262 karma · joined January 17, 2011
Balanced has been doing nothing but marketplace payments since early 2011, and have a history of coming out with the functionality most useful to marketplaces (and crowdfunders) 6-12 months before anyone else:
- Next-day payouts (same-day for WF)
- Stand-alone ACH payouts
- White-label merchant onboarding
- Dynamic soft-descriptor control
We've got a lot more coming out soon, and as an open company, you'll have a voice in exactly what we build.
That said, I'm not sure what your specific needs are, but shoot me an email at jkwade@balancedpayments.com and we can figure it out. Thanks!
[1] http://www.quora.com/With-the-release-of-Braintree-Marketpla...
Balanced's mission is to increase the global economy by enabling new commerce. Our current mechanism to do that is with payments [1].
So we don't actually want to build a processing company, per se, but we're finding that's the best way to accomplish our mission right now.
At some point, it's likely that we'll have to make changes to our mechanism, but until then we feel building the world's first open source payments infrastructure company [2] is a great way to accomplish our goal.
[1] https://www.balancedpayments.com/about [2] http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008944/open-company/why-i-made-my...
If you're interested in seeing other great companies use GitHub to "open up" their company, check out Gittip[1]. Balanced's first open interactions were with Gittip founder, Chad Whitacre[2]. He's definitely one of the most forward thinking in this space.
But congrats to Braintree on the launch!
(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced)
dylandrop's already commented, but would love to get others' input
I'm head of sales at balancedpayments.com, a payments company that works with online marketplaces, so I interact with dozens of marketplace founders in a given week, and in my opinion the true P2P/collaborative consumption movement is a few years away.
[1]
Watsi (https://watsi.org) is another fully open company. They publish all of their financials. It's pretty impressive to watch.
Balanced (https://www.balancedpayments.com) is happy to be working with you as a vendor and a customer :)
Here's a sample CURL command (copy/paste to your terminal to test it out):
curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
-u da3da6de7c9311e288c9026ba7f8ec28: \
-d "amount=10000" \
-d "bank_account[routing_number]=121000358" \
-d "bank_account[type]=checking" \
-d "bank_account[name]=Johann Bernoulli" \
-d "bank_account[account_number]=9900000001"
As you know, we at Balanced are trying to encourage openness as well [1], but recently made the decision to not video record and publish (or live stream) guest speakers that come into our office. We feel this actually promotes a more honest and open discussion for the attendees. We may revise this decision, but it seems to be going well so far. We're also working on events specifically for remote audiences. Those will be recorded and published.
[1] http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008944/open-company/why-i-made-my...
But you could do it the other way around as well. Do some open source work for a company you're interested in joining/contracting for. For example, a developer wrote an iOS client library for our payments API. https://github.com/balanced/balanced-ios
https://status.balancedpayments.com/ https://github.com/balanced/status.balancedpayments.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812222
Nice job with Cropup!
A lot of the successful marketplaces these days (e.g. Airbnb) have decided to fully intermediate the payments on their platform for security reasons. They find escrow is a way to promote trust and security on their platform. Most third-party payment platforms don't allow for this. Even eBay, which uses the most popular 3rd party payments platform of all (PayPal) had to initiate a $5000 "PayPayl guarantee" to encourage sales. Other marketplaces, like Etsy, are moving away from PayPal and building their own intermediated payments system to have a similar experience as Airbnb. My understanding is that Stripe Connect is great for store builders like Shopify, which are disaggregated, but less attractive to marketplaces like Airbnb.