Balanced (YC W11) Adds Bank Payments to its P2P Payments Platform

Hi there,

We use Quora as a way to answer these questions:

- http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-compare-agai...

Our customers highlight why they switched from Braintree, Authorize, Stripe etc to Balanced here:

- http://www.quora.com/Balanced/Why-do-you-use-Balanced-for-pa...

One of our many differences is that your charged/acquired funds are available to you SAME DAY (if you've got a Wells Fargo bank account) or NEXT DAY (if you're not a Wells Fargo customer).

Compare to Stripe's 7day rolling reserve or Braintree's 2 day settlement.

Your use case is very common, many companies like SellSimple / Zaarly / etc use us for that reason. Facilitating transactions is our speciality, though not necessarily all that we can do.

Happy to talk more - hop on IRC (irc.freenode.net #balanced).

    Buyer's card -> Your Balanced escrow account -> Merchants bank account
                                                 -> Fee to you

Amber on our team clarified some of the differences between Stripe and Balanced here: http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-compare-agai...

-- Flow of Funds --

With Balanced, since all of the payments are aggregated in one account, it’s up to the marketplace to keep track of how much each seller is owed and explicitly pay them out. This means full control on exactly when and what gets paid: things like escrow and custom payout schedules are possible.

With Stripe Connect, since all of the sellers have different Stripe accounts and the charges are made with their distinct API keys, the money will automatically go into their Stripe account and be paid out a 7-day rolling basis. The application can take a cut of each transaction and/or issue refunds, but you never have to touch (or worry about) distributing any of the funds. Because of this, however, payout schedules are less flexible.

-- Liability/Disputes --

Balanced provides the ability to pass disputes onto the seller, but the marketplace ultimately has full liability for chargebacks, fraud, and so on.

With Stripe Connect, each seller is responsible for charges run through their own Stripe account. This removes any liability from the marketplace, and is really useful if you want to purely be a platform of facilitating payments and don’t actually want to be involved in the risk and complexity of handling any of the money.

-- Signing up a seller --

With Balanced, each seller can be signed up directly through the API (which includes an underwriting API). However, any charges made are still the responsibility of the marketplace.

With Stripe Connect, the seller can use an existing Stripe account or create a new one during the OAuth flow (which requires a redirect to Stripe’s site). Stripe takes full responsibility for evaluating each seller.

For the application you mentioned, Stripe Connect can certainly facilitate a transaction like that. With Balanced, if something goes wrong with the transaction, the marketplace is liable for disputes. With Stripe, because the transaction is happening directly between the buyer and seller, the marketplace avoids all liability.