

Announcing Balanced Payouts (YC W11) - frankdenbow
http://blog.balancedpayments.com/announcing-balanced-payouts

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

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ScotterC
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.

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jareau
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
I also read the article.

~~~
jareau
that was the the lazy ones amongst us :)

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

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ajsharp
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.

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losvedir
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.

~~~
mjallday
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)

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cdvonstinkpot
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?

~~~
mjallday
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 :)

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

~~~
jareau
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
"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.

~~~
jareau
I know it's a tired line, but follow that Github link to stay up to date.

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Breefield
Balanced is fucking killing it.

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lftl
Any support or plans for making debits via ACH?

~~~
jareau
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?

~~~
lftl
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.

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

~~~
zende
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.

