Payments Startup Balanced (YC W11) Is Processing $370M a Year

As an example of openness working at Balanced, I was fielding a question from a customer on IRC yesterday[1] about our support for JCB and Diner's Club cards: we support them, but balanced.js said we didn't. While I was talking with some other engineers about this, they just fixed the bug themselves! [2] We both win: we didn't have to drop everything and write the code, and our customer got their fix even faster.

Or when I saw that /r/dogecoin was trying to get Reddit Gifts (a customer of ours) to support Dogecoin. Since we do all feature discussion on GitHub, I was able to get them involved[3]. That one.... wasn't as productive as the bugfix. :)

1: https://botbot.me/freenode/balanced/msg/9808050/

2: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-js/pull/68

3: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1t3obk/petition_fo...

The guys at Balanced are doing a great job. I'm using their service for a product I've built to manage gyms [1] and it is working great. This is cool b/c that wasn't the original intention of how their product would be used (i.e. not a marketplace) but it supports our use case well. Also, the ACH API is one of the BIG differentiators of their product when compared to something like Stripe (which is also very cool, but lacks the processing ACH API).

[1] http://www.simplegym.co

Balanced is a great service. We use them at Wefunder and are very happy with their product and customer support. They're worth checking out, especially if you want to do ACH.

I really want to like Balanced, and we signed up a few weeks ago. Before signing up, I contacted them on the IRC channel and asked if there were any other requirements to get started and send out payments. We would be sending out approximately $160k on our first batch that we'd have to fund through a bank and I wanted to make sure there would be no delays.

I was assured that this would be fine, and no additional information would be required. Well, reality turned out to be different. After sending the funding requests from our bank account, nothing happened for a few days. I didn't want to be impatient annoying customer so I waited till day 3 and shot them an email.

Turned out the transactions were flagged by their risk management team, and that they just made a mistake by not contacting us. They did process the withdrawals that day, and while the funds have now left the bank account, our Balanced account is still not funded and we can still not send out the payments.

My customers were expecting to be paid by today. Now, due to the bank holiday, if I am lucky, they will be paid by Wednesday. These are people's mortgage and rent payments. Completely unacceptable.

Balanced did apologize but did not attempt in any way to speed up the payment process. I even offered to wire the funds as it was essential that things would go through on time.

I completely understand that there is risk management involved, which is why I contacted them to begin with. I also understand that mistakes can be made, and I'll cut them slack for that. But the fact is that I now have 100s of very pissed off customers (understandably so) and that I think Balanced could have made more of an effort to help getting this batch out on time.

Hopefully this was just a glitch and the rest will go smoothly. Like I said, I want to like them but if you are like us and are already somewhat established, make sure you are not on a tight deadline and pro-actively follow-up.

wow - more than i expected. is balanced including their payouts in this number or is the 370M just all incoming payments?

All I can say is that my experience with Balanced has been most excellent, I really love what they do.

In my experience their team is extremely responsive and receptive to feedback, to the level customers can (and do) have impact on the product itself, that's pretty huge in my book.

Very happy to see them doing so well and growing.

Big congrats to the Balanced team!

Stripe, Balanced, Braintree, etc all look like much better technical solutions (Apis, ease of integration) than what I use currently, but the pricing is SO prohibitive! Are there any plans for these guys to do Interchange+ pricing, and lower per txn down to a reasonable 10c? At the end of the day, payment processing is a commodity and I'll gladly do the extra work it takes to integrate with a cheaper processor.

As I continue to say in these threads (and it's been a long time), Balanced has terrible third-party support while Stripe dominates them.

We have this ridiculous non-overlapping issue with payment processors:

Balanced - Same day payouts (!) to WF, next-day to anyone else. ACH processing. Documentation isn't great. Third-party support is horrible. (Tickets are open on my [relatively popular] software of choice and have been for months; no timetable has been set.)

Stripe - Infinitely better documentation. Easier implementation. Outstanding third-party support. Crazy good APIs. Seven-day rolling payments (sigh).

Square - Next-day processing. Physical dongle. Easy to use web store. No APIs (for fuck's sake).

It's like each company looks at one another and figures out a way to best frustrate segments of the market, ensuring that no one provider can handle it all.

As for me, I put through low-mid six figures through Stripe and Square but I'd switch to Balanced if they would engender better support amongst third-party providers. Stripe has worked with me to cut payout speed, but it's not anywhere close to Square/Balanced. And if Square opened up their APIs, I'd leave everyone behind assuming third-party support was there.

Yeah, these guys are all better than Paypal/Authorize.net, but good god figure it out, please.

400 customers and $370m in transactions. So average customer is doing less than $1m in transactions a year.

Will be interesting to see if they can retain customers as they grow, I guess that's the reasoning behind volume pricing.

Congrats Matin and team!

Anybody have an idea as to how much Stripe is doing annually?

Do you know a "Balanced" for europe?

do they have plans for International support ?