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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

This is not true.

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