Send money to debit cards
stripe.com
stripe.com
There are also multiple ways to build this kind of feature. Balanced is doing it 'the right way,' but you can fake it till you make it, and hope that Visa/MC doesn't get mad at you before you build out the real implementation. That way is also cheaper...
As an example of the benefit of 'the right way,' Balanced will be immediate for a large percentage of cards, rather than the 1-2 days that this page claims.
[1]: http://jonbwhite.tumblr.com/post/66853226398/how-square-move...
I don't have any special insight into how Stripe is doing it, but the extremely low cost and the '1-2 days' sounds like unreferenced refunds. I could be wrong.
The 'right way' is basically a new product, in my understanding and so, like any product, they charge what the market will bear.
The first I know of is Giftly, a gifting startup (around 2010?). Maybe there are earlier examples.
It sounds like both Balanced and Stripe will use them :-). But let's not turn this into a Balanced vs Stripe thread. It's not especially relevant for users and we'll stay out of the way when you guys have your public launch. Continued good luck!
Hey, as I said below, I'm a Stripe customer: you guys are great. Frankly, I don't even see Stripe and Balanced as directly competing. Well, Balanced is deep in a vertical of one of your products. When I took the job at Balanced, I kept on selling my books through Stripe: you guys kick ass for that use case.
> we'll stay out of the way when you guys have your public launch.
That was gonna be today. ;) :(
(Balanced co-founder)
Can't tell if that was a little jab at the end there, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. :-) My preference for and interest in Stripe as the operator of a Stripe Connect service is clear to anyone who clicks on my profile. :-)
Something I did learn today is that what Balanced really excels at is making marketplaces easy. Stripe doesn't do this well at all...at least not yet. So I think that for now, there's room for both.
The miles hounds have throught through these scenarios pretty thoroughly :)
WHILE airmiles < MAXINT do { load, withdraw, pay card bill }
Round and round the money goes. :)
Obviously the fee-free aspect was unusual, perhaps an oversight but more likely an attempt to get some critical mass in the online payments market which, at the time, was primarily only PayPal and a UK outfit called "NoChex" (which of course DID charge a fee.)
Eventually a loading fee did arrive, and a little later on, the service closed up shop entirely.
A lot of airline miles were earned at the expense of the US government.
The cost to the mint to produce a coin is far less than the face value.
Whether anyone was actually hurt depends on how the cost to distribute this way compares to the normal cost to distribute new currency.
And, assuming this method was more expensive, calculating who was hurt and by how much would take me a few hours. Maybe someone else has that more on the top of their head.
> There's no way to map debit card numbers to routing/account numbers (afaik).
> They're probably using the ATM network primarily and another method if it's not supported.
If using the ATM network, can they also initiate a withdrawal from a debit card at the 25 cents rate?
This would be a huge saving versus paying a credit card processing fee, on debit cards.
[I think I'm being overly utopian, but I don't understand why. Can someone explain it to me?]
- Stripe and Balanced ARE direct competitors, much more so than say Stripe and Braintree or Balanced and PayPal. Balanced handles the money in a bit of a different way, but the end product is very similar (i.e. receive payments from cards and bank accounts, and send payments to bank accounts [and now debit cards for both as well]).
- One or both companies may feel they have the better solution (see steveklabnik's comment above), and thus collaborating would be giving away intellectual capital for less in return
As a potential customer, you should prefer that they do work separately, because when different teams come up with different solutions, the chances are greater that at least one of those solutions is correct. This leads to greater long-term health in the industry as a whole.
I had to do some integration with Authorize.net some months ago and had terrible flashbacks to the late 90's / early 00's when they were the only real player in the game for self-hosted checkouts. Reading Authorize.net documentation does not invoke happy feelings.
Now APIs are being treated as first class citizens, rather than an afterthought, and libraries are released alongside product launches rather than being tacked on a decade later.
So much better.
This is absolutely true! Let's do a feature comparison of when Balanced and Stripe have launched some new features:
Balanced Stripe
MP payments 11/16/12 2/24/14
ACH Payouts 2/14/13 6/24/13
Push to Card 1/24/14 5/22/14
Bitcoin 2/20/14 3/27/14
ACH Debits 2/28/13 (in private beta)
metadata 11/16/12 10/30/13
auth/capture 11/16/12 6/20/13
same-day payouts 2/25/13 (2 day payouts in private beta)
Dynamic Soft Descriptor 11/16/12 3/14/14
It's tough because we (I've actually just left Balanced, and, in the interest of full disclosure, have been a Stripe customer for a few years) are so open, our roadmap is basically public. Today is the day we originally said we'd launch production push to card, not beta, so it's fun to see Stripe launch this feature today.
Does that mean you might have some free time to work on your Designing Hypermedia APIs book?
I saw an option to 'send cash' on Hangouts the other day so I presume Google is A/B testing this as well. (Don't get me started on the notion of hangouts where you can send the other person cash, it seems a bit too attractive to the webporn crowd).
Why is this a bad thing? Two adults participating in a consensual tranasction
Due to a confluence of perverse incentives across many facets of life, this becomes part of a sales funnel that recruits young people to the sex industry.
In every case it is a limited career that does not scale with age, while inculcating habits and attitudes that make traditional employment or switching industries difficult.
Powerful, happy, balanced, rich people do not tend to work in the sex trade. Can you imagine Condolezza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Marissa Mayer deciding that porn or prostitution is what they really wanted to do all along but just could never find the time for?
You say this like these people are shining examples of people doing good for mankind. They're run-of-the-mill politicians. I couldn't care less about their porn or political careers. I'm sure the void would have been filled by someone.
Powerful people do not typically choose porn or prostitution.
Sex "work" is a "job" where the less experienced you are, the more "employers" will want you. What other job prefers inexperienced people? Only exploitative ones do.
It's a popular opinion, but is it also true? For example sex professions aren't regarded specially in Germany or Sweden, do you think those people are damaging themselves more than any of the more "legitimate" professions?
I am so tired of hearing in techy circles how everything about porn and prostitution is an awesome thing. Thanks for counterbalancing against all the dudebros who think everything about selling oneself for sex is great.
(I'm pretty sure this is gonna attract a lot of downvotes, but I just wanted to get this off my chest.)
Also; down votes are for not contributing to the conversation. You're not arguing for your position, you're just thanking someone else for appearing to share it.
Also, yay bitcoin, because you.
This whole consent argument is totally flawed and is an attempt to ignore the question about whether the participants in porn and prostitution are being harmed or not. The people working in sweat shops in China are also "consenting" to do that, but we shouldn't be promoting any efforts that put more people in sweat shops.
Whether or not being in porn or prostitution are comparable to being a sweat shop worker is a different matter and a different debate, but it's a debate that should be had and not be dismissed with the consent argument.
Damn right they are. Stop idyllising the abject poverty of subsistence farming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/magazine/two-cheers-for-sw...
I'm really not sure whether I'd choose being held prisoner in a factory making high-end gadgets or scraping an existence from the soil and rain and having my family around me a little autonomy. Hobson's choice.
>In June 2011, Zhang and his teenage classmates were taken out of their family homes and dispatched to a factory making electronic gadgets. The pupils were away for a six-month internship at a giant Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, a 20-hour train ride from their home in central China. He had no say in the matter, he told researchers. "Unless we could present a medical report certified by the city hospital that we were very ill, we had to go immediately."
Or this http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5078402/workers-in-apples-... :
>The report details the push to find workers to produce the iPhone 5’s 8-megapixel camera, and the means by which companies like Flextronics International, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, recruit for positions on factory assembly lines. According to Bloomberg, companies recruit across the poor cities and villages of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Nepal to staff up the army of workers needed to create components. To accomplish that task, recruiters hire brokers, who charge families high fees — often a year's worth of wages, with interest — for the opportunity to work on the supply side.
>Factory workers were reportedly also obliged to surrender their passports to brokers to ensure they paid off their debts. This practice amounts to the very same kind of bonded labor that Apple has tried to combat in its recent supply-chain audits. According to Bloomberg, Flextronics has commissioned an outside group to conduct an investigation into the fees being foisted on recruits. Apple spokesperson Chris Gaither told Bloomberg that the company will ensure that "the right payments have been made."
Neither of those is the story I had in mind FWIW. I can find you more such reports from mainstream media if you like.
People get charged for a job, shipped out to a location; kept in a virtual confinement (eg passports taken, not allowed off campus), then sometimes the work disappears and they're left high-and-dry with a debt and still no job.
Yes I imagine many do make more in factories but that's not at all the whole story, not by a long shot.
> I don't know if Stripe or Balanced are using this feature
Could make for an interesting loyalty card program.
They already use paypal + snapchat (or skype), so it's not like it would be something new.
Also, I found out when I began working for international clients, the U.S. doesn't participate in the IBAN system. Instead we have something else which necessitates international wire transfer payments be made via an account number, a routing number, and a swift number. It's very annoying. (perhaps business accounts work differently, I get paid directly into my personal account which I'm sure is a bad idea, but it works for me).
No it is, almost all my purchases are via debit but it comes off my credit card. Most banks come with Credit cards that are just a fee-less low-liability proxy for debit that gets withdrawn from the bank account.
You're right.
Our API has been built, but we're giving private beta access to anyone that made prepayments via our crowdfunding campaign [1] first. Private beta will launch next week [2]. We want to make sure the performance (instant payouts & high coverage) is on par with our standards before a public release, which will happen later this summer.
[1] https://balanced.crowdhoster.com/let-s-push-to-debit-cards [2] https://www.balancedpayments.com/push-to-card
Make a card:
$curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/cards \
-u ak-test-2qEM0Znvd8LIVbZ01LbFHvHgab4fkNr3c: \
-d name="Johannes Bach" \
-d number=4342561111111118 \
-d expiration_month=05 \
-d expiration_year=2017
$ curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/cards/CC2mEWYlYvod2E1w3TJHOiGh/credits \
-u ak-test-2qEM0Znvd8LIVbZ01LbFHvHgab4fkNr3c: \
-d amount=10000
While we can only support U.S. Visa and MasterCard debit cards at the moment, we’re actively working to bring our transfers API to our users in other countries."
.... uhm or just use bitcoin ...
Understatement of the year.
For the rest of us, this could be pretty interesting.
For starters, there's a ton of alternatives, but more importantly giving out the debit card number is high risk - much worse even than handing out your credit card details (getting charges dropped / charged back is much more effort with a debit card) - whereas giving out your bank account details is not (if bank lets anyone do anything other than depositing money in your account with just your account details, the liability is entirely on them).
And for most transfers within the EU, you can do an online electronic transfer and get the money to the recipient in <2 hours - very often in less than 10 minutes.