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Comment by bnzelener | Hacker News Reader

I read that Square Cash uses a credit card refund protocol to send money to debit cards so quickly. Is this the same mechanism?

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I use the square app daily to settle up lunch tabs with friends and whatnot. Totally free and 1-day turnaround. This seems not as good.

Square takes a hit for each transaction and makes it free for its users. Stripe has an API that allows anyone to implement this. Making it free and suffering these kinds of losses is a bad business idea.

I'm sure square can make it up in volume.

Given that Stripe charges the same fee as an ACH transfer, it sounds like Visa/MC has given them some sort of API to convert a debit card number to ABA routing/account numbers.

This is not true.

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.

(I'm a co-founder of Balanced, a payments company also building push to card (p2c) functionality [1])

    > There's no way to map debit card numbers to routing/account numbers (afaik).

You're correct.

    > They're probably using the ATM network primarily and another method if it's not supported.

Based on the settlement times advertised, it looks like Stripe is simply performing "unreferenced refunds" to debit cards, rather than using the various ATM networks to push funds out to cards. If they were using the ATM networks, you could expect sub-10 min settlement times.

[1] https://www.balancedpayments.com/push-to-card

Sub-10 min settlement times for what sorts of messages? You're seeing 220s land in that amount of time?

I mean, the funds will be available for use in the recipients bank account within 10 minutes. The API call to perform this operation will have much lower latency than that. Did I understand your questions correctly?

I current deal with ISO messages for debit cards a bit so I was more asking about the underlying protocol messages involved.

I asked the balanced guys this last time, already, but maybe you know the answer as well.

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.

Visa recently launched a feature where debit cards can receive funds. No ACH is involved.

That is only kinda true.

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