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Comment by btmerr | Hacker News Reader

Hey there, I'm Brian Merritt, the CEO of SEED. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. You can also email me at brian at seed.co.

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One of the key elements of business banking is short/medium term credit (e.g. overdrafts and small business loans). These are typically offered by a company's main bank (as this bank has complete info on the company's past cash flows).

Do you intend to offer loans and/or overdrafts, either yourselves, or in partnership with other companies?

Short answer, yes. We have a lot of ideas about how to offer credit and lending products, both ourselves, and with partners. We're spending a lot of time talking to companies to understand the current pain points, and we'll be able to share more soon.

What are the current rates for international payments. I'm very interested in the pricing structure here since it's an area that could certainly use some disruption!

It's difficult to answer this question, because the nature of foreign exchange and banking in different countries makes it hard to generalize.

What I can say right now is that our pricing will be transparent, consistent, and as low as possible. We will not seek to profit off of international payments fees, and any fees we pass through will be shared transparently.

For comparison, we have heard of international transactions processed by banks that are charged upwards of 7% of the value of the transaction. Our pricing will be <1% in most cases.

I switched to Simple last year for my personal account, and I have wanted a similar alternative for my business accounts for a long time. Currently there is no way to apply for membership on your site- when do you expect to start taking applications?

I will take a peek at your API in the morning :)

If you fill out the form we'll send you an invite when we're able to accept new customers. There's a waiting list but we're working hard to get everyone on board as soon as possible.

It turns out ad block was blocking the form :)

I don't see an API method for depositing checks- is that something you plan to offer?

Also, no method for getting transaction history?

We're working to update our docs as quickly as possible, so transaction stuff will be there soon. As for checks, we're not planning on supporting check deposit via API initially. There are a few reasons:

1. Remote Check Deposit is a protected technology owned by Mitek and/or USAA, and we're limited in how we can use it.

2. Checks are a huge fraud vector, so we're going to be careful about how we support them.

3. Checks are literally the worst payment mechanism ever invented and we would love to see them die in a fire. So we're going to discourage their use as much as possible while providing better, easier to use payment mechanisms.

That having been said, you will be able to deposit checks into SEED, just not via API for now.

Cool, I agree that checks are terrible, but I still get more customers paying by check than any other method :)

Regarding item 1: Just curious- Do you mean Mitek and/or USAA have a patent on the process? Or do they own the only technology approved for some back-end process by the Federal Reserve?

They own or co-own the patent(s). Last I checked they were still battling it out in court.

The relevant legislation that enabled Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) is the Check21 act, which you can learn about here: http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regcc-faq-check...

In theory, anyone can build a system to deposit checks via check images, but software/process patents are a (mostly bad) thing. :(

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