Announcing Balanced Payouts (YC W11)

http://blog.balancedpayments.com/announcing-balanced-payouts

by frankdenbow • 13 years ago

69 24 13 years ago

blog.balancedpayments.com

mahmoudimus• 13 years ago

This was in response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026802

jareau7• 13 years ago

Here's the curl command that allows you to send funds to anyone's US-based bank account in one business day:

    curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
        -d amount=10000 \
        -d description="Math lesson" \
        -d bank_account[name]="Johann Bernoulli" \
        -d bank_account[account_number]=9900000001 \
        -d bank_account[routing_number]=121000358 \
        -d bank_account[type]=checking \
        -u 7b7a51ccb10c11e19c0a026ba7e239a9:

Domenic_S• 13 years ago

I also read the article.

jareau7• 13 years ago

that was the the lazy ones amongst us :)

ScotterC• 13 years ago

I'm very happy to see this. We've still been paying out a lot to our artists by ach by hand and it's miserable. There are apis out there provided by banks but they're god awful and require a lot of hand holding to set up. I'll be using this immediately.

jbrooksuk• 13 years ago

So does this work in the UK? I don't see anything in the Help & Support which limits the service to the USA/Canada.

jareau7• 13 years ago

Right now, we're limited to the US, but we're actively looking into options for international payouts: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/44

simonz05• 13 years ago

"we're limited to the US, but we're actively looking into options for international payouts"

I get the feeling of déjà vu when I hear this phrase.

tbrooks• 13 years ago

What I do on the 1st and 15th of every month:

1) Calculate payout totals for each organization for the prior 2 weeks.

2) Write a check to each organization.

3) Mail the checks.

So when I tell my customers that you're paid on the 1st and 15th of every month, what it really means is that I'll put checks in the mail on those days. Then you have to wait 1-2 days for mail, then 1-2 days for deposits to clear. It gets worse when the 1st or 15th land or national holidays when the mail doesn't run or banks are closed.

These fluctuations in cash flow can kill an organization. Enter Balanced Payouts.

Now it's as simple as running a query that calculates the totals and deposits those amounts to each respective organization. A half day process I did twice a month, now turned into a cron job that runs in < 1 minute.

Thanks Balanced!! (star twinkle on tooth)

Reclix• 13 years ago

hahaha this is eerily similar to the story of my life before Balanced - love their team & the product is beautiful.

Breefield• 13 years ago

Balanced is fucking killing it.

eriksank• 13 years ago

What about swift.com payments? That should be able to reach approximately every possible bank account in the world ...

jareau7• 13 years ago

We're discussing international payouts on our Github repo. Please add your 2¢ here: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/44

zende• 13 years ago

SWIFT or wire transfers are international and next-day at worst and intra-day at best, but it's really freakin' expensive—$15 vs. the 25¢ that Balanced charges.

The worst part of SWIFT though is that the recipient also gets charged on the order of $15.

cdvonstinkpot• 13 years ago

How does a non-coder use this? I don't know what all that is.

I'm just a Python noob thus far.

Will there be an interface for the rest of us?

jareau7• 13 years ago

mjallday2• 13 years ago

jareau has the right idea, go to www.balancedpayments.com - create a test marketplace and hit the "Pay a seller" button on the left hand side. Enter their bank account details and an amount and you're done.

For a production account it's exactly the same process except you'll need real money in your account :)

ajsharp• 13 years ago

At Zaarly, we use next-day ACH to pay out our sellers. It's a total game-changer. Our sellers do business with buyers, and they have the funds in their bank account the following business day. The service level of payouts has enabled such a critical part of our experience. I can't say enough great things about it.

lftl2• 13 years ago

Any support or plans for making debits via ACH?

jareau7• 13 years ago

Yeah, we've discussed this a lot on our github repo: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/2

What size transactions are you planning?

lftl2• 13 years ago

We have two use cases I'm currently looking at ACH solutions for. For the first, judging by past experience in our target market, we would probably average around $250 per transaction, with most being regular recurring transactions.

The other would be one off payments in the $10k-20k range.

losvedir• 13 years ago

Balanced Payouts looks awesome. We use Stripe to deal with PCI issues, and it means we put some degree of trust in Stripe.

I feel like when dealing with ACH and actual bank accounts, we have to put so much more trust in them because there don't exist the same protections consumers have with credit cards.

Could someone (internal or external) breach Balanced's security, grab all of the bank account numbers and routing numbers, and siphon out everyone's funds? What would be the recourse of users who lost money that way?

I want to love Balanced and is it solves a huge pain point in our start up, but I'm always cautious with our own customers' financial information. I checked Balanced's web site, but couldn't find what kind of security systems they have in place, what kinds of engineers they have on the job, etc.

mjallday2• 13 years ago

Balanced uses the same tokenization and vaulting for bank accounts as for cards so there's no way to pull the unencrypted data via the API.

Could someone grab the tokens and charge the bank accounts? Absolutely, the same as with any payment processor.

From the Wikipedia page on ACH "the consumer has 60 days upon notification to dispute a transaction in his statement" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House (not that I've personally tried this)

Announcing Balanced Payouts (YC W11)

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