

Ask HN: Web Startup Friendly Banks / Accounts / Payments / Etc - dryicerx

I am sure there are quite a few of us wondering about this. I've been on the technical side of things forever, and I'm trying to figure out the cash flow and banking side of things for a service I am working on (to receive subscriptions/payments).<p>Any Recommendations on Banks which are Web Startup Friendly (go big banks like Citi or BoA, or go small)? Type of account (any special accounts I should know of)? Payment processing and gateways (eg. FirstData)? Any type of other services I should know of (considering Spreedly)?<p>And anything else I should be vary of regarding this subject. External resources on this matter would be nice... although having a hard time finding sites that go over this process.<p>For example I am thinking WebApp -&#62; Spreedly -&#62; FirstData -&#62; Citi SmallBusiness Account. Is that sane?
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jacquesm
Have a look at ccbill and epoch.

Try to get your own merchant account by all means if you can.

As for banks, any mid sized or large bank that will take your business will
do, the bank itself is not that critical (other than that it would be nice if
they stayed in business).

FirstData is a gateway, not an IPSP, and it would take you a lot of time,
money and certification fees to get connected to them. Having an IPSP in
between will save you a ton of heachaches, as well as lower your profile as a
target. The price of hosting for servers that are certified is also much
higher than for run-of-the-mill webservers because you have to ensure that
physical security of your server is warranted at all times, and most hosting
facilities can not do that (they have customers visiting the server rooms and
unless you have your own locked rack people will have access).

The downside is that you will not have the customer card info/cvv information
so if you ever have to switch IPSPs you are basically starting from scratch.

In practice this is only a problem when an IPSP falls over, but as the IBill
and DMR history shows this occasionally does happen and it takes thousands of
merchants down with them.

One more reason to get that merchant account of your own, at least like that
you'll get your money if the something bad happens.

I use vxsbill myself, it is run by friends of mine, but the downsides for
people from the US (which I assume applies to you) is that you need a dutch
presence to make use of them and the application fees are steep.

The upside is that they are rock solid (or at least have been to date), each
and every one of their customers has a separate merchant account, so a misstep
by one customer does not affect the others.

Without segregated merchant accounts that is a very real risk.

~~~
dryicerx
This is really good information, thank you! I didn't think about getting my
own merchant account, seems like getting one is indeed a good idea.

And regards to FirstData, I am not planning on using them directly, but
through Spreedly (who in turn just abstract the connection with FirstData and
security and give a easy API to work with, but I may be wrong, this is simply
from some information I gathered in the past day). Now that you mention it, I
will look more deeply in to it.

~~~
jacquesm
Spreedly looks very much like vxsbill in concept, from what I get they
basically handle the transaction through a common API independent of the
gateway that it is sent to.

What I like about their way of doing things is that you get to host the
payment page if you want, this will definitely positively affect your
conversion rate.

Judging by the FAQ they are not yet PCI compliant but they hope to be
certified soon.

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kareemm
In addition to SPreedly, check out cheddargetter.com and recurly.com.

