
Braintree Takes On Stripe, PayPal With Debut Of “Marketplace” - dpick
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/14/braintree-takes-on-stripe-paypal-with-debut-of-marketplace/
======
ajsharp
Meh. Welcome to the party, a couple of years late. I'll stick with Balanced.
Fantastic product, incredible support. Not even a question. Braintree's bread
and butter is card processing. Balanced's is marketplaces / payouts.

~~~
lcusack
\+ 1

------
peterjancelis
So now there are 5 players in this space (that I know of).

Ordered by the launch date of their marketplace offering: WePay, Balanced
Payments, Stripe, Paymill, Braintree.

Edit: Added WePay.

~~~
ebspelman
Elliott from WePay here - don't mean to turn these comments into a corporate
stick-measuring contest, but our API has been able to support this use case
since August of 2011.

~~~
peterjancelis
Sorry Elliot I did not know that. I added WePay to the list.

~~~
lsh123
Just to keep it historically accurate, PayPal's Adaptive Payments API
supported marketplace use case since mid 2010.

Disclaimer: I used to work on it in my past life.

~~~
jareau
To keep this historical accuracy trend going: Balanced has been doing
marketplace payment for the likes of Zaarly since early 2011.

But congrats to Braintree on the launch!

(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced)

~~~
peterjancelis
Sorry, I googled your launch date, saw some TC posts from 2012 and didn't know
you guys were doing beta before that.

Can't edit it anymore...

------
forman00
Looking at Braintree's Marketplace docs, it appears you have to "onboard" each
sub-merchant you want to send payouts to, which requires entering their name,
address, date of birth, and their social security number. It then says "If
[the social security number] is not provided, we will attempt to retrieve the
full Social Security number based on the other applicant details."

So my question is: How is it possible / how do they retrieve someone's social
security number using apparently just a name, address, and birth date? (Maybe
I'm naive, but I thought socials were pretty secure)

~~~
klynch
Kristi from Braintree here. We work with one of the major credit bureaus to
cross-reference the data provided to match it with a social security number.

~~~
forman00
Ah, that makes sense, thanks!

------
latchkey
WePay has had this for years, the title is a bit sensational.

~~~
pdog
So does _Balanced Payments for Marketplaces_ [1]. Facilitating transactions is
a huge pain point for businesses, so it's a big deal to see another company
moving in to solve it.

[1]: [https://www.balancedpayments.com/](https://www.balancedpayments.com/)

