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Stripe Treasury

918 points by timf 6y ago

jakozaur 6y ago
I'm continue to be amazed by Stripe innovations. Financials companies used to stagnate (e.g. PayPal) while Stripe keeps reinventing itself... Stripe Capital, Stripe Checkout, Stripe Treasury...
- mritchie712 6y ago
  Atlas is pretty awesome too. Build a C Corp in a few minutes.
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    Atlas was priced right, but we had a negative experience with it. Document templates were wrong, spouses never got emails for signature, workflow steps were out of order, tax id issuance took very long, and on top of that they are extremely oversubscribed, so hearing back from their support team took a while. Atlas has a lot of potential, but needs a lot of work.
    - edwinwee 6y ago
      I'm really sorry that happened. We've invested a lot this year in making things smoother (incorporation is faster than ever and our Atlas support team has scaled up), but I'd like to see what went wrong in your case—and if we could prevent it from happening again. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
ianhawes 6y ago
This looks like a great product from Stripe. If anyone is searching for an offering thats a bit more mature and not invite only, I highly recommend Synapse[0] as a Banking as a Service platform. [0] https://synapsefi.com/ https://synapsefi.com/
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tarstarr 6y ago
Hi everyone, I’m Tara, PM on Stripe Treasury. Treasury is a banking-as-a-service API for platforms—built in partnership with the world’s leading banks. Embed interest-earning accounts, bill pay, ACH and wire transfers, and faster access to revenue directly in your platform. Happy to answer any questions here—and I’d love to hear your feedback!
- teagee 6y ago
  Hi Tara, this looks like it solves some of the limitations we've run into using Stripe Connect with ACH, which is very exciting! Will existing platforms using Stripe Connect eventually be able to add Stripe Treasury for existing users?
  - tarstarr 6y ago
    definitely! we want to make it as easy as possible for existing Stripe Connect users to add Treasury functionality for their connected accounts. Request an invite [0] (the product team is personally monitoring this queue) and let's chat about what you're looking to do! 0. https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite edit: added a space
    - teagee 6y ago
      Wonderful! I requested an invite, my email is tyler@... and my initials are TG. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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- nojvek 6y ago
  The landing page doesn’t really explain what kinds of problems Treasury solves (may need some customer education since it’s so new) IIUC this is useful for marketplaces like Lyft/Uber/Shopify to automatically provision bank accounts for drivers and have money deposited in there? The value add is faster payouts? Can I use this as a replacement to plaid api? I.e open a bank account through stripe and use that as a way to do finance analytics? What are the banking fees? Basically: which customer audience is this targeting ? and what headaches does it solve for that audience?
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jeremymcanally 6y ago
I look forward to the GitHub project that makes a one-click to deploy to Heroku your own "bank" using this. :) I haven't dug into their terms, but is there any reason you couldn't create effectively a bank of one customer (or even just your family?) with this, backed by their larger institutions? Issue your own debit cards, the works?
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I look forward to the terraform bank account module to follow. :)
- alexobenauer 6y ago
  This would be incredibly interesting. I have yet to find a bank for our business accounts that doesn't make me jump through ridiculous hoops to get basic things done.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I've had good luck with https://mercury.com https://mercury.com for business banking.
    - PStamatiou 6y ago
      Same, Mercury is great
    - jjb123 6y ago
      +1 for mercury, great option for this use case
    - mattcantstop 6y ago
      Where is all the mercury.com spam coming from. I am highly skeptical this is organic.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        My comment comes from my own experience with the product, nothing more nothing less. I share so it can help others who have the need. Can’t speak for anyone else’s comments.
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armatav 6y ago
Oof this is such a good idea. Cannot wait till it's out of beta.
scop 6y ago
Super interesting from a business perspective, but can’t help but think of the personal front too. While it may be difficult to execute safely/cheaply, just the idea rolling my own personal checking account is phenomenal.
- drewrv 6y ago
  This is something I've wanted for a while, for personal use only. I wonder if their pricing and license will actually accommodate this kind of use case though.
- tarstarr 6y ago
  Stripe Treasury currently supports businesses whose customers make business use of the platform. We are interested in innovation in personal financial services, too, but see more need currently from B2B platforms. We will see how things develop as we improve this offering!
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- mritchie712 6y ago
  What features are you looking for? If you have an account at Capital One (or most other major banks) you can get pretty good control over it thru Plaid.
  - Oblouk 6y ago
    I'd prefer Capital One not have access to and sell all my purchase data.
vincentmarle 6y ago
When is Stripe going to IPO so mere souls can also invest in the company, it’s been long overdue.
- 42droids 6y ago
  I would also like to know this.
- agildehaus 6y ago
  I get this, but being private is often a reason why a company is great.
- xyst 6y ago
  Good for the people that want to speculate on the stock price, but bad for the people that actually use their products. I honestly hope they never go public, otherwise I fear they will just become another souless "salesforce"
  - diogenescynic 6y ago
    Good for people with retirement accounts...
switz 6y ago
Is this multi currency or USD only? Does this mean I can store EUR alongside USD via my Stripe checkout sales, instead of being forced to convert immediately?
- patio11 6y ago
  Stripe Treasury presently supports USD only, but we do envision multicurrency accounts as we roll it out to more markets. Depending on where you are, we may have like-for-like settlement available for you (allowing you to receive EUR to a EUR-denominated account you have and USD to a USD-denominated account you have, saving conversion fees). Write support@stripe.com for more details on whether it is available for you specifically.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  Open accounts with TransferWise and have those currencies sent to those accounts. You can convert it whenever you want.
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uses 6y ago
Does this allow me to basically create my own bank? Like could I make my own version of Simple, and use this as the back end? I'm confused because I thought there were a lot of legal requirements to banking and not just the actual services they provide, which this seems to commoditize.
- tarstarr 6y ago
  Stripe isn’t a bank either! We hold various financial licenses and partner with a number of large global banks to power Stripe Treasury. That said, you can definitely build atop Stripe Treasury to offer your customers fintech services, so that they can perform all of their money management needs on your product. Though we’re interested in helping entrepreneurs build financial services for many use cases, today we only support businesses (which includes sole props!) To the point of legal requirements -- there are absolutely a lot of legal requirements here, but Stripe Treasury abstracts a lot of the complexity of those requirements and makes it easier for you to comply than if you had to go at this alone.
  - yannlevy 6y ago
    How is that different from other BaaS solutions ? such as Bond Tech or Wise ?
xyst 6y ago
Would have been nice if stripe actually got into the consumer banking business instead of using existing big bank infrastructure. Probably could have spun off a separate entity for consumer banking and hook their treasury api into that system. Partnering with companies such as Goldman Sachs is typically not a good look from an optics perspective - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies
- ytrytr 6y ago
  > Partnering with companies such as Goldman Sachs is typically not a good look from an optics perspective - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies Lol, as if having a 'Controversies' section on Wikipedia automatically precludes GS from being one of the best at what they do. Also, a lot of this 'Optics' talk doesn't matter in the real world, which is why something like Marcus has been as successful as it is, and people have rushed to get the Apple Card.
joshuakelly 6y ago
There's a reason "marketplaces" get a call out on this landing page. Every single startup that has to manage buyers and sellers ends up needing to implement their own bespoke "treasury" operations. There are other players in this space (Modern Treasury for example), but obviously the distinct Stripe advantage is integrating with the payment stack. This would have saved years of development efforts and maintenance on treasury operations for my team at a previous gig (in the live events/ticketing space, who are probably going to read this comment - hi guys).
- radihuq 6y ago
  This has an incredible amount of potential in the events space --- I'm excited to see what new advances this tech will enable
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Seems like that would be more inline with the stripe connect platform.
    - radihuq 6y ago
      Today, yes, but I think in the long run a platform that implements something like Stripe Treasury has the opportunity to provide a ton of value for bottom-market event planners (think: those people that run 10 person workshops out of a community center)
      - joshuakelly 6y ago
        It's also true at the high end. Business decisions around key service providers in the AAA+ live events space are driven primarily by access to what effectively are financial services (advances and other lifecycle events, and in general the ability of your counter party to act as an underwriter). Access to quasi-financial services are the key differentiator at the top of the market. This will be especially true looking forward to the post-COVID relaunch of tours and festivals.
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jonplackett 6y ago
I tried out Stripe's API years and years ago and it was immediately obvious that these guys were good. I think you can tell a lot about a company by how well they do their documentation.
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cplantijn 6y ago
This announcement comes very close to Atlanta entrepreneur/rapper Micheal Render (Killer Mike)'s Greenwood bank, a grassroots black owned bank. I wonder if they are using Stripe Treasury as their banking platform. Bank: https://bankgreenwood.com/ https://bankgreenwood.com/
- Kye 6y ago
  I don't see anything about who they bank with on the site other than it's FDIC insured.
OldHand2018 6y ago
Does this service allow anyone that is legally allowed to participate in the US financial system? Or is it limited to people that your partner banks "want" to deal with? I'm thinking about the unbanked and others that financial institutions tend to not want to deal with. Living in a large city, I've seen plenty of people that use gift cards, transit cards, etc as their "bank" because bank services are unavailable or the fee structure is too onerous. Or, for example, someone that has been in prison for financial crimes and needs a way to rehabilitate back into society. Thanks!
- patio11 6y ago
  We are extremely in favor of making financial services available to more people in more places at lower cost and with less arbitrary restrictions. That said, we won’t be able to solve this problem singlehandedly in a day; Stripe Treasury is presently only for businesses serving businesses. As an infrastructure provider, we are also reliant on our users building the platforms their communities need. Fees matter for businesses too, though. Many small business owners are greatly inconvenienced by e.g. the $X,000 minimum to avoid a $15-25 monthly maintenance fee. By bringing large global banks a great deal of deposits at once, we’ve convinced them to not impose maintenance fees on the end-users of these accounts; they’re willing to send the money they’re not spending on customer acquisition (advertising, branch networks, sales reps, etc) back to Main Street. Another thing scale allows us to do is advocate for our users with financial partners. For example, earlier this year we successfully convinced the relevant parties to approve processing payments for telemedicine companies, which was previously not something they were comfortable with. That is something that previously each company would have had to individually negotiate, and e.g. startups in the space or individual medical practices might not have had sufficient reputations with their financial institutions to cause major changes in their appetite. We were able to get it through by emphasizing how our scale, maturity, and robust compliance program allowed us to allay their concerns.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    > Stripe Treasury is presently only for businesses serving businesses. I missed that. Thank you for replying!
dang 6y ago
A related article and discussion are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289523
imtu80 6y ago
It's great Stripe is coming up with new services and changing how we do business online. Most purchases are now happening online, subscription based services are on rise and consumer buying habit is changing as well. I like Stripe and I use Stripe for my business. What I don't like about Stripe is they stepping on toes of their customers. Stripe starts with API service and later they introduce their product competing with early adopters. A good example is Stripe Billing [0]. Additionally, they position their products top on their partners page, therefore making it "popular". I wouldn't be surprised to see Stripe launching their own virtual bank product. [0] https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing [1] https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/collection/recurring-payments https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/collection/r...
- nojvek 6y ago
  Stripe is probably using Apple playbook. Once you’re on the platform, everything works nice and smooth. It makes sense for Stripe to deliver on all the finance related experiences.
densekernel 6y ago
Now every company can be a FinTech company! https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-company/ https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-...
ArtWomb 6y ago
Truly remarkable service. I am sure this is not the intended use case, but am wondering if it would be possible to build an experimental stock (or alternative capital asset) exchange with Stripe Treasury? It seems as though all the pieces are included. Including interest rollover, and potentially margin trading accounts.
coachtrotz 6y ago
Pretty interesting that Stripe is partnering with Evolve, Citi, and GS and not SVB whom they use for Stripe Atlas.
arusahni 6y ago
I appreciate the use of vim in the animatic.
rattray 6y ago
Bit of an aside, but as a new entrepreneur selling physical products (https://narwallmask.com https://narwallmask.com) I've been surprised by how much time I spend banking. Moving money around is way more of a headache than I would have anticipated. And that's before you even get into questions of working capital etc. As a former eng at Stripe who didn't know this product was coming, I'm very excited to see what gets built on top of it, and to see innovation spurred in business fintech in general.
- carabiner 6y ago
  Did you design the mask from scratch, or is this a rebrand of an existing product?
  - rattray 6y ago
    I created this product, but wouldn't say from scratch. It's based on a full face snorkel mask, with a few adaptors for filters (instead of water) that I designed with the help of an industrial engineer and the manufacturer of the snorkel mask. Goal was to reuse existing design and injection molds to reduce cost and increase speed to market (wanted to get them out in July, took till November!)
- renewiltord 6y ago
  What a fascinating device! Did you find that airlines are willing to accept it? They no longer accept my half-mask respirator with P100 filters.
  - rattray 6y ago
    Thanks! Usually yes - sometimes the gate attendant doesn't understand that the exhale is filtered (I assume this was the problem with your respirator). We have guidance on that here: https://narwallmask.com/pages/usage-guide#h:flying https://narwallmask.com/pages/usage-guide#h:flying
    - renewiltord 6y ago
nickelcitymario 6y ago
I see a lot of comments about the applications for startups, which is only logical. (This is HN after all.) But I think this could be even more transformative in vehicle sales. Example: I work for a boat manufacturer. We've wanted to sell boats online for many years, but it's not the kind of product you charge to a credit card. (Most of our boats are in the $30k-80k range.) So one of the biggest challenges to selling online is the financing. A service like this, once it opens up outside the US and for B2C, could solve that problem. I could see this having a transformative (disruptive?) effect on boats, RVs, cars, trucks, ATVs, etc. Basically any big-ticket item that doesn't require getting a lawyer involved.
dave_4_bagels 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be Stripe trying to take make inroads with Plaid's existing services? Is it just me, or is this expansion of Stripe's functionality a bit concerning? It goes without saying, that now Stripe will be able to clamp down and censor banking AND payment activity they deem inappropriate or allowed by their banking partners?
crb002 6y ago
Interest on short term holdings - sweet. Then again, AWS is a bank that gives 30 day loans - they still win because the payment friction is after the fact.
WC3w6pXxgGd 6y ago
Does anybody understand this? There's nothing explaining this on the page.
krm01 6y ago
does this mean I could create and operate my own interest-free bank where people can store money and pay their bills, without me having to go through all the regulations?
- rc_mob 6y ago
  Right? Completely avoid having to pay the salaries of buildings full of bankers with my interest payments
rsync 6y ago
Perhaps it is too early to ask this question, but in case anyone here is an early user of Stripe Treasury (or there are Stripe employees here): What is the Stripe Treasury equivalent of a Twilio Twiml Bin ? A Twiml bin is a block of code that you can enter into your twilio account, through their management interface and then perform actions, etc., without any outside hosting of code or additional services. It's perhaps not the most powerful mechanism but it is tremendously simple and efficient to just type the code into the user interface in your account rather than hosting code to call with webhooks, etc., etc.
sebmellen 6y ago
Evolve Bank & Trust will probably be the bank most of these funds sit in [0]. With this partnership, and their Mercury Bank partnership [1], they've positioned themselves very well. For a small bank out of Memphis [2], this is quite impressive. [0]: https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite [1]: https://mercury.com/ https://mercury.com/ [2]: https://www.getevolved.com/contact/locations/ https://www.getevolved.com/contact/locations/
eins1234 6y ago
If I were to build a Bank on top of this, what's stopping Stripe from coming up with their own Banking service that undercuts my bank on every financial metric imaginable due to their higher margins? Honestly that seems pretty inevitable given Stripe Corporate Card came out almost immediately after Stripe Issuing.
leonardteo 6y ago
Question for others running marketplaces: how does Stripe Treasury and Connect play with other payment systems? Or they simply don’t? The issue we have is that a large percentage of our customers want to pay with PayPal and I suppose in the future that will expand into other payment methods. Because of this we have to be payment method agnostic and we run both Stripe (for CC) and PayPal. We’ve always been interested in things like Stripe Connect and I’m sure Treasury is interesting also but it all seems very Stripe-locked-in and would only work with payments going via Stripe (credit cards mostly and Apple Pay) which means that marketplaces that support PayPal are out? PayPal has its own marketplace product as well but again, that is too locked into the whole PayPal platform.
RileyJames 6y ago
This is the direction I hoped Xero would head, but unfortunately never quite made it. It has all the relationships in place to do so, and their software already handles these transactions at the accounting level. It seemed as if the fear of disrupting banks/banking relationships won out against innovation. Rather than build the necessary product and commodity banking they’ve worked with the banks to build out their products. I’m sure they’re still having a lot of meetings... Congrats to stripe for getting it done. Huge effort.
golergka 6y ago
The examples are built using NodeJS and are using Javascript's default number type (instead of the new BigInt or something more suitable) to represent the amount of money. I love Node, but using number type for money seems like a very, very bad idea.
- kanwisher 6y ago
  I don't know specifically in this case but usually you keep currency numbers in whole numbers and then divide by 100 when you need decimals. is a much cleaner method then using bigints
  - golergka 6y ago
    Your customer with 90 trillion dollars will not be happy about it (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Number/MAX_SAFE_INTEGER https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...). I have been bitten with this in production, although it was facebook id represented as number and not money amount. On a more realistic scenario, imagine that get 1% cashback on their purchases. When you multiply their purchase amount by 0.01, you get sub-cent amounts. From a point of view of a particular customer, it doesn't matter much, so you can just floor the number. But on the scale of your whole organisation, it does matter; so, where's all the remainder are going to end up at? And even if you don't forget about these remainders, are you sure you will remember to add the values before the division, as 10 or 20, and not after, as 0.1 or 0.2? Because when you some the latter up, you won't get 0.3. If you're just using a built-in 'number' type, you're facing these mistakes by yourself, but a well-written library for handling money will guard you against this. Types exist not only to represent values, but to guard you against doing such mistakes. (And if that's the first time ever you hear about this scenario, do yourself a favour and watch Office Space — which does not only include this scenario as a plot device, but is a terrific movie on it's own right). I have to be honest, I tend to forget all the details when I don't work with these kinds of tasks for some time. Instead, I just remember that using any standard built-in integer type for money is a huge potential minefield. And since in Javascript it's really a float, even more so.
omarforgotpwd 6y ago
Stripe is eating banking with software. If I were a chartered bank I'd be nervous about a few core businesses right now.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Wait until google hops in, launches with their banking license, and starts lending based on their own models (tuned with their own data) straight from the Federal Reserve.
- woutr_be 6y ago
  I work for a chartered bank, I can tell you that nobody in upper management is nervous. Questions about this often come up during town halls or department wide meetings, the justification is always that they already have the clients, and that clients are sceptical of financial startups. As a regular employee I just laugh it up, and watch startups launch similar products 10 times faster than we ever could. A startup could build an entire product, while my team is trying to get approval to even get considered for a launch.
zaroth 6y ago
I've been thinking about this in the back of my head all day. I think this is a really big deal, if it's being done the way I imagine. "Embedding financial services" as an API is essentially an Identity service that ties directly into your platform. This opens the door for a lot of very cool stuff. I'm definitely hoping to get an invite to beta test this.
akrymski 6y ago
Marketplaces holding on to my funds for longer than necessary seems like a dark pattern. Why would a Shopify seller want this? If I wanted a bank account - I'd go to a bank. Conceptually this reminds me of embedded messaging: every app provides its own inbox, instead of properly integrating with my email inbox. More walled gardens.
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  Cash flow is the #1 problem with small businesses. Vendors to pay to make the goods they're selling. When you attach a bank account, it usually takes ~3 business days from card processed to accessible cash. This isn't Stripe's fault, it's bank transfer ACH's fault. By offering sellers a built-in checking account, Stripe (and in turn Shopify) can decrease the time it takes to access money you've been paid. Same-day or next-day access, huge deal. edit: I'll add, Stripe already offers immediate access to cash (Instant Transfers), but they charge 1.5% because technically they're extending credit. Stripe is eating their own lunch here. People won't need Instant Transfers as often and their profit margin on the interest sitting in the checking accounts will be much lower than the 1.5% fee they currently charge for Instant Transfer. But much bigger market.
bradley_taunt 6y ago
I'm normally a big fan of the web design work from Stripe - but this page is a mess on mobile Safari (iOS 10.3.3). It seems more and more companies are dropping basic support for "older" devices and it's a real shame. Having this look great on even very old devices should be simple, since this page doesn't even do anything that "cutting edge".
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HipsterZipster 6y ago
So cool

918 points by timf 6y ago

I'm continue to be amazed by Stripe innovations. Financials companies used to stagnate (e.g. PayPal) while Stripe keeps reinventing itself... Stripe Capital, Stripe Checkout, Stripe Treasury...

mritchie712 6y ago
Atlas is pretty awesome too. Build a C Corp in a few minutes.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  Atlas was priced right, but we had a negative experience with it. Document templates were wrong, spouses never got emails for signature, workflow steps were out of order, tax id issuance took very long, and on top of that they are extremely oversubscribed, so hearing back from their support team took a while. Atlas has a lot of potential, but needs a lot of work.
  - edwinwee 6y ago
    I'm really sorry that happened. We've invested a lot this year in making things smoother (incorporation is faster than ever and our Atlas support team has scaled up), but I'd like to see what went wrong in your case—and if we could prevent it from happening again. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

ianhawes 6y ago

This looks like a great product from Stripe. If anyone is searching for an offering thats a bit more mature and not invite only, I highly recommend Synapse[0] as a Banking as a Service platform. [0] https://synapsefi.com/ https://synapsefi.com/

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tarstarr 6y ago

Hi everyone, I’m Tara, PM on Stripe Treasury. Treasury is a banking-as-a-service API for platforms—built in partnership with the world’s leading banks. Embed interest-earning accounts, bill pay, ACH and wire transfers, and faster access to revenue directly in your platform. Happy to answer any questions here—and I’d love to hear your feedback!

teagee 6y ago
Hi Tara, this looks like it solves some of the limitations we've run into using Stripe Connect with ACH, which is very exciting! Will existing platforms using Stripe Connect eventually be able to add Stripe Treasury for existing users?
- tarstarr 6y ago
  definitely! we want to make it as easy as possible for existing Stripe Connect users to add Treasury functionality for their connected accounts. Request an invite [0] (the product team is personally monitoring this queue) and let's chat about what you're looking to do! 0. https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite edit: added a space
  - teagee 6y ago
    Wonderful! I requested an invite, my email is tyler@... and my initials are TG. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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nojvek 6y ago
The landing page doesn’t really explain what kinds of problems Treasury solves (may need some customer education since it’s so new) IIUC this is useful for marketplaces like Lyft/Uber/Shopify to automatically provision bank accounts for drivers and have money deposited in there? The value add is faster payouts? Can I use this as a replacement to plaid api? I.e open a bank account through stripe and use that as a way to do finance analytics? What are the banking fees? Basically: which customer audience is this targeting ? and what headaches does it solve for that audience?

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jeremymcanally 6y ago

I look forward to the GitHub project that makes a one-click to deploy to Heroku your own "bank" using this. :) I haven't dug into their terms, but is there any reason you couldn't create effectively a bank of one customer (or even just your family?) with this, backed by their larger institutions? Issue your own debit cards, the works?

scrollaway 6y ago
I look forward to the terraform bank account module to follow. :)
alexobenauer 6y ago
This would be incredibly interesting. I have yet to find a bank for our business accounts that doesn't make me jump through ridiculous hoops to get basic things done.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  I've had good luck with https://mercury.com https://mercury.com for business banking.
  - PStamatiou 6y ago
    Same, Mercury is great
  - jjb123 6y ago
    +1 for mercury, great option for this use case
  - mattcantstop 6y ago
    Where is all the mercury.com spam coming from. I am highly skeptical this is organic.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      My comment comes from my own experience with the product, nothing more nothing less. I share so it can help others who have the need. Can’t speak for anyone else’s comments.

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armatav 6y ago

Oof this is such a good idea. Cannot wait till it's out of beta.

scop 6y ago

Super interesting from a business perspective, but can’t help but think of the personal front too. While it may be difficult to execute safely/cheaply, just the idea rolling my own personal checking account is phenomenal.

drewrv 6y ago
This is something I've wanted for a while, for personal use only. I wonder if their pricing and license will actually accommodate this kind of use case though.
tarstarr 6y ago
Stripe Treasury currently supports businesses whose customers make business use of the platform. We are interested in innovation in personal financial services, too, but see more need currently from B2B platforms. We will see how things develop as we improve this offering!
- deleted 6y ago
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mritchie712 6y ago
What features are you looking for? If you have an account at Capital One (or most other major banks) you can get pretty good control over it thru Plaid.
- Oblouk 6y ago
  I'd prefer Capital One not have access to and sell all my purchase data.

vincentmarle 6y ago

When is Stripe going to IPO so mere souls can also invest in the company, it’s been long overdue.

42droids 6y ago
I would also like to know this.
agildehaus 6y ago
I get this, but being private is often a reason why a company is great.
xyst 6y ago
Good for the people that want to speculate on the stock price, but bad for the people that actually use their products. I honestly hope they never go public, otherwise I fear they will just become another souless "salesforce"
- diogenescynic 6y ago
  Good for people with retirement accounts...

switz 6y ago

Is this multi currency or USD only? Does this mean I can store EUR alongside USD via my Stripe checkout sales, instead of being forced to convert immediately?

patio11 6y ago
Stripe Treasury presently supports USD only, but we do envision multicurrency accounts as we roll it out to more markets. Depending on where you are, we may have like-for-like settlement available for you (allowing you to receive EUR to a EUR-denominated account you have and USD to a USD-denominated account you have, saving conversion fees). Write support@stripe.com for more details on whether it is available for you specifically.
withinboredom 6y ago
Open accounts with TransferWise and have those currencies sent to those accounts. You can convert it whenever you want.

deleted 6y ago

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uses 6y ago

Does this allow me to basically create my own bank? Like could I make my own version of Simple, and use this as the back end? I'm confused because I thought there were a lot of legal requirements to banking and not just the actual services they provide, which this seems to commoditize.

tarstarr 6y ago
Stripe isn’t a bank either! We hold various financial licenses and partner with a number of large global banks to power Stripe Treasury. That said, you can definitely build atop Stripe Treasury to offer your customers fintech services, so that they can perform all of their money management needs on your product. Though we’re interested in helping entrepreneurs build financial services for many use cases, today we only support businesses (which includes sole props!) To the point of legal requirements -- there are absolutely a lot of legal requirements here, but Stripe Treasury abstracts a lot of the complexity of those requirements and makes it easier for you to comply than if you had to go at this alone.
- yannlevy 6y ago
  How is that different from other BaaS solutions ? such as Bond Tech or Wise ?

xyst 6y ago

Would have been nice if stripe actually got into the consumer banking business instead of using existing big bank infrastructure. Probably could have spun off a separate entity for consumer banking and hook their treasury api into that system. Partnering with companies such as Goldman Sachs is typically not a good look from an optics perspective - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies

ytrytr 6y ago
> Partnering with companies such as Goldman Sachs is typically not a good look from an optics perspective - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs_controversies Lol, as if having a 'Controversies' section on Wikipedia automatically precludes GS from being one of the best at what they do. Also, a lot of this 'Optics' talk doesn't matter in the real world, which is why something like Marcus has been as successful as it is, and people have rushed to get the Apple Card.

joshuakelly 6y ago

There's a reason "marketplaces" get a call out on this landing page. Every single startup that has to manage buyers and sellers ends up needing to implement their own bespoke "treasury" operations. There are other players in this space (Modern Treasury for example), but obviously the distinct Stripe advantage is integrating with the payment stack. This would have saved years of development efforts and maintenance on treasury operations for my team at a previous gig (in the live events/ticketing space, who are probably going to read this comment - hi guys).

radihuq 6y ago
This has an incredible amount of potential in the events space --- I'm excited to see what new advances this tech will enable
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Seems like that would be more inline with the stripe connect platform.
  - radihuq 6y ago
    Today, yes, but I think in the long run a platform that implements something like Stripe Treasury has the opportunity to provide a ton of value for bottom-market event planners (think: those people that run 10 person workshops out of a community center)
    - joshuakelly 6y ago
      It's also true at the high end. Business decisions around key service providers in the AAA+ live events space are driven primarily by access to what effectively are financial services (advances and other lifecycle events, and in general the ability of your counter party to act as an underwriter). Access to quasi-financial services are the key differentiator at the top of the market. This will be especially true looking forward to the post-COVID relaunch of tours and festivals.
- 6y ago

jonplackett 6y ago

I tried out Stripe's API years and years ago and it was immediately obvious that these guys were good. I think you can tell a lot about a company by how well they do their documentation.

deleted 6y ago
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cplantijn 6y ago

This announcement comes very close to Atlanta entrepreneur/rapper Micheal Render (Killer Mike)'s Greenwood bank, a grassroots black owned bank. I wonder if they are using Stripe Treasury as their banking platform. Bank: https://bankgreenwood.com/ https://bankgreenwood.com/

Kye 6y ago
I don't see anything about who they bank with on the site other than it's FDIC insured.

OldHand2018 6y ago

Does this service allow anyone that is legally allowed to participate in the US financial system? Or is it limited to people that your partner banks "want" to deal with? I'm thinking about the unbanked and others that financial institutions tend to not want to deal with. Living in a large city, I've seen plenty of people that use gift cards, transit cards, etc as their "bank" because bank services are unavailable or the fee structure is too onerous. Or, for example, someone that has been in prison for financial crimes and needs a way to rehabilitate back into society. Thanks!

patio11 6y ago
We are extremely in favor of making financial services available to more people in more places at lower cost and with less arbitrary restrictions. That said, we won’t be able to solve this problem singlehandedly in a day; Stripe Treasury is presently only for businesses serving businesses. As an infrastructure provider, we are also reliant on our users building the platforms their communities need. Fees matter for businesses too, though. Many small business owners are greatly inconvenienced by e.g. the $X,000 minimum to avoid a $15-25 monthly maintenance fee. By bringing large global banks a great deal of deposits at once, we’ve convinced them to not impose maintenance fees on the end-users of these accounts; they’re willing to send the money they’re not spending on customer acquisition (advertising, branch networks, sales reps, etc) back to Main Street. Another thing scale allows us to do is advocate for our users with financial partners. For example, earlier this year we successfully convinced the relevant parties to approve processing payments for telemedicine companies, which was previously not something they were comfortable with. That is something that previously each company would have had to individually negotiate, and e.g. startups in the space or individual medical practices might not have had sufficient reputations with their financial institutions to cause major changes in their appetite. We were able to get it through by emphasizing how our scale, maturity, and robust compliance program allowed us to allay their concerns.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  > Stripe Treasury is presently only for businesses serving businesses. I missed that. Thank you for replying!

dang 6y ago

A related article and discussion are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289523

imtu80 6y ago

It's great Stripe is coming up with new services and changing how we do business online. Most purchases are now happening online, subscription based services are on rise and consumer buying habit is changing as well. I like Stripe and I use Stripe for my business. What I don't like about Stripe is they stepping on toes of their customers. Stripe starts with API service and later they introduce their product competing with early adopters. A good example is Stripe Billing [0]. Additionally, they position their products top on their partners page, therefore making it "popular". I wouldn't be surprised to see Stripe launching their own virtual bank product. [0] https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing [1] https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/collection/recurring-payments https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/collection/r...

nojvek 6y ago
Stripe is probably using Apple playbook. Once you’re on the platform, everything works nice and smooth. It makes sense for Stripe to deliver on all the finance related experiences.

densekernel 6y ago

Now every company can be a FinTech company! https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-company/ https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-...

ArtWomb 6y ago

Truly remarkable service. I am sure this is not the intended use case, but am wondering if it would be possible to build an experimental stock (or alternative capital asset) exchange with Stripe Treasury? It seems as though all the pieces are included. Including interest rollover, and potentially margin trading accounts.

coachtrotz 6y ago

Pretty interesting that Stripe is partnering with Evolve, Citi, and GS and not SVB whom they use for Stripe Atlas.

arusahni 6y ago

I appreciate the use of vim in the animatic.

rattray 6y ago

Bit of an aside, but as a new entrepreneur selling physical products (https://narwallmask.com https://narwallmask.com) I've been surprised by how much time I spend banking. Moving money around is way more of a headache than I would have anticipated. And that's before you even get into questions of working capital etc. As a former eng at Stripe who didn't know this product was coming, I'm very excited to see what gets built on top of it, and to see innovation spurred in business fintech in general.

carabiner 6y ago
Did you design the mask from scratch, or is this a rebrand of an existing product?
- rattray 6y ago
  I created this product, but wouldn't say from scratch. It's based on a full face snorkel mask, with a few adaptors for filters (instead of water) that I designed with the help of an industrial engineer and the manufacturer of the snorkel mask. Goal was to reuse existing design and injection molds to reduce cost and increase speed to market (wanted to get them out in July, took till November!)
renewiltord 6y ago
What a fascinating device! Did you find that airlines are willing to accept it? They no longer accept my half-mask respirator with P100 filters.
- rattray 6y ago
  Thanks! Usually yes - sometimes the gate attendant doesn't understand that the exhale is filtered (I assume this was the problem with your respirator). We have guidance on that here: https://narwallmask.com/pages/usage-guide#h:flying https://narwallmask.com/pages/usage-guide#h:flying
  - renewiltord 6y ago

nickelcitymario 6y ago

I see a lot of comments about the applications for startups, which is only logical. (This is HN after all.) But I think this could be even more transformative in vehicle sales. Example: I work for a boat manufacturer. We've wanted to sell boats online for many years, but it's not the kind of product you charge to a credit card. (Most of our boats are in the $30k-80k range.) So one of the biggest challenges to selling online is the financing. A service like this, once it opens up outside the US and for B2C, could solve that problem. I could see this having a transformative (disruptive?) effect on boats, RVs, cars, trucks, ATVs, etc. Basically any big-ticket item that doesn't require getting a lawyer involved.

dave_4_bagels 6y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be Stripe trying to take make inroads with Plaid's existing services? Is it just me, or is this expansion of Stripe's functionality a bit concerning? It goes without saying, that now Stripe will be able to clamp down and censor banking AND payment activity they deem inappropriate or allowed by their banking partners?

crb002 6y ago

Interest on short term holdings - sweet. Then again, AWS is a bank that gives 30 day loans - they still win because the payment friction is after the fact.

WC3w6pXxgGd 6y ago

Does anybody understand this? There's nothing explaining this on the page.

krm01 6y ago

does this mean I could create and operate my own interest-free bank where people can store money and pay their bills, without me having to go through all the regulations?

rc_mob 6y ago
Right? Completely avoid having to pay the salaries of buildings full of bankers with my interest payments

rsync 6y ago

Perhaps it is too early to ask this question, but in case anyone here is an early user of Stripe Treasury (or there are Stripe employees here): What is the Stripe Treasury equivalent of a Twilio Twiml Bin ? A Twiml bin is a block of code that you can enter into your twilio account, through their management interface and then perform actions, etc., without any outside hosting of code or additional services. It's perhaps not the most powerful mechanism but it is tremendously simple and efficient to just type the code into the user interface in your account rather than hosting code to call with webhooks, etc., etc.

sebmellen 6y ago

Evolve Bank & Trust will probably be the bank most of these funds sit in [0]. With this partnership, and their Mercury Bank partnership [1], they've positioned themselves very well. For a small bank out of Memphis [2], this is quite impressive. [0]: https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite [1]: https://mercury.com/ https://mercury.com/ [2]: https://www.getevolved.com/contact/locations/ https://www.getevolved.com/contact/locations/

eins1234 6y ago

If I were to build a Bank on top of this, what's stopping Stripe from coming up with their own Banking service that undercuts my bank on every financial metric imaginable due to their higher margins? Honestly that seems pretty inevitable given Stripe Corporate Card came out almost immediately after Stripe Issuing.

leonardteo 6y ago

Question for others running marketplaces: how does Stripe Treasury and Connect play with other payment systems? Or they simply don’t? The issue we have is that a large percentage of our customers want to pay with PayPal and I suppose in the future that will expand into other payment methods. Because of this we have to be payment method agnostic and we run both Stripe (for CC) and PayPal. We’ve always been interested in things like Stripe Connect and I’m sure Treasury is interesting also but it all seems very Stripe-locked-in and would only work with payments going via Stripe (credit cards mostly and Apple Pay) which means that marketplaces that support PayPal are out? PayPal has its own marketplace product as well but again, that is too locked into the whole PayPal platform.

RileyJames 6y ago

This is the direction I hoped Xero would head, but unfortunately never quite made it. It has all the relationships in place to do so, and their software already handles these transactions at the accounting level. It seemed as if the fear of disrupting banks/banking relationships won out against innovation. Rather than build the necessary product and commodity banking they’ve worked with the banks to build out their products. I’m sure they’re still having a lot of meetings... Congrats to stripe for getting it done. Huge effort.

golergka 6y ago

The examples are built using NodeJS and are using Javascript's default number type (instead of the new BigInt or something more suitable) to represent the amount of money. I love Node, but using number type for money seems like a very, very bad idea.

kanwisher 6y ago
I don't know specifically in this case but usually you keep currency numbers in whole numbers and then divide by 100 when you need decimals. is a much cleaner method then using bigints
- golergka 6y ago
  Your customer with 90 trillion dollars will not be happy about it (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Number/MAX_SAFE_INTEGER https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...). I have been bitten with this in production, although it was facebook id represented as number and not money amount. On a more realistic scenario, imagine that get 1% cashback on their purchases. When you multiply their purchase amount by 0.01, you get sub-cent amounts. From a point of view of a particular customer, it doesn't matter much, so you can just floor the number. But on the scale of your whole organisation, it does matter; so, where's all the remainder are going to end up at? And even if you don't forget about these remainders, are you sure you will remember to add the values before the division, as 10 or 20, and not after, as 0.1 or 0.2? Because when you some the latter up, you won't get 0.3. If you're just using a built-in 'number' type, you're facing these mistakes by yourself, but a well-written library for handling money will guard you against this. Types exist not only to represent values, but to guard you against doing such mistakes. (And if that's the first time ever you hear about this scenario, do yourself a favour and watch Office Space — which does not only include this scenario as a plot device, but is a terrific movie on it's own right). I have to be honest, I tend to forget all the details when I don't work with these kinds of tasks for some time. Instead, I just remember that using any standard built-in integer type for money is a huge potential minefield. And since in Javascript it's really a float, even more so.

omarforgotpwd 6y ago

Stripe is eating banking with software. If I were a chartered bank I'd be nervous about a few core businesses right now.

tgtweak 6y ago
Wait until google hops in, launches with their banking license, and starts lending based on their own models (tuned with their own data) straight from the Federal Reserve.
woutr_be 6y ago
I work for a chartered bank, I can tell you that nobody in upper management is nervous. Questions about this often come up during town halls or department wide meetings, the justification is always that they already have the clients, and that clients are sceptical of financial startups. As a regular employee I just laugh it up, and watch startups launch similar products 10 times faster than we ever could. A startup could build an entire product, while my team is trying to get approval to even get considered for a launch.

zaroth 6y ago

I've been thinking about this in the back of my head all day. I think this is a really big deal, if it's being done the way I imagine. "Embedding financial services" as an API is essentially an Identity service that ties directly into your platform. This opens the door for a lot of very cool stuff. I'm definitely hoping to get an invite to beta test this.

akrymski 6y ago

Marketplaces holding on to my funds for longer than necessary seems like a dark pattern. Why would a Shopify seller want this? If I wanted a bank account - I'd go to a bank. Conceptually this reminds me of embedded messaging: every app provides its own inbox, instead of properly integrating with my email inbox. More walled gardens.

secondbreakfast 6y ago
Cash flow is the #1 problem with small businesses. Vendors to pay to make the goods they're selling. When you attach a bank account, it usually takes ~3 business days from card processed to accessible cash. This isn't Stripe's fault, it's bank transfer ACH's fault. By offering sellers a built-in checking account, Stripe (and in turn Shopify) can decrease the time it takes to access money you've been paid. Same-day or next-day access, huge deal. edit: I'll add, Stripe already offers immediate access to cash (Instant Transfers), but they charge 1.5% because technically they're extending credit. Stripe is eating their own lunch here. People won't need Instant Transfers as often and their profit margin on the interest sitting in the checking accounts will be much lower than the 1.5% fee they currently charge for Instant Transfer. But much bigger market.

bradley_taunt 6y ago

I'm normally a big fan of the web design work from Stripe - but this page is a mess on mobile Safari (iOS 10.3.3). It seems more and more companies are dropping basic support for "older" devices and it's a real shame. Having this look great on even very old devices should be simple, since this page doesn't even do anything that "cutting edge".

deleted 6y ago

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HipsterZipster 6y ago

So cool