Braintree Takes On Stripe, PayPal With Debut Of “Marketplace”

Meh. Welcome to the party, a couple of years late. I'll stick with Balanced. Fantastic product, incredible support. Not even a question. Braintree's bread and butter is card processing. Balanced's is marketplaces / payouts.

So now there are 5 players in this space (that I know of).

Ordered by the launch date of their marketplace offering: WePay, Balanced Payments, Stripe, Paymill, Braintree.

Edit: Added WePay.

Looking at Braintree's Marketplace docs, it appears you have to "onboard" each sub-merchant you want to send payouts to, which requires entering their name, address, date of birth, and their social security number. It then says "If [the social security number] is not provided, we will attempt to retrieve the full Social Security number based on the other applicant details."

So my question is: How is it possible / how do they retrieve someone's social security number using apparently just a name, address, and birth date? (Maybe I'm naive, but I thought socials were pretty secure)

WePay has had this for years, the title is a bit sensational.