> If what they actually meant was that customers would be sending their card data directly to Balanced and it wouldn't ever hit the other business's systems eve

> If what they actually meant was that customers would be sending their card data directly to Balanced and it wouldn't ever hit the other business's systems even transiently, that's a more interesting case. Balanced seems to be following a model similar to Stripe where the payment details are indeed sent directly to them (via javascript in the browser, for the most common use case), and it never touches the merchant's servers.