11 ms·

Stripe now supports ACH payments

424 points by craigkerstiens 11y ago

ROFISH 11y ago
So is it possible for simple ACH->ACH deposits? I'm looking to take out of my bank account and put into another (royalty payments for the curious). Ideally without having to hold a Stripe balance, just simple xfer.
- matthewarkin 11y ago
  You could take a look at combining ACH and Stripe Connect.
chadkruse 11y ago
@pc - curious if you have plans to integrate ACH into your Checkout product. Seems like an incredibly difficult UX problem, but I'm sure your folks are up to the challenge :)
- pc 11y ago
  No immediate plans. ACH is mostly popular for B2B use-cases whereas Checkout is optimized for "lightweight" transactions. You can obviously imagine cases where an integration would be useful but we decided not to hold up the launch in order to build that. We'll calibrate based on feedback going forward.
  - rwmurrayVT 11y ago
    @pc How do you feel about the assumed fraud risk you are taking on with this? I'd love to have a conversation with you about it (in private). You can email me at rwmurray (@) vt.edu. I know you all have quite a few vulnerabilities in your system and can't ever find a way to share them.
    - pc 11y ago
      You should definitely email the fraud team! Try mlm@stripe.com. (Feel free to CC me; patrick@stripe.com.)
rw2 11y ago
This opens up so much
fblp 11y ago
Glad to see Stripe release this, but the $5.00 fee cap doesn't seem competitive for frequent large transactions compared to other providers that have a flat fees from $0.25 like Dwolla, with more listed here http://www.merchantmaverick.com/need-know-accepting-ach-payments/ http://www.merchantmaverick.com/need-know-accepting-ach-paym.... Why the higher cost?
- pc 11y ago
  Dwolla also charges monthly fees: https://www.dwolla.com/pricing https://www.dwolla.com/pricing. You need to pay $1,500 a month in order to charge more than 10 bank accounts. In general, most providers have a lot of fine-print. We tried to come up the simplest and fairest pricing we could.
  - veritas20 11y ago
    Not sure about this. Pricing reads "funding sources" with no reference to the number of bank accounts that you can charge. http://blog.dwolla.com/connect-multiple-funding-sources-dwolla-account/ http://blog.dwolla.com/connect-multiple-funding-sources-dwol...
  - jacobsimon 11y ago
    Still, it seems unusual to charge a percentage fee. From what I understand, one of the main benefits of ACH over credit cards is the flat fee structure.
    - 0xffff2 11y ago
      Compared to credit cards, $5 is pretty flat isn't it?
    - jslampe 11y ago
      TL;DR ACH is a commodity. The business model is derived by the platforms services offered, flexibility provided, and business targeted. ACH is a heavily commoditized product. For ACH processors, then, your business model is tied to the functionality and capabilities offered by the platform. Dwolla, which has spent the last 4 years exclusively building out its ACH API, has a range of free and paid-for products and services. This allows us to offer a fixed flat-fee price point based on the additional value we bring to platforms (instant account verification, next-day processing, higher limits, holding balances, etc.). Both services do an excellent job at baking in the expensive compliance, support, regulatory, etc. into their products.
tomschlick 11y ago
Looks like the TOS acceptance button on this page is spitting out a 500 error https://stripe.com/docs/guides/ach https://stripe.com/docs/guides/ach
- pc 11y ago
  Sorry about that -- this only affects a small number of users, but we'll have it fixed momentarily.
  - raycmorgan 11y ago
    This has now been fixed. Sorry again for the trouble!
    - tomschlick 11y ago
      Thanks! Just confirmed it's working.
dubcanada 11y ago
I wonder if this means Interac Online will come soon :O that's a very big deal for the Canadian market.
- tomschlick 11y ago
  Hopefully. I've had to integrate with that in the past and it was not a fun project. I faintly remember them passing back html to inject to the user that contained iframes and a bunch of other junk javascript.
dang 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10889918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10889918 looks like another announcement about this. It was posted slightly later so we'll treat it as the duplicate in this case. Eventually we'll have some form of URL grouping when there are multiple stories on a topic.
BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
The UI component presenting the login form for major banks is troubling. It seems like encouraging users to feel comfortable entering their online banking credentials into anything other than their bank's web site is a bad move.
- cardine 11y ago
  I have a feeling that ACH payments are mostly only going to be widely adapted in instances where the purchase price is very large (5 figure+ transactions) where you have a dedicated account rep. I think it'll be quite a while before users are comfortable entering in their bank account login info to buy a $30 product.
  - tyingq 11y ago
    And where the purchase price is large, those customers don't want some 3rd party interface to send the ACH...they typically already know how to send an ACH. They just want your account+routing so they can do it. In short, this solution from Stripe fills a niche, but it's a very narrow one.
    - thesimon 11y ago
      >In short, this solution from Stripe fills a niche, but it's a very narrow one. Not too sure about that. Klarna in Europe has a similar system called SOFORT in a lot of countries processing millions of transactions [0]. According to a german article, they processed 2.4 billion euros in 2013 [1] iDEAL using a similar system (officially provided by banks though) is the most popular payment method in the Netherlands [2]. There is probably a big market for bank transfers with instant confirmation for the merchant. I agree with you though that it is a niche in the US, because credit cards are so common. Expansion in the EU would've probably allowed them to access a bigger potential market. [0]: https://www.sofort.com/eng-GB/press-releases-sofort-gmbh/press-releases/SOFORT-Banking-still-in-the-fast-lane/ https://www.sofort.com/eng-GB/press-releases-sofort-gmbh/pre... [1]: https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.channelpartner.de%2Fa%2Fsofortueberweisung-erreicht-2-4-mrd-euro-transaktionsvolumen%2C3041650 https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL
rwmurrayVT 11y ago
I hate to see this honestly. Stripe is already notoriously vulnerable to credit card fraud and this is likely not helping their cause. I'd love to know how long you should expect for an ACH payment to clear and into your bank account. The two day period for credit cards is so small. Who checks their statements every single day? This is obviously the benefit of using Stripe if you're the merchant, but it leaves you vulnerable. We can only pray that Stripe accepts some responsibility for verifying these ACH transfers. Fraud on Stripe is a two-fold problem. They've got fraudsters signing up for Stripe accounts and running cards through them. They've also got fraudsters making purchases on Stripe-based sites. Obviously, Stripe prefers that the charges are made to legitimate users. That way they're not out all the money. Edit: It appears it could take "up to 5 days" for the payments to be processed. This is entirely on the bank's side of the equation. I guess from there you'll only need to wait your 2 days (7 days for some users) to receive the ACH into your bank account. I see massive fraud coming in here.
- matthewarkin 11y ago
  The micro-deposit requirement or Plaid (logging into the bank account) should ideally minimize fraud. But for consumers ACH fraud is sadly way more difficult to deal with than credit card fraud.
  - rwmurrayVT 11y ago
    This is unfortunately not the case in reality. It is quite easy to get access to high value checking accounts for less than 50 USD. They could be personal or business. For between 25-75 USD you could get access to all the login information you need to access Wells Fargo/SunTrust/BoA accounts. You could see both Plaid micro-deposits. Even PayPal has faced this issue and they're solution was to be a huge pain in the fucking ass to users. Balancing convenience with security for ACH is not an easy task. That's why ACH is so damn hard to do online.
- zachperret 11y ago
  Plaid co-founder here. When users connect their accounts via the Plaid instant verification process, we actually allow developers to get a greater understanding of the user. Via Plaid, you can do things like validate the available balance and check the account owner's identity -- which can significantly reduce the likelihood of ACH fraud.
spenczar5 11y ago
When I last worked on a billing system about three years ago, we looked so hard to find an ACH provider. There was just nothing out there. This is an enormous advance. The problem we had was that we issued moderately large invoices monthly - they could be from $1k to $50k. We wanted to be paid quickly, so we tried to convince our customers to pay by credit card (through Stripe) and enable automatic payments, but we had trouble when customers would bump up against credit card limits. So, for our bigger clients, we were relegated to asking for checks to be sent by mail. This meant we couldn't automatically charge customers every month, and instead needed to badger them to send their check - all of a sudden, we needed an accounts receivable team. We couldn't just ignore the problem since these were our biggest accounts, too. Stripe's pricing is almost comically friendly here - credit card transactions are usually in the ballpark of 2.7% + $0.30, so even when card limits weren't an issue, we'd be paying out the nose on the transaction - 2.7% of $10k is $270. The new ACH payments would cost just $5. Anyways, this is a serious accomplishment. The underlying banking regulations and technologies around ACH are thorny. Good job, Stripe!
- amluto 11y ago
  Wells Fargo CEO can do it. IIRC it wasn't cheap unless you have high volume, though.
  - jslampe 11y ago
    I haven't seen it first hand, but lots of our current customers ditched them (and others) after working with their APIs or lack thereof (#xml). In general, ACH just wasn't built to accommodate "platforms" as an entity in the transaction cycle. Banks, while although cheap, have a problem reconciling their infrastructure and processes with today's expectations. Not to mention their services don't package or include other compliance required to leverage ACH legally (KYC, OFAC, reporting, reject handling, etc.). Bottom-line: ACH and traditional providers are not suitable options for today's platforms. Among others, banks are hemorrhaging ACH-related business to companies like Stripe and Dwolla.
    - nemothekid 11y ago
wesleyfsmith 11y ago
I am trying to build a lending platform where we by definition cannot afford to lose 3% on each transaction. I'm am thrilled to see this. We have had to hand jam our current system with a local credit union (where we literally have to print out forms and bring it to them), so being able to switch to a fully programmatic system is awesome.
itsthisjustin 11y ago
Just got my beta invite too. Got frustrated at the lack of an easy ACH payments platform long ago though and went ahead and made my own. Launched http://paynote.io http://paynote.io on January 1st of this year.
- niij 11y ago
  This looks very interesting. Tell me more! How are you offsetting the cost of fraud when payments by fraudsters will cost them nothing?
  - itsthisjustin 11y ago
    Well it's not for ecommerce for one thing. So fraud will be a lot less just in terms of use case here. This is individuals and companies are paying invoices for services rendered. There's not an area where a fraudster would gain a lot from a fraudulent payment. The ACH Payment system I'm using is also FDIC insured up to 250k.
    - 0xEFF 11y ago
      Is this for real? I just started a consulting business and have been searching for a good, inexpensive way to receive relatively large payments on my invoices. How are you going to make money? Is this good up to $50K? EDIT: I just tried to sign up, and this seems really scammy. You need a photo ID uploaded, along with my bank account details? How do I have any assurance you're not going to drain my bank account?
      - itsthisjustin 11y ago
        Interesting you find that scammy. It is for real though. I'm a consultant and it's been a real pain trying to collect large payments without getting killed on fees. The information is required by law by the patriot act for any bank transfers done over the internet. I can't get around it. It's required by law and by my ACH provider.
wesleyfsmith 11y ago
Making this system integrate with Plaid out of the box was a smart move. Plaid is so much better for users' than having to manually enter bank account and routing numbers.
fideloper 11y ago
This is super important for b2b companies that need to accept payments of multiple thousands of dollars (e.g. Annual subscription / support), which largerish companies typically will not hand over a cc for, either due to CC limitations or (usually) internal process red tape.
- tyingq 11y ago
  I would say both yes, and no. My experience in B2B is that medium to large companies will want to pay you via ACH. However they have little to no interest in entering their online banking ID and password into something like what Stripe is providing. They already make ACH payments, using their own tools, and all they want from you is your routing and account number so they can do so. Assuming you are a US company, with a US bank account, you've already been able to accept ACH payments in this way for some time. This setup from Stripe seems to be targeted at consumers, or maybe small business owners, as the purchaser. I'm sure that's a need, but probably not a huge one. Many of my customers that are medium/large businesses want to make ACH payments, almost none of the small businesses have an interest in that.
  - pcunite 11y ago
    This is my experience too. When a customer wants to buy my product and the cost is over $5K, I give them the following and it shows up in my bank in about 3 days or so. Bank Address, Swift Code, Account Number, Routing Number.
Frozenlock 11y ago
> "And so, today, we’re delighted to launch support for ACH payments for all U.S. Stripe users." Any ETAs for international? More particularly Canadaland?
- petercooper 11y ago
  Hopefully they'll get there. We're a UK based company with 90% of our revenue from US based enterprises, so moving to this would be awesome :)
artursapek 11y ago
In college I worked part-time for a music social network startup that sold songs and paid artists a commission, kind of like iTunes. I had to write a cron job that would issue the artist payouts every night by writing ACH files in plaintext and SFTPing them to SVB. 3 years later it's great to see Stripe providing this, but I will always have an oddly fond memory of working on that. It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult.
- ucsfgrad 11y ago
  I always love memories like these. Looks like you found a pain point with a clear value-add solution. Hindsight is 20/20, but I always wonder what would have happened if your startup pivoted to offering ACH as a service....
  - dopamean 11y ago
    Is this satire?
- protomyth 11y ago
  > It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult. I earned a bit of money in the 90's doing a lot of those types of data transfers. I get the feeling 70% of IT is just data munging.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    > I get the feeling 70% of IT is just data munging. The remaining 30% is, as far as I can tell, fixing bugs in the data munging code.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Leave some room for the UI folks - although that is basically getting humans to munge the data as a pre-step for the computer munging.
- silasb 11y ago
kyriakos 11y ago
Stripe should start supporting the rest of the world. I'd love to use their services.
- mcollier000 11y ago
  GoCardless is another ycombinator business providing a very similar platform for the whole of the UK & Europe. https://gocardless.com/ https://gocardless.com/
ck2 11y ago
Wait, is there no minimum? Because 0.8% on very small amounts is very practical for micro payments. $1 payment would cost a fraction of a penny. What am I missing? This will be game changing if my observation is correct.
- oddevan 11y ago
  I'd wager the only thing you're missing is the high friction involved in setting up a bank account. I've got my credit card stored in my password manager vault, and even if not, I've got that sucker memorized. Contrast that with digging through the clutter on multiple horizontal surfaces in our house to find a checkbook so I can find the routing number and account number, waiting for the two deposits to show up (because I use a small bank that hardly ever shows up on these "automatically authenticate" lists), and then trying to remember what I was trying to spend $1 on... But that's literally the only problem. The fee structure is AWESOME for micro-payments, so for the right things (small subscriptions?) this could be amazing.
  - jedberg 11y ago
    But once you've set up your bank account once, it will work on every site that takes Stripe. That's the big sell as a merchant -- chances are your user is already configured for payments. And the larger their network grows the more likely this is true.
    - nemothekid 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If both Merchant A and Merchant B are using stripe, and I authorize my bank with Merchant A, that doesn't mean my bank is authorized with Merchant B. Especially because in most cases, you can be totally transparent with the fact that you are using Stripe.
arohner 11y ago
Can this be used, or setup in a way that supports the standard invoicing model? i.e. I want an api call to email a .pdf to a customer, and then have them "click this link and enter your info to pay via checking account". Several kinds of customers, including consulting, would be much happier with a "push" model of paying, than a "pull" model.
- jaredtking 11y ago
  Our startup, Invoiced, does exactly this. You can easily send invoices through our API [1] that customers can pay from the email. Now that Stripe ACH payments have been released we will be supporting it in the near future. [1] https://invoiced.com/docs/api/#send-an-invoice https://invoiced.com/docs/api/#send-an-invoice
- matthewarkin 11y ago
  Sure, Stripe just provides the underlying payment API, you can build your own tool (or use one of many pre-built ones) that sends your customer an invoice and providing them a method to pay you per invoice.
coupdejarnac 11y ago
Somewhat offtopic- is there a way to use Stripe to hold payment in escrow or to authorize a payment more than 7 days in advance? I really like Stripe, though I am not sure it can do what I need.
- giarc 11y ago
  No, as answered by a Stripe employee. https://www.quora.com/Does-Stripe-provide-an-escrow-facility-that-allows-users-to-authorize-payments-that-would-be-taken-out-at-some-time-in-the-future https://www.quora.com/Does-Stripe-provide-an-escrow-facility...
- matthewarkin 11y ago
  Using Stripe Connect and Managed Accounts you can hold funds for 30 days. Its not legally escrow though (escrow tends to have a specific legal definition and set of rules).
calgaryeng 11y ago
Is there an ETA on availability in Canada?
- itsthisjustin 11y ago
  Definitely working on international. You will be able to accept payments (not send) this week in the form of a paper check mailed to you. So when you claim, just check the box for mail me a paper check and you'll get one in the mail once the payment clears.
Eliezer 11y ago
Did micropayments suddenly become possible for the first time? Would this be a great service to charge 1000 users $0.10 each? Or for that matter, for selling ebooks?
- dtwhitney 11y ago
  I think it would need to support payments in the opposite direction too -- deposits into someone's account. I'd love to see this!
  - matthewarkin 11y ago
    Stripe Connect allows sending money to other peoples account
    - BillinghamJ 11y ago
      Other people's Stripe accounts yes, but not just arbitrary accounts.
      - matthewarkin 11y ago
        With Managed Accounts you can create accounts for other people via the API that besides for a line in your terms of service they don't need to be aware of Stripe for.
kevindeasis 11y ago
So with ACH I can directly bill my customers' account. ACH lets me to bill them for multiple or single payment. So, with these I can do person to person(p2p), business to business (b2b), and business to consumers(b2c) That is cool.
orliesaurus 11y ago
Sooooo as someone who used to live in the UK, should GoCardless tremble ?
mschuster91 11y ago
From what I gather from the comments, you as customer have to log in into your bank's online banking portal to initiate the transfers. Don't you US guys have an equivalent to SEPA direct debits where I just give the IBAN bank account number and the merchant will automatically deduct the money from my account? If so, then no wonder why US people are so dependent on credit cards...
staticautomatic 11y ago
Praise Jesus I've been waiting for this.
lsh123 11y ago
From a consumer perspective, paying via ACH is much more dangerous compared to paying with a credit card. In case of fraud (e.g. hacked payment provider), recovering from ACH fraud is much harder than recovering from a credit card fraud. While you will likely get your money back at the end, it is also likely that you will spend many months talking to your bank (not to mention returned checks or other payments in the meantime). Overall, I strongly recommend to NEVER pay via ACH from an account that is used for other purposes. Personally I have a special account at my bank just for rare ACH payments I need to make. I can transfer money instantly from my primary account when I need to make a payment. And of course this special account has all the overdraft protections, etc. disabled.
Brushfire 11y ago
This is great. Next up: I'd love to see true Debit card transactions (i.e. With Pin) at Debit prices (perhaps 10-30c regardless of transaction size). That could really enable a ton of smaller items to be sold to a very large audience.
joshmn 11y ago
Just an FYI to everyone accepting payments: Fighting chargebacks for ACH payments is a lot harder than just calling up a cardholder's bank. With Stripe now making ACH payments easier, I suspect the card shops " " will see a rise in routing/account numbers for sale. And as always, just a friendly reminder Stripe's "fraud protection" is beyond trivial to get circumvent, so don't think they're doing you a favor.
throway1234 11y ago
n00b alert: Can someone ELI5 differences between the solutions/products offered by Stripe and other payment related companies like Square, Braintree?
jblake 11y ago
I wish the pricing was more competitive. In the US, I've used Beanstream - which is $5/mo + $0.25 flat per transfer. In Canada I've used Versapay - $0/mo + $1 per transfer.
thedogeye 11y ago
We've been using the beta for about 6 months and find it to be incredibly reliable. Thanks Stripe people.
needusername 11y ago
So does the ACH do settlement rather than clearing as the name suggests?
whazor 11y ago
Non-USA person here, I am amazed that this is even allowed. Giving your username and password to a third party? Think about all the security problems, like creating a fake Stripe. You are basically trusting every website you use. In my opinion, there should be a free and open protocol between banks for payments. Where you get redirected after you clicked on the pay button.

424 points by craigkerstiens 11y ago

So is it possible for simple ACH->ACH deposits? I'm looking to take out of my bank account and put into another (royalty payments for the curious). Ideally without having to hold a Stripe balance, just simple xfer.

matthewarkin 11y ago
You could take a look at combining ACH and Stripe Connect.

chadkruse 11y ago

@pc - curious if you have plans to integrate ACH into your Checkout product. Seems like an incredibly difficult UX problem, but I'm sure your folks are up to the challenge :)

pc 11y ago
No immediate plans. ACH is mostly popular for B2B use-cases whereas Checkout is optimized for "lightweight" transactions. You can obviously imagine cases where an integration would be useful but we decided not to hold up the launch in order to build that. We'll calibrate based on feedback going forward.
- rwmurrayVT 11y ago
  @pc How do you feel about the assumed fraud risk you are taking on with this? I'd love to have a conversation with you about it (in private). You can email me at rwmurray (@) vt.edu. I know you all have quite a few vulnerabilities in your system and can't ever find a way to share them.
  - pc 11y ago
    You should definitely email the fraud team! Try mlm@stripe.com. (Feel free to CC me; patrick@stripe.com.)

rw2 11y ago

This opens up so much

fblp 11y ago

Glad to see Stripe release this, but the $5.00 fee cap doesn't seem competitive for frequent large transactions compared to other providers that have a flat fees from $0.25 like Dwolla, with more listed here http://www.merchantmaverick.com/need-know-accepting-ach-payments/ http://www.merchantmaverick.com/need-know-accepting-ach-paym.... Why the higher cost?

pc 11y ago
Dwolla also charges monthly fees: https://www.dwolla.com/pricing https://www.dwolla.com/pricing. You need to pay $1,500 a month in order to charge more than 10 bank accounts. In general, most providers have a lot of fine-print. We tried to come up the simplest and fairest pricing we could.
- veritas20 11y ago
  Not sure about this. Pricing reads "funding sources" with no reference to the number of bank accounts that you can charge. http://blog.dwolla.com/connect-multiple-funding-sources-dwolla-account/ http://blog.dwolla.com/connect-multiple-funding-sources-dwol...
- jacobsimon 11y ago
  Still, it seems unusual to charge a percentage fee. From what I understand, one of the main benefits of ACH over credit cards is the flat fee structure.
  - 0xffff2 11y ago
    Compared to credit cards, $5 is pretty flat isn't it?
  - jslampe 11y ago
    TL;DR ACH is a commodity. The business model is derived by the platforms services offered, flexibility provided, and business targeted. ACH is a heavily commoditized product. For ACH processors, then, your business model is tied to the functionality and capabilities offered by the platform. Dwolla, which has spent the last 4 years exclusively building out its ACH API, has a range of free and paid-for products and services. This allows us to offer a fixed flat-fee price point based on the additional value we bring to platforms (instant account verification, next-day processing, higher limits, holding balances, etc.). Both services do an excellent job at baking in the expensive compliance, support, regulatory, etc. into their products.

tomschlick 11y ago

Looks like the TOS acceptance button on this page is spitting out a 500 error https://stripe.com/docs/guides/ach https://stripe.com/docs/guides/ach

pc 11y ago
Sorry about that -- this only affects a small number of users, but we'll have it fixed momentarily.
- raycmorgan 11y ago
  This has now been fixed. Sorry again for the trouble!
  - tomschlick 11y ago
    Thanks! Just confirmed it's working.

dubcanada 11y ago

I wonder if this means Interac Online will come soon :O that's a very big deal for the Canadian market.

tomschlick 11y ago
Hopefully. I've had to integrate with that in the past and it was not a fun project. I faintly remember them passing back html to inject to the user that contained iframes and a bunch of other junk javascript.

dang 11y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10889918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10889918 looks like another announcement about this. It was posted slightly later so we'll treat it as the duplicate in this case. Eventually we'll have some form of URL grouping when there are multiple stories on a topic.

BHSPitMonkey 11y ago

The UI component presenting the login form for major banks is troubling. It seems like encouraging users to feel comfortable entering their online banking credentials into anything other than their bank's web site is a bad move.

cardine 11y ago
I have a feeling that ACH payments are mostly only going to be widely adapted in instances where the purchase price is very large (5 figure+ transactions) where you have a dedicated account rep. I think it'll be quite a while before users are comfortable entering in their bank account login info to buy a $30 product.
- tyingq 11y ago
  And where the purchase price is large, those customers don't want some 3rd party interface to send the ACH...they typically already know how to send an ACH. They just want your account+routing so they can do it. In short, this solution from Stripe fills a niche, but it's a very narrow one.
  - thesimon 11y ago
    >In short, this solution from Stripe fills a niche, but it's a very narrow one. Not too sure about that. Klarna in Europe has a similar system called SOFORT in a lot of countries processing millions of transactions [0]. According to a german article, they processed 2.4 billion euros in 2013 [1] iDEAL using a similar system (officially provided by banks though) is the most popular payment method in the Netherlands [2]. There is probably a big market for bank transfers with instant confirmation for the merchant. I agree with you though that it is a niche in the US, because credit cards are so common. Expansion in the EU would've probably allowed them to access a bigger potential market. [0]: https://www.sofort.com/eng-GB/press-releases-sofort-gmbh/press-releases/SOFORT-Banking-still-in-the-fast-lane/ https://www.sofort.com/eng-GB/press-releases-sofort-gmbh/pre... [1]: https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.channelpartner.de%2Fa%2Fsofortueberweisung-erreicht-2-4-mrd-euro-transaktionsvolumen%2C3041650 https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL

rwmurrayVT 11y ago

I hate to see this honestly. Stripe is already notoriously vulnerable to credit card fraud and this is likely not helping their cause. I'd love to know how long you should expect for an ACH payment to clear and into your bank account. The two day period for credit cards is so small. Who checks their statements every single day? This is obviously the benefit of using Stripe if you're the merchant, but it leaves you vulnerable. We can only pray that Stripe accepts some responsibility for verifying these ACH transfers. Fraud on Stripe is a two-fold problem. They've got fraudsters signing up for Stripe accounts and running cards through them. They've also got fraudsters making purchases on Stripe-based sites. Obviously, Stripe prefers that the charges are made to legitimate users. That way they're not out all the money. Edit: It appears it could take "up to 5 days" for the payments to be processed. This is entirely on the bank's side of the equation. I guess from there you'll only need to wait your 2 days (7 days for some users) to receive the ACH into your bank account. I see massive fraud coming in here.

matthewarkin 11y ago
The micro-deposit requirement or Plaid (logging into the bank account) should ideally minimize fraud. But for consumers ACH fraud is sadly way more difficult to deal with than credit card fraud.
- rwmurrayVT 11y ago
  This is unfortunately not the case in reality. It is quite easy to get access to high value checking accounts for less than 50 USD. They could be personal or business. For between 25-75 USD you could get access to all the login information you need to access Wells Fargo/SunTrust/BoA accounts. You could see both Plaid micro-deposits. Even PayPal has faced this issue and they're solution was to be a huge pain in the fucking ass to users. Balancing convenience with security for ACH is not an easy task. That's why ACH is so damn hard to do online.
zachperret 11y ago
Plaid co-founder here. When users connect their accounts via the Plaid instant verification process, we actually allow developers to get a greater understanding of the user. Via Plaid, you can do things like validate the available balance and check the account owner's identity -- which can significantly reduce the likelihood of ACH fraud.

spenczar5 11y ago

When I last worked on a billing system about three years ago, we looked so hard to find an ACH provider. There was just nothing out there. This is an enormous advance. The problem we had was that we issued moderately large invoices monthly - they could be from $1k to $50k. We wanted to be paid quickly, so we tried to convince our customers to pay by credit card (through Stripe) and enable automatic payments, but we had trouble when customers would bump up against credit card limits. So, for our bigger clients, we were relegated to asking for checks to be sent by mail. This meant we couldn't automatically charge customers every month, and instead needed to badger them to send their check - all of a sudden, we needed an accounts receivable team. We couldn't just ignore the problem since these were our biggest accounts, too. Stripe's pricing is almost comically friendly here - credit card transactions are usually in the ballpark of 2.7% + $0.30, so even when card limits weren't an issue, we'd be paying out the nose on the transaction - 2.7% of $10k is $270. The new ACH payments would cost just $5. Anyways, this is a serious accomplishment. The underlying banking regulations and technologies around ACH are thorny. Good job, Stripe!

amluto 11y ago
Wells Fargo CEO can do it. IIRC it wasn't cheap unless you have high volume, though.
- jslampe 11y ago
  I haven't seen it first hand, but lots of our current customers ditched them (and others) after working with their APIs or lack thereof (#xml). In general, ACH just wasn't built to accommodate "platforms" as an entity in the transaction cycle. Banks, while although cheap, have a problem reconciling their infrastructure and processes with today's expectations. Not to mention their services don't package or include other compliance required to leverage ACH legally (KYC, OFAC, reporting, reject handling, etc.). Bottom-line: ACH and traditional providers are not suitable options for today's platforms. Among others, banks are hemorrhaging ACH-related business to companies like Stripe and Dwolla.
  - nemothekid 11y ago

wesleyfsmith 11y ago

I am trying to build a lending platform where we by definition cannot afford to lose 3% on each transaction. I'm am thrilled to see this. We have had to hand jam our current system with a local credit union (where we literally have to print out forms and bring it to them), so being able to switch to a fully programmatic system is awesome.

itsthisjustin 11y ago

Just got my beta invite too. Got frustrated at the lack of an easy ACH payments platform long ago though and went ahead and made my own. Launched http://paynote.io http://paynote.io on January 1st of this year.

niij 11y ago
This looks very interesting. Tell me more! How are you offsetting the cost of fraud when payments by fraudsters will cost them nothing?
- itsthisjustin 11y ago
  Well it's not for ecommerce for one thing. So fraud will be a lot less just in terms of use case here. This is individuals and companies are paying invoices for services rendered. There's not an area where a fraudster would gain a lot from a fraudulent payment. The ACH Payment system I'm using is also FDIC insured up to 250k.
  - 0xEFF 11y ago
    Is this for real? I just started a consulting business and have been searching for a good, inexpensive way to receive relatively large payments on my invoices. How are you going to make money? Is this good up to $50K? EDIT: I just tried to sign up, and this seems really scammy. You need a photo ID uploaded, along with my bank account details? How do I have any assurance you're not going to drain my bank account?
    - itsthisjustin 11y ago
      Interesting you find that scammy. It is for real though. I'm a consultant and it's been a real pain trying to collect large payments without getting killed on fees. The information is required by law by the patriot act for any bank transfers done over the internet. I can't get around it. It's required by law and by my ACH provider.

wesleyfsmith 11y ago

Making this system integrate with Plaid out of the box was a smart move. Plaid is so much better for users' than having to manually enter bank account and routing numbers.

fideloper 11y ago

This is super important for b2b companies that need to accept payments of multiple thousands of dollars (e.g. Annual subscription / support), which largerish companies typically will not hand over a cc for, either due to CC limitations or (usually) internal process red tape.

tyingq 11y ago
I would say both yes, and no. My experience in B2B is that medium to large companies will want to pay you via ACH. However they have little to no interest in entering their online banking ID and password into something like what Stripe is providing. They already make ACH payments, using their own tools, and all they want from you is your routing and account number so they can do so. Assuming you are a US company, with a US bank account, you've already been able to accept ACH payments in this way for some time. This setup from Stripe seems to be targeted at consumers, or maybe small business owners, as the purchaser. I'm sure that's a need, but probably not a huge one. Many of my customers that are medium/large businesses want to make ACH payments, almost none of the small businesses have an interest in that.
- pcunite 11y ago
  This is my experience too. When a customer wants to buy my product and the cost is over $5K, I give them the following and it shows up in my bank in about 3 days or so. Bank Address, Swift Code, Account Number, Routing Number.

Frozenlock 11y ago

> "And so, today, we’re delighted to launch support for ACH payments for all U.S. Stripe users." Any ETAs for international? More particularly Canadaland?

petercooper 11y ago
Hopefully they'll get there. We're a UK based company with 90% of our revenue from US based enterprises, so moving to this would be awesome :)

artursapek 11y ago

In college I worked part-time for a music social network startup that sold songs and paid artists a commission, kind of like iTunes. I had to write a cron job that would issue the artist payouts every night by writing ACH files in plaintext and SFTPing them to SVB. 3 years later it's great to see Stripe providing this, but I will always have an oddly fond memory of working on that. It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult.

ucsfgrad 11y ago
I always love memories like these. Looks like you found a pain point with a clear value-add solution. Hindsight is 20/20, but I always wonder what would have happened if your startup pivoted to offering ACH as a service....
- dopamean 11y ago
  Is this satire?
protomyth 11y ago
> It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult. I earned a bit of money in the 90's doing a lot of those types of data transfers. I get the feeling 70% of IT is just data munging.
- IanCal 11y ago
  > I get the feeling 70% of IT is just data munging. The remaining 30% is, as far as I can tell, fixing bugs in the data munging code.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Leave some room for the UI folks - although that is basically getting humans to munge the data as a pre-step for the computer munging.
silasb 11y ago

kyriakos 11y ago

Stripe should start supporting the rest of the world. I'd love to use their services.

mcollier000 11y ago
GoCardless is another ycombinator business providing a very similar platform for the whole of the UK & Europe. https://gocardless.com/ https://gocardless.com/

ck2 11y ago

Wait, is there no minimum? Because 0.8% on very small amounts is very practical for micro payments. $1 payment would cost a fraction of a penny. What am I missing? This will be game changing if my observation is correct.

oddevan 11y ago
I'd wager the only thing you're missing is the high friction involved in setting up a bank account. I've got my credit card stored in my password manager vault, and even if not, I've got that sucker memorized. Contrast that with digging through the clutter on multiple horizontal surfaces in our house to find a checkbook so I can find the routing number and account number, waiting for the two deposits to show up (because I use a small bank that hardly ever shows up on these "automatically authenticate" lists), and then trying to remember what I was trying to spend $1 on... But that's literally the only problem. The fee structure is AWESOME for micro-payments, so for the right things (small subscriptions?) this could be amazing.
- jedberg 11y ago
  But once you've set up your bank account once, it will work on every site that takes Stripe. That's the big sell as a merchant -- chances are your user is already configured for payments. And the larger their network grows the more likely this is true.
  - nemothekid 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If both Merchant A and Merchant B are using stripe, and I authorize my bank with Merchant A, that doesn't mean my bank is authorized with Merchant B. Especially because in most cases, you can be totally transparent with the fact that you are using Stripe.

arohner 11y ago

Can this be used, or setup in a way that supports the standard invoicing model? i.e. I want an api call to email a .pdf to a customer, and then have them "click this link and enter your info to pay via checking account". Several kinds of customers, including consulting, would be much happier with a "push" model of paying, than a "pull" model.

jaredtking 11y ago
Our startup, Invoiced, does exactly this. You can easily send invoices through our API [1] that customers can pay from the email. Now that Stripe ACH payments have been released we will be supporting it in the near future. [1] https://invoiced.com/docs/api/#send-an-invoice https://invoiced.com/docs/api/#send-an-invoice
matthewarkin 11y ago
Sure, Stripe just provides the underlying payment API, you can build your own tool (or use one of many pre-built ones) that sends your customer an invoice and providing them a method to pay you per invoice.

coupdejarnac 11y ago

Somewhat offtopic- is there a way to use Stripe to hold payment in escrow or to authorize a payment more than 7 days in advance? I really like Stripe, though I am not sure it can do what I need.

giarc 11y ago
No, as answered by a Stripe employee. https://www.quora.com/Does-Stripe-provide-an-escrow-facility-that-allows-users-to-authorize-payments-that-would-be-taken-out-at-some-time-in-the-future https://www.quora.com/Does-Stripe-provide-an-escrow-facility...
matthewarkin 11y ago
Using Stripe Connect and Managed Accounts you can hold funds for 30 days. Its not legally escrow though (escrow tends to have a specific legal definition and set of rules).

calgaryeng 11y ago

Is there an ETA on availability in Canada?

itsthisjustin 11y ago
Definitely working on international. You will be able to accept payments (not send) this week in the form of a paper check mailed to you. So when you claim, just check the box for mail me a paper check and you'll get one in the mail once the payment clears.

Eliezer 11y ago

Did micropayments suddenly become possible for the first time? Would this be a great service to charge 1000 users $0.10 each? Or for that matter, for selling ebooks?

dtwhitney 11y ago
I think it would need to support payments in the opposite direction too -- deposits into someone's account. I'd love to see this!
- matthewarkin 11y ago
  Stripe Connect allows sending money to other peoples account
  - BillinghamJ 11y ago
    Other people's Stripe accounts yes, but not just arbitrary accounts.
    - matthewarkin 11y ago
      With Managed Accounts you can create accounts for other people via the API that besides for a line in your terms of service they don't need to be aware of Stripe for.

kevindeasis 11y ago

So with ACH I can directly bill my customers' account. ACH lets me to bill them for multiple or single payment. So, with these I can do person to person(p2p), business to business (b2b), and business to consumers(b2c) That is cool.

orliesaurus 11y ago

Sooooo as someone who used to live in the UK, should GoCardless tremble ?

mschuster91 11y ago

From what I gather from the comments, you as customer have to log in into your bank's online banking portal to initiate the transfers. Don't you US guys have an equivalent to SEPA direct debits where I just give the IBAN bank account number and the merchant will automatically deduct the money from my account? If so, then no wonder why US people are so dependent on credit cards...

staticautomatic 11y ago

Praise Jesus I've been waiting for this.

lsh123 11y ago

From a consumer perspective, paying via ACH is much more dangerous compared to paying with a credit card. In case of fraud (e.g. hacked payment provider), recovering from ACH fraud is much harder than recovering from a credit card fraud. While you will likely get your money back at the end, it is also likely that you will spend many months talking to your bank (not to mention returned checks or other payments in the meantime). Overall, I strongly recommend to NEVER pay via ACH from an account that is used for other purposes. Personally I have a special account at my bank just for rare ACH payments I need to make. I can transfer money instantly from my primary account when I need to make a payment. And of course this special account has all the overdraft protections, etc. disabled.

Brushfire 11y ago

This is great. Next up: I'd love to see true Debit card transactions (i.e. With Pin) at Debit prices (perhaps 10-30c regardless of transaction size). That could really enable a ton of smaller items to be sold to a very large audience.

joshmn 11y ago

Just an FYI to everyone accepting payments: Fighting chargebacks for ACH payments is a lot harder than just calling up a cardholder's bank. With Stripe now making ACH payments easier, I suspect the card shops " " will see a rise in routing/account numbers for sale. And as always, just a friendly reminder Stripe's "fraud protection" is beyond trivial to get circumvent, so don't think they're doing you a favor.

throway1234 11y ago

n00b alert: Can someone ELI5 differences between the solutions/products offered by Stripe and other payment related companies like Square, Braintree?

jblake 11y ago

I wish the pricing was more competitive. In the US, I've used Beanstream - which is $5/mo + $0.25 flat per transfer. In Canada I've used Versapay - $0/mo + $1 per transfer.

thedogeye 11y ago

We've been using the beta for about 6 months and find it to be incredibly reliable. Thanks Stripe people.

needusername 11y ago

So does the ACH do settlement rather than clearing as the name suggests?

whazor 11y ago

Non-USA person here, I am amazed that this is even allowed. Giving your username and password to a third party? Think about all the security problems, like creating a fake Stripe. You are basically trusting every website you use. In my opinion, there should be a free and open protocol between banks for payments. Where you get redirected after you clicked on the pay button.