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I bet your bank has a great API for this as well :)

Balanced abstracts away this batching process and giving you events and nice json objects to deal with rather than parsing the batch file that eventually gets returned.

You could make the same argument for the card processing, if you really really wanted to you could bypass Balanced/WePay/Braintree/whoever and deal directly with the bank but for most people your time is better spent getting on with your core business.

Yep, there's no API really, just creating a file in a specific format, and uploading it to the bank after logging in. Balanced is definitely easier.

The security conscious part of me also likes that there's human, offline intervention before money leaves my bank account.

What bank do you use? Not sure of BofA has this.

The banking feature is called ACH Origination. We use a small local bank, Canandaigua National Bank, most banks should be able to do it. Writing the software to do it took me about a day.

I'm also curious what bank does this.