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klynch

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Community manager at Braintree. The world is in the middle of a shift in the way we do business, and I love being a part of the transition. Interested in customer engagement, how human beings learn, and the galaxy.

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Braintree here. Gave the same response below in the thread,but wanted to make sure to address here as well. You all are right. Getting a merchant account and setting up a foreign currency account has been notoriously difficult to get in the past with extremely high fees and approval requirements. This is no longer the case. Braintree sponsors merchants to get setup with a merchant account in Australia and has built an accelerated process to creating foreign currency accounts.

If a provider states that no merchant account is required, you are most likely being placed on an aggregated merchant account. This has many disadvantages for the merchant as you are grouped under one umbrella account. As the provider grows, this becomes unsustainable and often leads to poor customer experiences (a la Paypal account freezes).

We're working to create a sustainable solution where customer service and great software are the central focus. We'll be constantly improving the on-boarding timeline and look forward to helping the fast growing tech scene in Australia. Always happy to answer any questions about anything payments or e-commerce related, just let us know!

Braintree here. You all are right. Getting a merchant account and setting up a foreign currency account has been notoriously difficult to get in the past with extremely high fees and approval requirements. This is no longer the case. Braintree sponsors merchants to get setup with a merchant account in Australia and has built an accelerated process to creating foreign currency accounts.

If a provider states that no merchant account is required, you are most likely being placed on an aggregated merchant account. This has many disadvantages for the merchant as you are grouped under one umbrella account. As the provider grows, this becomes unsustainable and often leads to poor customer experiences (a la Paypal account freezes).

We're working to create a sustainable solution where customer service and great software are the central focus. We'll be constantly improving the on-boarding timeline and look forward to helping the fast growing tech scene in Australia.

Kristi from Braintree here. To be totally honest, although we've been beta testing for a few months, we're still new to the market, and there are still some unknowns.

We could've launched with a standard high rate to cover for those, but we decided that offering custom tailored pricing would be more favorable to individual businesses. All of that being said, we're fast learners and should have standard pricing for Australian merchants within a few months.

The idea behind this offer is to help launch more startups. If you are a pre-revenue start-up or just started to collect fees for your product, then shoot us an email at accounts@braintreepayments.com, and we're happy to help.

Kristi from Braintree here. Admittedly, our legacy bank relationships left us as the middle man to their risk departments. This may be what you are referring to when you mention the "ludicrously strict risk team." This is no longer the case. Starting with the launch of our instant product, we brought risk in house. We are able to use our years of experience working with startups to develop risk processes that help us build relationships, not get in your way.

Most applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker.

The good thing about doing this upfront is that you don't have to worry about running into any issues (like unexpected shutdowns) as your processing ramps up.

We would love to do this for startups around the world. It's tricky to do with international banking relationships, but we'll continue to work with them to bring more opportunities like this outside of the US.

@sethbannon- This is not most promotions. Our goal is to help startups get off the ground.

@davidedicillo- We're happy to help recent signups who qualify, shoot an e-mail over to support@braintreepayments.com and we'll set things right.

-Kristi from Braintree

Kristi from Braintree here. We're working pretty furiously to make the sign-up experience just as seamless for our international customers. Can't offer specific timing yet, but working hard to get there.

While the sign-up isn't quite as seamless on the international front, it is the same great software and APIs that our US clients use. So in the meantime, we'd love to work with you to get you up and running with us as quickly as possible.

Kristi from Braintree again.

All of our merchants get their own merchant account during our onboarding process.

Admittedly, it's a complex process behind the scenes. We know that a lot of people are interested in how we do this, and we want to be completely transparent about our business practices. We plan on putting out a blog post explaining it all in detail in the coming weeks.

You can subscribe to our RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/braintree for updates.

That's great! Not sure if you saw this answer to @davidandgoliath where I elaborate a little more on our process:

Most applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker - as fast as 20 or 30 minutes.

The difference between Braintree and others is that when we say yes, we mean it. That means your business is good to go from day one and you won’t have to worry about paypal-like shut downs.

Kristi, Braintree

Kristi from Braintree here.

We wrote our own underwriting software that connects our online signup process with years of data and experience underwriting tech companies. That combination of better software, years of data and more experience with tech companies makes us way more efficient than traditional payment providers.

As for who assumes the risk: the merchant is responsible for chargebacks first. If the merchant fails to cover those chargebacks, the risk then typically sits with the payment provider. If the payment provider is not able to cover the risk, the bank then stands behind the payment provider.

Yes, we do have a universal checkout product in the works with the Venmo team. We’ll provide more details as we get further with the product but expect to see more from us on this soon, and the Pando article captures the essence of it. We want to take the seamless checkout experience that we’ve enabled for companies like Uber, HotelTonight, Fab and thousands of others and make it available across every merchant that uses Braintree and every consumer that uses Venmo.

-Kristi from Braintree

@jkalkundi - Kristi from Braintree here.

Currently, the instant underwriting process is only available to our US based merchants. We've made underwriting for merchants outside the US easier than many of the current international alternatives. But we’re still working hard to make sign-up instantaneous for merchants based outside the US and expect to be there soon. As you probably already know, international banks can often be much more risk averse.

Most valid applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker - as fast as 20 or 30 minutes.

The difference between Braintree and others is that when we say yes, we mean it. That means your business is good to go from day one and you won’t have to worry about paypal-like shut downs.

Kristi from Braintree

Kristi from Braintree here. From a technical perspective, having multiple simultaneous merchant accounts shouldn't be a problem. If you'd like, shoot us some details, and we can see how we can help - support@braintreepayments.com

Good observations and I couldn't agree more with this line: "great names are the byproduct of great products not the other way round."

It's still important to be thoughtful about the name, but it's definitely not worth spending lots of $$$ or dwelling on for weeks.

Kristi from Braintree here.

We have multiple banking partners throughout the world who have different pricing structures and are willing to accept different merchant types. We're working to standardize this to make it easier on you. As always, our pricing is transparent and we don't have any hidden fees.

This is Kristi from Braintree.

@huxley - this pricing https://www.braintreepayments.com/pricing is for U.S. based customers.

@entropyneur - we've not published international pricing because we work with multiple banking partners throughout the world who have different pricing structures and accept different merchant types. We're working on standardizing this and making it easier for you. We have a ton of other improvements in the pipeline that will continually improve our offering.