

Balanced Payments (YC W11) Raises $1.4M To Provide A Platform For P2P Markets - whit537
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/balanced-marketplace-payments/

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colinsidoti
Less than two weeks ago, this scathing comment showed up on HN about
BalancedPayments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744982>

Did Balanced ever respond? The comments here about the founders are quite
opposite.

~~~
skrish
As a side note, that particular thread has some excellent comments about
chargebacks, risk detection etc.,

Gem of a discussion on that thread apart from the scathing attack.

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irollboozers
I don't know what it is about YC payment companies, but they are all awesome.
Would you believe me if I said that these guys are nicer and friendlier than
Stripe?

Congrats guys! We're definitely looking forward to moving to Balanced.

~~~
zende
Thanks irollboozers! Looking forward to having you on board.

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Jsarokin
We're using Balanced @ our startup - Really great integration, and support is
crazy fast. Keep it up guys!

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dmr
As a dev and a user, I love that these guys are creating a better payments
platform. Here's to the all the marketplaces that before Balanced were just
twinkles in their founders' eyes.

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whit537
Afaict, the really new thing Balanced is doing that I haven't seen anywhere
else is programmatically authorizing merchant accounts. Is anyone else doing
that?

~~~
zende
> Afaict, the really new thing Balanced is doing that I haven't seen anywhere
> else is programmatically authorizing merchant accounts.

There's three main things marketplaces have expressed that they like about
Balanced: 1\. Compliance. This includes PCI and the ability to underwrite
merchants through the API 2\. Payouts. Depositing money in a merchant's bank
account the next business day and having full control over _when_ you issue
the deposit. With this launch, we made it easier for marketplaces to use us
just for payouts—something we saw existing customers doing 3\. Taxes. We
handle the tax reporting for the merchants

There's no one else that provides any of the three above.

~~~
jjb123
Extremely valuable competencies for marketplace payments - excited to see you
guys grow.

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ScottBurson
Bug report: I just went to your home page and got the message "Put money in
your seller's bank account by: UNDEFINED NAN/NAN".

~~~
mjallday
Cheers Scott, fix on the way :)

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tiffani
Happy to see this! I've had nothing but great, helpful experiences with the
folks over at Balanced.

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dikbrouwer
Guys, a typo on your "overview" page:

... and 2.9% = 30¢ when you successfully ....

This should be 2.9% + 30¢ I believe.

~~~
mahmoudimus
Whoops. Thanks for that! Fixed.

~~~
dikbrouwer
Great! Love the product btw, I really think it solves a clear pain point. One
feature request: give the option to send checks (through the API preferably)
vs. an ACH. An ACH is not always feasible.

~~~
mahmoudimus
Thanks! We've definitely explored this option. Part of being an open company
is that we publicly discuss our roadmap, I'd love it if you just +1'ed via our
github tracker so you can get updated about our progress in that direction.

If we have enough interest on this feature, we'll reopen the issue and track
its progress publicly:

<https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/69>

~~~
wtvanhest
I just tried clicking the blog link from the bottom of this page
<https://www.balancedpayments.com/community> and got this error:

SSL Error

This is probably not the site you are looking for! You attempted to reach
blog.balancedpayments.com, but instead you actually reached a server
identifying itself as secure.static.tumblr.com. This may be caused by a
misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on
your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially
harmful) version of blog.balancedpayments.com. You should not proceed,
especially if you have never seen this warning before for this site.

~~~
mahmoudimus
This has been fixed! Thanks for reporting:)

~~~
wtvanhest
No prob. Good luck!

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anilv
Balanced is awesome. Really helpful people!

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jamoes
What's your bitcoin strategy?

It seems like bitcoin could really complement this type of business: The
escrow service would be very useful to people wishing to pay in bitcoin. And
at the same time, Balanced could benefit from the significantly lower fees and
zero risk of fraud that bitcoin payments offer.

~~~
zende
We haven't seen much demand for supporting bitcoin. If you would like us to
support bitcoin, could you create a GitHub issue, so we can track interest?

<https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues>

We use GitHub to track feature requests like international support:
<https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23>

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marek12886
Great and innovate product. Keep it up!

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jjb123
Excellent to see Balanced getting love for the great product they've built!
Congrats guys!!

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jamesnine
balanced ftw! I love the fact that I can send ACH payments immediately.

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fduran
You may want to change in the blog URL https -> http

~~~
mahmoudimus
Ah thanks! Love your attention to detail here.

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littlegiantcap
You guys planning on integrating with Dwolla?

~~~
zende
We haven't seen much demand for supporting Dwolla. However, could you create
an issue on GitHub if you would like us to support Dwolla?
<https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues>

