
Payments Startup Balanced (YC W11) Is Processing $370M a Year - steveklabnik
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/16/balanced/
======
steveklabnik
As an example of openness working at Balanced, I was fielding a question from
a customer on IRC yesterday[1] about our support for JCB and Diner's Club
cards: we support them, but balanced.js said we didn't. While I was talking
with some other engineers about this, they just fixed the bug themselves! [2]
We both win: we didn't have to drop everything and write the code, and our
customer got their fix even faster.

Or when I saw that /r/dogecoin was trying to get Reddit Gifts (a customer of
ours) to support Dogecoin. Since we do all feature discussion on GitHub, I was
able to get them involved[3]. That one.... wasn't as productive as the bugfix.
:)

1:
[https://botbot.me/freenode/balanced/msg/9808050/](https://botbot.me/freenode/balanced/msg/9808050/)

2: [https://github.com/balanced/balanced-
js/pull/68](https://github.com/balanced/balanced-js/pull/68)

3:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1t3obk/petition_fo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1t3obk/petition_for_reddit_to_accept_dogecoin_as/ce47kh5)

------
harrisreynolds
The guys at Balanced are doing a great job. I'm using their service for a
product I've built to manage gyms [1] and it is working great. This is cool
b/c that wasn't the original intention of how their product would be used
(i.e. not a marketplace) but it supports our use case well. Also, the ACH API
is one of the BIG differentiators of their product when compared to something
like Stripe (which is also very cool, but lacks the processing ACH API).

[1] [http://www.simplegym.co](http://www.simplegym.co)

~~~
lbotos
I might be lying, but I think stripe recently enabled ACH support?

EDIT: [https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-
stripe](https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe)

~~~
rmanisha
I believe harrisreynolds was talking about ACH debits:
[https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-
debits](https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-debits)

~~~
harrisreynolds
Correct. Stripe can do ACH payouts (credits) but cannot pull money from a bank
account for a payment (ACH debit).

~~~
theflyingkiwi42
You can also not fund stripe to do ACH payments. So if you have your own
merchant account with much lower rates, you cannot use Stripe to pay out.

You can with Balanced, which is awesome (in theory).

------
gbelote
Balanced is a great service. We use them at Wefunder and are very happy with
their product and customer support. They're worth checking out, especially if
you want to do ACH.

------
theflyingkiwi42
I really want to like Balanced, and we signed up a few weeks ago. Before
signing up, I contacted them on the IRC channel and asked if there were any
other requirements to get started and send out payments. We would be sending
out approximately $160k on our first batch that we'd have to fund through a
bank and I wanted to make sure there would be no delays.

I was assured that this would be fine, and no additional information would be
required. Well, reality turned out to be different. After sending the funding
requests from our bank account, nothing happened for a few days. I didn't want
to be impatient annoying customer so I waited till day 3 and shot them an
email.

Turned out the transactions were flagged by their risk management team, and
that they just made a mistake by not contacting us. They did process the
withdrawals that day, and while the funds have now left the bank account, our
Balanced account is still not funded and we can still not send out the
payments.

My customers were expecting to be paid by today. Now, due to the bank holiday,
if I am lucky, they will be paid by Wednesday. These are people's mortgage and
rent payments. Completely unacceptable.

Balanced did apologize but did not attempt in any way to speed up the payment
process. I even offered to wire the funds as it was essential that things
would go through on time.

I completely understand that there is risk management involved, which is why I
contacted them to begin with. I also understand that mistakes can be made, and
I'll cut them slack for that. But the fact is that I now have 100s of very
pissed off customers (understandably so) and that I think Balanced could have
made more of an effort to help getting this batch out on time.

Hopefully this was just a glitch and the rest will go smoothly. Like I said, I
want to like them but if you are like us and are already somewhat established,
make sure you are not on a tight deadline and pro-actively follow-up.

~~~
rmanisha
Thanks for calling us out on this. We're working to make sure this type of
miscommunication doesn't continue to occur.

If you have any other issues maintaining your payout schedule please email me
directly at manisha at balancedpayments dot com.

------
poppin3k
wow - more than i expected. is balanced including their payouts in this number
or is the 370M just all incoming payments?

------
joonas
All I can say is that my experience with Balanced has been most excellent, I
really love what they do.

In my experience their team is extremely responsive and receptive to feedback,
to the level customers can (and do) have impact on the product itself, that's
pretty huge in my book.

Very happy to see them doing so well and growing.

------
ajaymehta
Big congrats to the Balanced team!

------
jeffblake
Stripe, Balanced, Braintree, etc all look like much better technical solutions
(Apis, ease of integration) than what I use currently, but the pricing is SO
prohibitive! Are there any plans for these guys to do Interchange+ pricing,
and lower per txn down to a reasonable 10c? At the end of the day, payment
processing is a commodity and I'll gladly do the extra work it takes to
integrate with a cheaper processor.

~~~
zende
(ceo of balanced)

We don't have any plans to offer interchange+ pricing. We found that would
create more work for our customers. The predicability in pricing is part of
the value that Balanced provides.

~~~
jeffblake
OK, but you can't get more "open" than interchange plus :)

------
icelancer
As I continue to say in these threads (and it's been a long time), Balanced
has terrible third-party support while Stripe dominates them.

We have this ridiculous non-overlapping issue with payment processors:

Balanced - Same day payouts (!) to WF, next-day to anyone else. ACH
processing. Documentation isn't great. Third-party support is horrible.
(Tickets are open on my [relatively popular] software of choice and have been
for months; no timetable has been set.)

Stripe - Infinitely better documentation. Easier implementation. Outstanding
third-party support. Crazy good APIs. Seven-day rolling payments (sigh).

Square - Next-day processing. Physical dongle. Easy to use web store. No APIs
(for fuck's sake).

It's like each company looks at one another and figures out a way to best
frustrate segments of the market, ensuring that no one provider can handle it
all.

As for me, I put through low-mid six figures through Stripe and Square but I'd
switch to Balanced if they would engender better support amongst third-party
providers. Stripe has worked with me to cut payout speed, but it's not
anywhere close to Square/Balanced. And if Square opened up their APIs, I'd
leave everyone behind assuming third-party support was there.

Yeah, these guys are all better than Paypal/Authorize.net, but good god figure
it out, please.

~~~
zende
(ceo of balanced)

> Tickets are open on my [relatively popular] software of choice and have been
> for months; no timetable has been set.)

I'm sorry to hear that. What software would you like to see Balanced support?

~~~
icelancer
This was opened 11 months ago:

[https://github.com/balanced/balanced-
api/issues/268](https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/268)

But it appears it was updated just yesterday by someone with WP experience, so
maybe it will be done soon? Would love to test it out.

------
nedwin
400 customers and $370m in transactions. So average customer is doing less
than $1m in transactions a year.

Will be interesting to see if they can retain customers as they grow, I guess
that's the reasoning behind volume pricing.

~~~
GuiA
It's kind of hard to infer anything from those 2 numbers alone. Given the
nature of the payments industry, it wouldn't be surprising if they had 10
customers account for $300m and the rest processing a few $10s/$100s k a year.

------
rmorrison
Congrats Matin and team!

------
lquist
Anybody have an idea as to how much Stripe is doing annually?

------
leoplct
Do you know a "Balanced" for europe?

~~~
mahmoudimus
(Balanced employee)

Hi there! Yes, have you looked @ MangoPay? We have a great relationship with
them.

------
kyriakos
do they have plans for International support ?

~~~
sleepyhead
[https://support.balancedpayments.com/hc/en-
us/articles/20013...](https://support.balancedpayments.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200135940)

+1 for not encouraging +1 to GitHub issues.

~~~
steveklabnik
One of the reasons we encourage people to leave a comment is that when we
actually implement the feature, everyone who has +1'd gets automatically
notified.

~~~
sleepyhead
Yes, there is the "subscribe" button for notifications though. I'm just
generally annoyed with people +1'ing GitHub issues. While I'm not a huge fan
of adding a +1/like button to comments/issues in GitHub it does seem to be the
only solution to people adding +1 everywhere.

