Ask HN: Stripe for Sending Payments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Stripe for Sending Payments?

12 pointsespadagroup9 comments

I am really impressed with how far payment processing has come from just Paypal, including all of the layers on top like Spreedly, Recurly, and Chargify, to better end to end products like Stripe and Braintree.

This is great for those wanting to accept payments, but what about those who are trying to send payments, the other thing Paypal is used for. As far as I can tell there really hasn't been a lot of movement on this front. You seem to have to rely on the solutions all of the above mentioned services are trying to fix namely, Paypal and Amazon FPS.

I think what makes it harder is the fact that there seems to be a need for some type of pseudo bank account, like Paypal has, to manage deposits.

With the exception of WePay, which I think is the only company working on this front, are there other solutions? Is this on the road map for processors like Stripe? Or is it really not that big of a market?

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Founder of WePay, here.

Quick clarification: We're actually not really working on solving the problem of helping people "send" money. Our primary focus is making it dead simple for anybody to get-up and running, collecting/accepting payments online.

We think that collecting money is a bigger pain point and a larger market.

"Sending" money falls into two categories: P2P transfers and remittances. Remittance is a pretty large market, with old (Western Union) and new (Xoom) players alike. It's not very exciting to us, and it's a difficult business to break into.

P2P is a little sexier, but the pain point is not as high, people are incredibly sensitive to cost, and it's a problem that will be "absorbed" by the bigger companies (Amex/VISA now have solutions, PayPal offers it for free, your bank will offer it soon). It's more of a feature than a real business. I actually think Venmo has an awesome product and does a great job solving this problem, but I'm guessing that it'll be hard for them to build a big business on that alone.

Would I be right in thinking Stripe is your biggest competitor?

{Closest to your business model as opposed to WU or Xoom and even PayPal}

Bill from WePay here...

We love the guys at Stripe, they have an awesome product. They provide a super simple gateway for developers. WePay provides super simple tools for anyone (mostly non-developers) to accept payments.

We LOVE to see innovation in user experience disrupting the payments industry from the likes of Square in mobile POS, Stripe for developers, BankSimple for checking accounts and WePay for SMBs & non-profits.

I should mention that we offer an API, but it's mostly for folks that want to allow their users to accept payment via their site (i.e. for marketplaces, fundraising tools, or event planning) - it's not really for recurring billing or merchant processing like Stripe. For more information, see wepay.com/developer

I think the biggest hurdle is the regulation that would be faced from a say start up PayPal now.

As you might of heard Facecash nearly died because of the money transmitter act.

You might not need banking regulation but a money transmitter in every state would be very, very costly indeed.

However there is Venmo.

All things equal, is there really that big of a difference in regulation between accepting payments and sending payments?

I don't think that is the issue. I just think it is point blank the cost of a license that I 'believe' costs around $500,000 in California.

See here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/brown.html

From what I know about Stripe they are purely making it easier for developers to accept payments and as far as I know they aren't looking at developing technology aiding the sending on money.

* Unless they have some underground project that their website doesn't mention.

I personally would love to see a service like you are talking about.

I recently did an ask hn in search of a payment service and someone else posted a similar question today. Seems like there is some need for that sort of thing.

If FaceCash were legal in CA you could use it to send payments. Right now it can only be used in MA, SC, MT, NM, AL, and ID. LA and WA are pending.

See http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/heldhosta....

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