jareau

Stripe made a tender offer to equity holders in 2021 at the $95B valuation. Maybe not as high as it could have traded up on the stock market at the same time but not chump change.

He was an early investor but has no operational influence on the company.

Reading this was so refreshing. A few years ago, I shut down a startup I'd spent the past 4 years on and honestly didn't know what to do with myself. In hindsight, it was obvious I was slowly killing myself with stress but I was so attached to the company I couldn't walk away. I appreciate contributions like this to the startup/hustle narrative. Thanks for sharing, Frank!

I know Dwolla's FiSync protocol is being adopted by more banks and is zero-cost, but for Square to provide the consumer coverage most merchants expect they would have to wait for FiSync to get to a much larger scale.

How would Dwolla help Square cut out the CC companies?

hi icelander, Sorry to let you down. If you're a Balanced customer, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the transition: jkwade@balancedpayments.com

(Balanced co-founder)

Hi Keith, sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you and the Storefront team. Feel free to email me if you need any help with the migration: jkwade@balancedpayments.com.

I sincerely appreciate the faith you placed in Balanced. I'm sorry we couldn't keep it going, but you're in good hands with Stripe.

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?

You're right. See this comment for some insight on why Balanced is releasing to a private beta first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785476

(Balanced co-founder)

Happy to ask Steve to correct any inaccuracies here, Patrick. Feel free to email me.

(Balanced co-founder)

  > I don't know if Stripe or Balanced are using this feature

Yes, Balanced is.

(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

(Balanced co-founder here)

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

(Balanced co-founder here)

Balanced would be happy to discuss working with Venmo/PayPal as a vendor to power their push to card payouts if they're interested.

fraud is often priced into these systems since most payments instruments in the US aren't push-only. Sorry if it sounds like I'm justifying...

> Why is the USA one of the only first-world countries that have such prevalent usage of cheques

I'm actually thinking about writing a blog post explaining my theory behind why this is the case. Would that be interesting?

tl;dr of my theory: geographic size and decentralized gov't in the US allowed a paper cheque system to outlive other countries'

yep!

Hi theflyingkiwi42. I'm a co-founder of Balanced. Happy to answer whatever questions you have about our product and hear how we can make Balanced's ACH products better, but don't want to derail this thread. Would you mind commenting on one, or more, of our ACH related GitHub issues [1]? Or you can email support@balancedpayments.com to expand on your thoughts here. Cheers!

-jkw

[1] https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/search?q=ach&ref=cm...

dogebase?

Don't forget about the "zen" of YC: Zencoder, Zenefits, ZenPayroll, Zenbox, & Zenedy.

Kudos on this!

We do metered billing at Balanced [1], essentially "grossing out fees" and charging the merchant at the end of the day for one lump sum, rather than "netting out fees" which would require us to take our fee out per transaction. We've gotten a some praise from customers who call it "super clean [2]."

[1] https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees [2] https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-...

(Balanced co-founder here)

Good suggestion. We'll work on adding that [1]. Right now, we have those interested +1 on a GitHub issue tread [2], so we can contact them later, but you're right something a bit cleaner would be easier for you and us.

[1] https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/issues/... [2] https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23

oops forgot this:

[1] https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/423271986073063424

(co-founder of Balanced here)

Thanks! We're pretty interested in cryptocurrencies at Balanced [1]. Would love to have your support on this project:https://balanced.crowdhoster.com/let-s-push-to-debit-cards/c...

No

mangopay.com

live workshop/meetup/hack day would be really fun!

True. But we just love the experience of getting emails from AWS telling us we're paying too much and what we can do to bring costs down. Balanced is striving toward that level of transparency and customer focus.

zende, cristinacordova, I like where this is headed. Created an issue on Balanced's blog repo to discuss the topic further.

This would be a huge win for customers if we could find a way to work together to bring prices down even further!

https://github.com/balanced/balanced.github.com/issues/72

(I'm a Balanced employee)

We certainly could offer cost+ pricing. In fact, that's the status quo in most of the payments industry right now. But as cristinacordova from Stripe points out above:

"We optimize for simplicity though, as we know that many of our users don't want to read an excel spreadsheet detailing the variety of charges we incur from card networks and other parties, which factor into their overall rate. Many of our users have chosen Stripe because we abstract away all the complexity involving pricing."

Balanced chooses to offer blended, simple pricing for similar reasons.

PayPal's open pricing was part of the inspiration for opening up our pricing tiers. PayPal however sells directly to merchants. Balanced sells to marketplaces, which benefit from the aggregated volume of merchants on their platform, hence the higher transaction volume criteria for our tiers.