7 ms·
Show HN: One curl command issues next-day ACH deposit
At Balanced Payments YC W2011, we've been working on simplifying ACH deposits
and we've managed to boil it down to one curl command.
Tell us what you think! Ultimately, our goal with this is to provide
ACH deposits for those who are already using existing processing
solutions, but want to pay their users or vendors via ACH instead.
US only - we're cooking up something for international.
Without further ado:
curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
-d amount=10000 \
-d description="Math lesson" \
-d bank_account[name]="Johann Bernoulli" \
-d bank_account[account_number]=9900000001 \
-d bank_account[routing_number]=121000358 \
-d bank_account[type]=checking \
-u 7b7a51ccb10c11e19c0a026ba7e239a9:
Try it out!
More about Balanced Payments here: https://balancedpayments.com
- jjbohn 14y agoNice! Greatly resembles Stripe, which imo is a good thing. Look forward to using this next time I need ACH on a project.
- wheaties 14y agoYou guys are fantastic. You documentation is clear. The fact that you all live on the IRC channels makes obtaining information and help super simple.
- jareau 14y agothanks wheaties. you can see a live stream of our IRC channel on our help and support page too: https://www.balancedpayments.com/help https://www.balancedpayments.com/help
- cperciva 14y agoWhy have you not been acquired by Stripe yet? This seems like a bug.
- dbul 14y agoFrom https://balancedpayments.com https://balancedpayments.com "no redirects. no iframes. no external accounts." That's the unqiue, killer feature right there. If some M&A were to happen between those companies, the existence of this feature is imperative. Specifically, if I have a marketplace I don't want my customers to do any more than a) type their paypal email or b) type their bank account details. Edit: if you happen to seriously be confused by what I've written, please visit the url and ctrl/cmd f for the quote. Then, take a look at what is below. That is, curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \ -d amount=10000 \ -d description="Math lesson" \ -d bank_account[name]="Johann Bernoulli" \ -d bank_account[account_number]=9900000001 \ -d bank_account[routing_number]=121000358 \ -d bank_account[type]=checking \ -u 7b7a51ccb10c11e19c0a026ba7e239a9: You can't do that in Stripe. If you want accomplish the same effect using Stripe, however, your customers will need some kind of account which is external to your site and/or a redirect. Does that help?
- jonknee 14y agoI'm confused... Stripe doesn't require redirects, iframes or external accounts.
- bdcravens 14y agoAs I understand Balanced Payments, it's for the other side of the transaction: Stripe is about people giving you money, but Balanced Payments is for sending others money (where you do a straight ACH deposit). (As opposed to paying them via Stripe, or PayPal, etc)
- jareau 14y agoThat's exactly right, but we do offer credit card processing as well. Our processing and payouts functionalities can be coupled or used separately. Check out the docs if you've got more questions: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api
- jareau 14y agoI believe you can send money to someone using Stripe Connect, but that would require them setting up a separate Stripe account.
- codegeek 14y agoclickable https://balancedpayments.com https://balancedpayments.com
- rabidonrails 14y agoGreat to see -- this has been a giant pain in the past! Happy to see you guys taking this on (so I don't ever have to :)
- jareau 14y agoThanks! We think of pain tolerance as a core competency. ;)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alpb 14y agoIf I embed this request onto an HTML form, what would be the name attribute on input element? Is it going to be like name="bank_account[type]" ?
- moofish 14y agoYes
- mahmoudimus 14y agoHi there! Thanks for inquiring! Here's a simple jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/KRFtB/ http://jsfiddle.net/KRFtB/ Obviously - you wouldn't encode your secret key, etc in production, but this is an example. If you want to tokenize it properly, try: http://jsfiddle.net/mahmoudimus/DGDkt/11/ http://jsfiddle.net/mahmoudimus/DGDkt/11/ We don't support CORS yet, but we're planning to do that shortly :) Our company runs like an open source project, so anything you might have thoughts on, we discuss publicly here: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api We are also on IRC providing real-time support: irc.freenode.net #balanced
- rabrooks 14y agoACH is way too slow. It is really an artifact of a slow moving banking industry. Dwolla has made some limited strides with their 'Instant' product but asking new customers to go through the signup process is also cumbersome. Is Balanced Payments working on something that can put funds into someones bank account within the hour?
- jareau 14y agoWe're always trying to speed up the flow of funds, which is why we offer next-day ACH transfers rather than 3-5 days. Also, our original product used to do instant account-to-account transfers, but that product couldn't scale. We may dust off that tech though if we can find a way to make it work at scale.
- rsync 14y agoExactly. ACH, wire transfers, etc. - it is amazing how much of our "modern" banking practice is still defined by the constraints of (literally) horses and buggies. 3pm cutoff times, overnight settlement, multi-day wire settlement ... what a clown show.
- jareau 14y agodon't get me started!! I rage so hard at the US banking system. I laugh/cry every time I have to tell a customer we can't make deposits on weekends or holidays.
- onetwothreefour 14y agoFedWires are almost instant... depending on your bank, receiving bank, etc. For most B2B FedWires, it's pretty much instant. Yay Treasury. The cutoffs do suck, however. The US needs to catch up to the rest of the world with regards to banking. And also kill off checks.
- jareau 14y agoWhat's the cost for FedWire?
- lancefisher 14y agoThis is great! ACH is such a pain to deal with. This solves a real problem I have right now. I'm using Stripe for payments, but I want an easy way for me to send money via ACH. This looks like the ticket.
- thematt 14y agoLooks great, but the terminology is slightly unclear. Is "Balanced Payouts" your product name or company name or both? But your URL is balancedpayments.com? Might want to sync the two up.
- jareau 14y agoBalanced Payouts is the name of the product. Balanced is the name of the company. balancedpayments.com is better for SEO than balanced.com. We'll add some more info the site to better call out the different products we offer. Thanks for the feedback!
- onetwothreefour 14y agoYou should still be spending the $10 to register the other domain.
- jareau 14y agoagree, but it's a bit more than $10
- onetwothreefour 14y agoHow so? dynadot.com - $9.99. Edit: oh, you were talking about balanced.com. Yeah, I meant balancedpayouts.com. :)
- jareau 14y agoAh, I'll look into that.
- mahmoudimus 14y agoHi thematt, Actually, Balanced Payouts is the product that we're showing HN here today. Balanced Payments is the umbrella payment company that arches over Balanced Processing, the credit card processing/ach debit arm, and Balanced Payouts, the ach credit arm. I'm happy to take suggestions on how to clarify that, if that wasn't clear from the homepage.
- a1k0n 14y agoThis is sort of frightening. The obscurity of ACH was the only real security it had; now if I write a check, anyone who sees it can trivially withdraw whatever they want from my account using the above API, no? What sort of fraud protection is there?
- jareau 14y agoThis end point only allows you to send money to a bank account.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> if I write a check, anyone who sees it can trivially withdraw whatever they want from my account using the above API, no You always were able to do that - even before this post - using traditional online banking. I won't go into the details here, but trust me, it's frighteningly easy[1]. > What sort of fraud protection is there? This isn't up to Balanced to solve. It's a banking system problem at its core. [1] The problem is actually much worse, because it allows anyone to compromise your entire banking account (not just your checking account) trivially, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader!
- rgarcia 14y agoSomeone should integrate this with Splitwise and solve bill/rent/etc. splitting once and for all.
- jareau 14y agoI tweeted at them. let's see if they reply :) https://twitter.com/balanced/status/288748033661870080 https://twitter.com/balanced/status/288748033661870080
- joshwa 14y agoSo if I understand the product correctly, I have to give you the money first, wait 3-5 days, and then I can pay people? That's why there is no way to specify the source account?
- jareau 14y agoYeah, unfortunately we can't speed up the process for bringing money into the system like we can for sending money out (i.e. next-day deposits). You'd have to fund your Balanced account first before sending payouts.
- xxpor 14y agoDoes this work with Savings accounts?
- jareau 14y agoYep. You'll notice a 'type' field on the bank account resource. You can set it to 'checking' or 'savings' https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#creating-a-new-bank-account https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea...
- callmeed 14y agoAt NextProof, we use BrainTree and ACH funds to our photographers. This looks cool but I'm trying to understand how it's different/better than what we do now.
- MichaelGG 14y agoCool looking product! I'll note that the GoDaddy cert on the homepage is a bit cheesy, although I don't know if your target audience cares or notices.
- spier 14y agoWhat exactly is an ACH deposit btw? (sorry, German reader here) Can one only send money with an ACH deposit or also pull money from an account?
- jareau 14y agohey seb, ACH = automated clearing house[1]. It's the US network for moving funds between two bank accounts. ACH is a push & pull system, but our API only supports push. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House
- GaryRowe 14y agoAs an alternative to the ACH approach, Bitcoin offers this bitcoind sendtoaddress <bitcoin address> <amount> Works anywhere in the world, not just USA.