Kristi from Braintree here. Good news- we recently launched in Canada and the EU. We plan on rolling out support for local payment methods in 2013. You can check out what our current international payment capabilities are here: https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international

Will the international sign-up become faster (instant?) as well? For now the list of docs required is huge amount of bureaucracy and paperwork.

Would love to hear some of the reasons for that. Lack of credit card usage? rates? I'm curious and I bet companies in the space would love to hear some of the reasons why.

Can't speak for Braintree, but generally US-launched financial services take some time to expand internationally for two reasons: 1) tons of compliance and regulation unique to each country, and 2) having to interface with the specific payment technologies in that country.

PayPal is one of the best international payment options because it's had more time and money to throw at these problems than almost anyone else.

It's probably a combination of credit cards being far less popular in Europe (there are numerous local alternatives for online payment), and many of these services not being available to European companies at all.

i'm assuming it's the banks. perhaps they are less cooperative than US banks.

to most card processing gateways, their main source of bread and butter is their relationships to banks. technology comes second.