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Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

As a SaaS vendor with customers in the EU, bank transfers have been a huge pain for us. We have to log into the bank website to confirm we’ve received an amount. Then we have to match it up with an invoice, mark it as paid, etc.

Conversely, with a debit/credit card that’s all automated. No manual labor involved.

Could we automate international bank transfers? Probably. But customers end up using a debit/credit card because it’s the only option offered.

We recently rolled out ACH bank transfer payments (US only) and offered an amazon gift card for anyone who wanted to switch. <5% of our customer base utilized this option.

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You may want to look into the SEPA direct debit system. It lets you send a file to your bank to request transfers and they send you back a file with the results.

You have to register for a debitor identifier and ask your customers for permission to debit their accounts first but overall it works well and can be automated. It's the standard way to do direct debits in Europe.

Direct debit doesn't work with all companies, it certainly would not work with ours. It gives too much control to outside parties.

Within SEPA direct debit, you can reverse a charge if it was unwarranted.

In my experience, it's a lot more common and accepted than credit card business payments in Europe.

European accounting and/or invoicing software can automatically read in your bank statements, detect paid invoices and mark them as paid, no manual work!

Choose a bank with API. My bank has it and it is easy to automate this process.

Any recommendations?

Czech Fio banka is the one I use, http://fio.cz Allows you to create read only or full access tokens.

After PSD 2 directive comes into effect (expected 2019?) all European banks will have to have an API.

Actually we’ve been prepping for 2018 launch.

Who is we? :)

The world is small... I always liked Fio, they had documented API and you could do whatever you wanted even in ages, when other banks insisted on using their software.

Soon or later all banks in Europe because of psd2.

You might also want to check out figo and fidor.

GoCardless (YC S11) allow you to accept direct debit payments across Europe:

https://gocardless.com/

This is not available for businesses based in the USA[1]. Also, the maximum amount for a single transaction is €5,000, which is inadequate for many (most?) B2B SaaS products.

[1] https://gocardless.com/faq/merchants/international-payments/

[2] https://gocardless.com/faq/merchants/

edit: link #2

Even in the US, I can't pay a $5000 invoice on a credit card. That's over the threshold where either they accept a purchase order, or we can't use them at all.

> have been a huge pain for us

Opportunity, business idea seekers!

This! In a world where very startup tries to deal with "sexy" problems like ML, AI, blockchain / distributed ledger, ... there is a lot that can be done to just ease the problems real enterprises have. This is for sure one of them - payment processor which takes CC and SEPA, with proper API and automations.

Stripe offers SEPA

well blockchains are about payments

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