Ask YC: Alternatives to 3rd Party Processing?
My business provides (or will provide) a payment solution in a niche market, mostly the domestic service industry, cutting costs for the vendor and providing better service and more convenience for the customer, whereas Paypal lets their users request payment against an email address, I let my users raise the invoice against a street address.
However banks see this kind of thing as "3rd party payments", taking money to give to someone else, and won't touch it with a barge pole. Paypal have a similar sucking air through the teeth reaction, they're all scared of fraud.
I'm looking for solutions, and I have two in mind at the moment, one would work, but might negate the need for the business in the not too long term, the other might not even work in getting the banks to grant me a merchant account.
So, the first option is to use Paypal, and require the vendor to have a Paypal account, and have the customer make payments direct to the vendor, I know there are several billing applications around that let people raise invoices, but they require the vendor to have their own method of collecting payments, whereas I want to provide that for my customers as well.
The problem, as the various bank reps have explained to me, is that the people making payments are not buying anything from me, and that raises issues with fraud. So I was wondering if having the customers purchase "tokens" from me, and spending them on the services from various vendors. I'm not sure if this will be enough for the banks though.
Are there any other alternatives to being a 3rd party processing application? Any that I've missed?