More cost-efficient registrations for conferences outside the United States

For many years, EDAS has handled registration payments for conferences both in the United States and elsewhere. We used PayPal to handle our credit card payments, and attendees would get billed in the currency advertised on the conference web site, possibly converted into their home currency. However, PayPal transferred the collected funds to EDAS Conference Services in US Dollars - that's the only option for almost all credit card processors, at least in the United States. This mechanism often meant that we had to convert the collected funds twice - once from, say, Euros to US Dollars and then back again to Euros, with the attendant currency conversion losses to the conference and EDAS. Payments also had to be batched, so that the conference either had to wait a while for funds or incur multiple wire transfer charges.

We are now trying out a new payment processor for all of our payments, Stripe. It allows us to connect Stripe accounts located in other countries, set up by the conference organizers. Payments are made directly to that account and will get transferred automatically to whatever bank account the organizers have set up, without the currency conversion losses.

Since this is a new feature, please contact EDAS Help for assistance in setting this up. Note that the conference is responsible for all compliance issues, e.g., making sure that no tax liabilities are incurred. But, generally, creating a Stripe account is straightforward, filling out some personal information such as address and tax ID for organizations and birth date for individual. For conferences where the financial affairs are handled by a university, this may be challenging and should be explored early.

We will continue to offer the old payment model for conferences that prefer it or cannot easily make use of the more cost-efficient model.