, relatively homogeneous market, whereas the EU and Asia are far more fractured, complicating things massively. So it's much easier to launch in America first.