Braintree launches instant underwriting | Hacker News Reader

Braintree launches instant underwriting

pandodaily.com

67 pointsthehammer29 comments

"A recent acquisition of digital wallet company Venmo gave it another key arrow in the quiver: The promise to extend one-click payments across its entire portfolio. In other words if you’ve ever purchased an Uber cab– or anything else on a Braintree powered site– you can now make a quick one click purchase on any of its other sites."

I don't see any mention of this sharing of one-click payment info on Braintree's site. Can anyone confirm this is really coming?

Yes, we do have a universal checkout product in the works with the Venmo team. We’ll provide more details as we get further with the product but expect to see more from us on this soon, and the Pando article captures the essence of it. We want to take the seamless checkout experience that we’ve enabled for companies like Uber, HotelTonight, Fab and thousands of others and make it available across every merchant that uses Braintree and every consumer that uses Venmo.

-Kristi from Braintree

One step away from a braintree wallet!

This is a big win for Braintree as it opens up the door to a lot of great opportunities they didn't have previously. For example, when starting up a new idea, I never would go with Braintree simply because I wasn't guaranteed I'd sell enough to be worth the monthly minimum. I'd rather take the no risk approach and pay a higher fee per transaction.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who looked at Paypal, Amazon Payments, or Stripe for that reason alone.

Loving the competition in the payments space. More innovation and companies (developers in particular) win.

Reading about all these innovations in the payment market is great, but unfortunately for most of us in Europe, PayPal is still the only option that makes sense most of the time, unfortunately. :(

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.

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.

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.

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.

Signed up & was told I'd be contacted in ~24 hours -- not much different from my previous attempts signing up.

Same experience here. Not sure whats new.

Most valid applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker - as fast as 20 or 30 minutes.

The difference between Braintree and others is that when we say yes, we mean it. That means your business is good to go from day one and you won’t have to worry about paypal-like shut downs.

Kristi from Braintree

20-30 min also for all the international countries?

Their sign up form seems to be only for the US, so is the instant underwriting news absolutely correct or is the instant thing for only one of the 200 countries in the world?

At least just a few days ago the international forms and documentation they asked for to sign up was miles long.

@jkalkundi - Kristi from Braintree here.

Currently, the instant underwriting process is only available to our US based merchants. We've made underwriting for merchants outside the US easier than many of the current international alternatives. But we’re still working hard to make sign-up instantaneous for merchants based outside the US and expect to be there soon. As you probably already know, international banks can often be much more risk averse.

Also, any plans for latin-america (I'm from Colombia). Paypal open here and then close, and I can't get out the money (except buying stuff). Now I'm with fastspring but wish to have options...

We're working on it, but no timeline. You can sign up to be notified when we become available in Latin America here: https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international

I don't understand how instant underwriting works. I thought the the reason it normally takes a while to get set up to take credit cards is because your merchant account provider is liable to the credit card providers for chargebacks, even if they can no longer collect that money from you because you went under months before.

Who assumes the risk for chargebacks in the instant underwriting scenario? How does that party control their risk?

Kristi from Braintree here.

We wrote our own underwriting software that connects our online signup process with years of data and experience underwriting tech companies. That combination of better software, years of data and more experience with tech companies makes us way more efficient than traditional payment providers.

As for who assumes the risk: the merchant is responsible for chargebacks first. If the merchant fails to cover those chargebacks, the risk then typically sits with the payment provider. If the payment provider is not able to cover the risk, the bank then stands behind the payment provider.

pretty sure you are just an aggregator. Visa & MC are making this more 'feasible'

Kristi from Braintree again.

All of our merchants get their own merchant account during our onboarding process.

Admittedly, it's a complex process behind the scenes. We know that a lot of people are interested in how we do this, and we want to be completely transparent about our business practices. We plan on putting out a blog post explaining it all in detail in the coming weeks.

You can subscribe to our RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/braintree for updates.

I've tried on occasion to figure out all the players involved in processing a payment, and their relationships and responsibilities. It is complicated because (1) so many companies offer multiple services (gateway, merchant account, etc) and their documentation blurs the distinction, and (2) some companies use different names for the same thing.

Here was my best attempt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445866

If your blog post could cover all the components I tried to cover there--but without the errors I probably made and with the gaps filled, I and many others would be grateful and ecstatic.

I'm not sure if this is comparable to Stripe's signup process.

I just tried signing up from: https://apply.braintreegateway.com/

At the end of it, my application for queued to be manually reviewed (~24 hrs) by an underwriter. Am I missing something here ?

Yeah the article says something about a 30-min process.

I suppose "same-day" would be more appropriate than "instant", but honestly what do you expect from Pando Daily?

UPDATE: My application was approved within 30 minutes.

That's great! Not sure if you saw this answer to @davidandgoliath where I elaborate a little more on our process:

Most applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker - as fast as 20 or 30 minutes.

The difference between Braintree and others is that when we say yes, we mean it. That means your business is good to go from day one and you won’t have to worry about paypal-like shut downs.

Kristi, Braintree

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