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).
Outsourcing KYC is a questionable decision though - I’m wondering how much of a black box that is or you get the same info as if you implemented it yourself.
There’s always false negatives for systems like this, and if Stripe wrongly tells you someone is good then are you liable for acting on that decision?
It’s a question of defensibility if some regulator came to you and asked why you allowed certain individuals through because a black box told you without any additional context.
And I don’t think anyone builds their own KYC from ground up - it’s more whether you have context for a decision with your own vendor implementation vs a black box yes or no.
Isn’t it Stripe’s partner bank that is ultimately underwriting all the KYC on a platform like this? I assume they’ve signed off on how Stripe has implemented it so as to be sufficiently defensible
Ding ding. Notice to open the Treasury account, you need to specify the bank. Stripe is not owning the accounts, the bank is, so KYC is pushed to them.
EDIT: For those that think that just opening the accounts as Stripe would be a workaround, the answer to that is "beneficial ownership" and is part of KYC.
Which in turn means you benefit from everyone else who's already been stung. KYC solutions' risk:reward ratios start high, but asymptotically approach 0 as the provider learns from its customers' problems. If you're signing up for a well-established one, you're able to free-ride on all the learning that's already been done.
You can have your cake and eat it, too:
- Start with a third-party KYC solution
- Slowly develop your own and compare the results with the one from the provider
- When your own solution provides something similar to the other one, you can abort the subscription
I can't speak specifically to the liability question since I don't want to provide any inaccurate information.
To the false negatives problem itself though, I think your implicit assumption is the correct one - that false negatives are a bigger potential problem than false positives. In my experience, the false positive rate on declines was immaterial to the business. The impact of a false negative is definitely a different question.
Outsourcing KYC is standard practice. There are expensive systems you can license that do this as correctly as possible, ensuring banned persons (due to sanctions, international most wanted lists, whatever) are not allowed to transact with your system.
Yes, they are black boxes, but they work pretty well considering banks all over the world use them.
In my country relying on someone else's advice even if that is a qualified professional advice won't remove any liability from a person acting on such advice. It's just an information that one needs to decide for themselves and accept consequences.
Hello anon589, no, it is the only right thing to do. Proper KYC is a thing that only works at scale, just like fraud prevention. Without access to amounts of data much larger than what any single company (even a larger one) sees you are simply going to learn all of the available lessons the hard way. KYC and UBO tracing are specialist jobs that a smaller entity will not be able to do even remotely as good as a larger one, especially not if that larger one has access to many other parties just like yours.
If I understand Stripe Treasury correctly, then a full-suite event management platform that implements this tech can drastically reduce friction for starting a small events business
(sorry for the hasty weak reply; just wanted to get a response in before the thread locks. I'll email you some specific use cases in a couple days)
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)
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.
Treasury at this time appears to be limited to businesses that serve other business, not businesses that serve end-users.
Obviously there is a lot of potential overlap there, but in those situations I suspect that the "rules" would be that you could use Treasury services for your "serving businesses" side, but not for your "end-consumer" side.
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!
"Financial services" are verbatim not allowed by Stripe's Acceptable Use Policy. What kind of businesses are permitted to use Stripe Treasury?
Which functionality is specifically provided (or anticipated to be provided) by Goldman Sachs Bank? The answer is probably a credit card.
Who performs KYC? Is it Stripe FTEs, Stripe contractors, or a vendor? Is it Evolve's vendor? The answer is probably a vendor.
When submitting payments or transfers, does your interface provide a way to show purpose of payment when the transfer is initiated? The answer is probably no.
Not sure why this keeps getting downvoted, these are not very opinionated or critical questions. It's also pretty reasonable to just guess answers, especially benign answers, based on their competitors, if they choose not to answer. They're all good faith questions.
Stripe Treasury does not violate our terms, and allows SaaS platforms (and similar) to provide their business users with access to capabilities which are regulated with those capabilities fulfilled by entities with the appropriate licensing and backed by our financial partners. This is similar to how our Connect product lets our regulated entity do money transmission on behalf of a demand economy company without them needing to do money transmission themselves.
Goldman Sachs is one of our financial partners for Stripe Treasury. Specifically, they provide custodial services for the money management accounts. For more details on this sort of thing, I'd recommend reading or having your lawyer read the contracts.
KYC goes through Stripe's processes. This is both operationally complicated and something that we generally do not go into detail on.
Given that the implementing SaaS business will control the UX around initiating a payment, they could control how much or little bookkeeping to do at time of a payment or transfer. Let me know if that doesn't answer the thrust of this question.
> Stripe Treasury does not violate our terms, and allows SaaS platforms (and similar) to provide their business users with access to capabilities which are regulated with those capabilities fulfilled by entities with the appropriate licensing and backed by our financial partners.
My very speculative reading of this: Stripe needs to fulfill KYC/AML requirements for its own customers, but not for its customers' customers. If I own a store and accept payments via Stripe, Stripe needs information about me to help make sure I'm not using the money I receive for unseemly things. But if you visit my store and buy something and pay me via Stripe, Stripe doesn't need that same information about you.
If instead of running a store I'm running a bank or some other financial service, that all changes - in that case, someone has to verify your identity to fulfill KYC/AML requirements. Stripe doesn't trust me to do that myself, since it's hard and heavily regulated and it would be onerous for Stripe to make sure I and all their other customers are doing it properly. But now they'll outsource that responsibility to banks on my behalf.
> ... provide their business users with access to capabilities which are regulated_,_ with those capabilities fulfilled by entities with the appropriate licensing ...
Short version: we do the hard things for you so you don't have to. Correction welcome if that comma doesn't convey the intended meaning.
Capabilities = stuff described on the landing page. If you provide that stuff yourself, you’d be breaking Stripe’s terms. If you use Stripe’s mechanisms, which under the hood delegate to entities Stripe trusts, you’d be fine. (IANAL.)
Would AngelList's angel investing product, built on Treasury, violate Stripe's AUP? How about TransferWise? These are financial services companies, they are something I can imagine building on Stripe Treasury. But they are probably against your AUP, even if of course they are permissible from a legal point of view.
> KYC goes through Stripe's processes. This is both operationally complicated and something that we generally do not go into detail on.
One of the things I like about banks is, when you're dealing with large amounts of money, which is what I aspire to do, you are talking with an educated person on the other end of the line. It's very easy to talk with integrity because the bank's FTE is experienced, vested in a positive outcome for you, doesn't get tripped up with keywords, and critically, because they live here and are paid well, they have something at stake, you can achieve a remedy if you don't get what you need from them.
With a contractor, there's a script. It's hard to talk with integrity because you might say a forbidden word, or you might merely delay your legitimate business even further by having to wait even longer for a Zendesk follow-up, or you might be dealing with someone in a foreign country beyond the law who is just going to criminally misuse information in your docs, like your passport, because SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are just policies, they're not laws and they're especially not enforcement. This is pretty consistent with everyone’s experience with contractors versus W2 in customer service and other cost departments, it is not a controversial position, it is definitely correlated with the fact that it is capricious, with no remedies, when you are locked out of eg your Google account, compared to say getting your checking account closed at a bank for non-legal reasons - at least the bank gives you the money in the account, while Google generally does not give you your emails nor responds to your support tickets.
It's one thing when it's a $100 merchant payment. Who cares. It's another when it's a $1,000,000 transfer. I understand the desire to scale and compartmentalize, to use vendors. It is pretty clear that the bulk of compliance work is not done through W2 Stripe employees, although I don't see why that is possible with a bank and not with Stripe.
> Given that the implementing SaaS business will control the UX around initiating a payment, they could control how much or little bookkeeping to do at time of a payment or transfer.
I'm asking, how do the typical statement-of-purpose and other KYC processes adopted by other fintech firms fit into your API? For example, if my business or I transfer $1,000,000, most fintech firms ask a day or two later to fulfill more detailed statement of purpose asks, as part of a "large transfer compliance" department sort of thing, like providing an invoice and information about the recipient. I understand this is above-and-beyond any regulatory requirements but I could be wrong. So suppose my end user makes a $1,000,000 transfer that I fulfill using Stripe Treasury-backed API, do you then follow up days later with the Treasury implementer (me), via e-mail, to obtain PDFs from the end user, etc.? Or do you simply not perform this sort of above-and-beyond ask?
The broader question was really about, how do you anticipate doing this KYC in an API-driven way? Or is the answer you will not? I'm not asking the specifics of the policy, I understand you cannot disclose the policy, I'm asking from a UX point of view, how will that policy be acted out? Because building the whole API implementation and then winding up in an e-mailing PDF back-and-forth with a contract Stripe employee anyway sounds pretty crummy.
Are the unusual asks are part of determining whether or not the implementor / intermediary is obeying an AUP, not to fulfill legal obligations? AUPs are at once quite subjective and opinionated but also surprisingly uniform among Internet money companies, leading me to believe that this is not something anyone actually feels strongly about but really just cargo-cults. While I do not personally believe this, the most cynical belief is that this is data gathering and lead generation, that Treasury is really a Robinhood-style business, so the docs asked are retained to be later analyzed for secular, non-compliance reasons like identifying new customers (i.e., the recipients's business) and pricing.
There are many financial services companies which are supportable. For example, Clearbanc, a financial services company, uses multiple Stripe products. We try to help users by offloading some of the regulatory and compliance work to us, but as you are aware regulation in financial services is complicated and nuanced. I can’t speculate on each possible use case serially, but we’re interested in hearing specifics and trying to support more legitimate fintech businesses versus less with this product.
As for handling exceptions on individual transactions: this is something which Stripe does very frequently with respect to our Stripe Connect users. For example, we might need to inquire about a large payment made over a Stripe Connect platform, particularly if it appears out-of-character for their usage or for that platform. (We might have questions about a million dollar “pizza” order.) Depending on our specific business relationship with the platform, the flow might be the platform reaching out to the customer for documentation, it might be the platform reviewing information provided contemporaneously with the transaction, it might involve us reviewing metadata on the transaction, or it might involve us reaching out to the user.
Depending on the specifics of what a platform does, it might have internal compliance or fraud teams. Many of our large platforms do; we interface with them (and create interfaces for them) to maximize their effectiveness and minimize silliness.
> Clearbanc, a financial services company, uses multiple Stripe products
If Clearbanc tried to use a Stripe product today, it obviously uses the words "investor" and "Fund me" on its landing pages, "democratize access to capital," - so it sounds like crowdfunding, even though I know Clearbanc's business isn't. Your contractor compliance team would say no, but a Stripe W2, who is equipped for this kind of nuance, would say yes.
However: "We provide the capital to grow and, in return, are paid a percentage of revenue until we are paid back plus a small 6% - 12% fee... no dilution, no board seats" is clearly describing a loan. Here's a link (1) to an SEC filing where in plain language a Clearbanc loan recipient describes receiving a "loan" from Clearbanc. So it's clearly a "lending instruments" and credit service, in violation of your AUP, no doubt about it, you even use the word lending instrument to provide the flexibility to account for this sort of stuff. And here, a contractor would not be able to figure out what I just did - they'd say, "oh their landing page is not using the word loan, which is a keyword in my script" - but a W2 would!
I get it, you want to have it both ways, I get that reality is just, "It is case by case, and in reality, we decide for (1) totally random reasons, like whether or not you are reviewed by a contractor or an educated W2, and (2) the cut of your jib." Maybe you guys permit loans in Stripe Connect.
Maybe these Clearbanc guys really did invoke some kind of magic, by not using the word loan but instead using the word advance and fees, even though their own Fast Company article says loan and the recipients (correctly) account for and legally define the money they received from Clearbanc as a loan. I don't know. It's actually really surprising and I'm trying to cut to the core of the AUP question and why it generates so many problems for you guys.
Is your real takeaway: "Oh, I can't say specific companies." I believe this is wrong! I think you should not be afraid to say Clearbanc, and then find out they make loans, and you should be able to just say, "No to AngelList and no to TransferWise." It's not that big of a deal that Clearbanc makes loans, which is against your AUP, you can work with whomever you want! Which is really what I'm getting at, which is to facilitate a conversation, something between educated people who aren't trying to gotcha each other, that is what we're having, about what the potential of the platform is - not a situation where, oh man, what do I put into this "What do you want to build with Stripe Treasury" box on the invite form? Because if I put in the wrong keywords, I am shut out from something really useful to me, not because I am doing something weird and want to skirt compliance, but because it is free.
(1) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001700895/000114420... "During 2018, the Company entered into several loan agreements with Clearbanc in the amount of $670,443, bearing interest ranging from 9.25% to 15%. Interest expense on these loans totaled $26,560 for the year ended December 31, 2018. The unpaid principal balance was $291,214 as of December 31, 2018."
I'm confused. Are you trying to say that Stripe is violating their own policies by offering a clearing-house API to facilitate their customers getting loans from banks?
Or are you trying to say that a Stripe customer would be in violation of Stripe's policies, if they used this facilitaton-of-loans to provide loans to their own customers?
Because I think the first statement is obviously false; and the second statement is obviously true, but vacuous — in that that's not the service that Stripe is offering. (Or, I mean, it could be in special cases, but it's not pitched that way because for most companies doing that would be a legal impossibility.)
Obviously, Stripe can hook your company up with a bank; and obviously, that bank can offer your company some loans. Those two processes, separately, are entirely normal things that happen every day in the financial world. Combining them doesn't change that.
Obviously (to me, at least), your company cannot take a loan offered by a bank, and repackage that same loan to your own customers as part of your offering as if it was from you, with your company controlling+mediating that relationship — at least, not without you yourself being legally reclassified as a bank. (Which is why that's not what Stripe itself is doing here. They're just facilitating already-legitimate transactions between banks and businesses, without owning or mediating those transactions.)
And that fact has nothing to do with any company's policies, Stripe's or otherwise; that just has to do with what activities are only legal for banks to do. Stripe isn't filtering these customers out. They're just telling them that they can't take do X with service Y Stripe provides, because they're not banks, and only banks can legally do X, regardless of how.
"I'm confused. Are you trying to say that Stripe is violating their own policies by offering a clearing-house API to facilitate their customers getting loans from banks?"
I think your parent is expressing (among other things) frustration about the fact that Stripe is presenting this product as a very modern, very Internet-based, very progressive product that we expect will be governed by the same kind of opaque, sometimes capricious enforcement of ToS/AUP that google uses to unexpectedly lock people out of their gmail accounts or "de-monetize" their youtube accounts for no discernible reasons ...
... but at the same time, this isn't a free email account and it isn't a video service - it's serious, grownup business involving real money.
So the question becomes, what kind of people are manning the back end infrastructure and how much of it is driven by algorithms ? As your parent describes, he can go to an actual bank and sit down with a real employee and have a substantive conversation with nuance and understanding ... which you can't have with an algorithm.
Can I ask a quick question - do you have familiarity with corporate treasury type activity at businesses and SAAS businesses?
The volume of businesses that will be interested in this is going to be high. Your accounting platform would LOVE to be able to add banking features. Your expense management platform would LOVE to have direct integrated debit cards and cash management for you (and their customers will love it). Your education institutions would love to have their stored value / payment flows made more efficient (huge numbers of changing students with onsite and offsite dining, stipends, reimbursements etc etc with lots of lost cards and more).
In most cases, business do a POOR job of KYC when onboarding payment recipients.
My guess is stripes default flow to onboard hairstylists and dog walkers will be stronger, and repeat bad actors will be more easily identified by them then whatever your existing corporate treasury process is (usually upload an ACH file with some very minimum checks based on a webapp onboarding).Stripes model for KYC / onboarding will be API driven almost certainly, that's going to be part of the value add without question. Emailing PDF's back and forth is not scalable for onboarding with KYC frankly (and not always that secure).
In more specialized cases, the person building on top of the treasury function, if required by their business / license etc, would need to do additional bookkeeping / KYC as necessary. That's how it always is. For example, many states require a money transmitter license. Transferwise could do the recordkeeping and validation around transfers at whatever additional level needed to be able to offer their product in those states, which may include things like finding out source of funds. So if you are operating a money transfer business, yes, you either may not be allowed on stripe, or you may get asked what is going on.
The other thing is, for many transfers "on platform" its going to be VERY clear what is going on. Stripe will have metadata access on the API side it looks like. They can review what is happening for reasonableness. And they already play in a pretty large space, I would be surprised if a lot of use cases exceeded their capacity and am sure MANY use cases would be within capacity.
"While I do not personally believe this, the most cynical belief is that this is data gathering and lead generation, that Treasury is really a Robinhood-style business, so the docs asked are retained to be later analyzed for secular, non-compliance reasons like identifying new customers (i.e., the recipients's business) and pricing."
Thank you for this insight, however unlikely it may end up being - it is very well taken.
Try not to be an asshole. The Stripe founders are probably the most ethical players in the payment space and if you make claims like the ones above you should at least provide some examples or evidence.
I've worked in and for PSPs for many years, if everybody in that space had the business ethics that the Stripe founders had that part of the domain would have a much better name than it does.
For some background on why I believe this is the case read up on Paypal, CCBill, IBill and many others besides.
> The Stripe founders are probably the most ethical players in the payment space and if you make claims like the ones above you should at least provide some examples or evidence.
I dont have any evidence regarding and neither you by the way, but if you want to play modern day Socrates, go ahead.
> I've worked in and for PSPs for many years, if everybody in that space had the business ethics that the Stripe founders had that part of the domain would have a much better name than it does.
I support part of that Kantian ethics involve collecting data from the users("For fraud detecting purposes}[1] and rejecting on previous promises to hike up prices[2].
Look, I am sure the guys at Stripe like puppies and make donations and so on, but at the end of the time, they are a business, a ruthless entity hyper-optimized to make money, nothing else. The rest are empty words like Google's : "Dont be evil" or Disney's "The Happiest Place on Earth". This a 40B company we are talking about, it is not longer a couple of kids in a garage. Despite your deontological aspirations a little bit of skepticism wouldn be so bad.
This is a bit harsh. Stripe's value add is handing you an API and doing all of the hard work behind the scenes, same as Twilio (integrating with far flung telco gateways with byzantine interfaces). It's not necessary for Stripe to handle payment flows or issue cards themselves. Success is if customers are willing to pay Stripe instead of wrangling all of those vendors together themselves (which sounds like a good bet to make).
Disclosure: Stripe CC processing customer, no other relation.
Considering Stripe forbids financial services in their t&c's, and this allows Stripe users to implement financial services, the question is, what kind of financial services are now allowed?
Would be great to hear a few use cases for Treasury that can't be done with existing Connect platform (and which fall within t&c's).
Suppose a driver for a rideshare app wants to pay their car payment.
Stripe Connect can't be used to hold funds from many rides for a month; they have to pay it out to a bank account (which they might not have) or to a disbursement card, which (because loan repayments are generally not paid on a card in the U.S.) likely doesn't solve their problem without withdrawing cash and buying a money order. That is extra effort and cost for the driver.
Stripe Treasury would let the rideshare platform give their drivers an embedded money management account. That would allow indefinitely holding money, and would allow them to use e.g. bill pay for car payments, similar to the way that many HNers probably pay their own car payments today.
This is good for the platform (solves a pain point for many drivers) and good for the drivers (they get faster access to their funds, decreasing the likelihood they'll get dinged for a late repayment, and can spend less of their time managing low-value-added money movement when they could instead be driving).
If my rideshare platform also lends or leases vehicles to its drivers, would Stripe Treasury permit the drivers to repay the loan or lease via the driver's treasury account where they get paid? Does regular Stripe support paying back loans or leases?
When I say permit, I mean from an acceptable use point of view, not an engineering point of view.
I know of no reason we'd not support the first, though feel free to run that by us formally if you want explicit permission in writing (which presumably a rideshare platform large enough to have a leasing operation would).
We don't support using Payments to collect loan repayments in most cases.
Are their cases where you do support using Payments for loan repayment?
I've had an idea for an "informal loan" platform that facilitates loans between friends, but paid back automatically, but I haven't ever acted on it because of the ban on using Stripe for loan repayments.
Synapse offers something like this, but is geared more toward loan origination than to strictly facilitation.
Wouldn't it be way easier and better for the driver to just open a bank account? Why would they want to tie something as important as making car payments to their ephemeral gig work?
Many people don’t want or cannot get real bank accounts, e.g. because they can’t sustain the minimum balance, have been blacklisted for bouncing checks, or it just isn’t the norm in their community.
It's kind of a slippery slope to start letting employers hold pay in an account they control... reminds me of the union busting articles on the top right now, with Facebook building employee housing now, the idea you brought up is the next step towards the "Facebook Store" and scrips.
I understand some people have trouble banking, but the answer should then be for us to ensure they can have equal access to banking, no matter what.
Agreed. But this is not some gig economy thing... when an institution needs to pay you and you don't have direct deposit, often they will send you a prepaid debit card instead of a check. Even the federal government does this [0]. These cards tend to have predatory fees.
I'm aware of that practice, and that's why I would hope that we could build something like the often talked about USPS bank, or whatever, so everyone can have equal access to real banking with no predatory practices.
Not that any gig companies are doing this yet, or even thought to do it, but I just don't like the idea of this being done in a "company scrips"-like fashion, there are some things that should be totally nuclear to the touch, and tying even more of your life to your company (in the USA you have medical, housing, food, etc. tied to your work) should be nuclear.
> and that's why I would hope that we could build something like the often talked about USPS bank, or whatever, so everyone can have equal access to real banking with no predatory practices.
I signed up on the wait list and emailed patio11 specifically to build such a product. Regarding your point about company scrip, I think prevention against that is best served by reaching out to your Congressional representatives, as well as members of the
U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, to legislate safeguards. Without the force of law, protections are only polite suggestions.
Will be interesting to see this product allows you to support customers who are e.g. on the ChexSystems list or have inadequate ID. Since it is real banks under the hood, same problems may apply.
bank may not open an account for the driver, and why push the drivers to the bank if you can provide kind of substitute of those services thus expanding your business in such a great way.
>Stripe Treasury would let the rideshare platform give their drivers an embedded money management account. That would allow indefinitely holding money, and would allow them to use e.g. bill pay for car payments, similar to the way that many HNers probably pay their own car payments today.
It sounds like what Stripe is doing is providing a quasi-bank account, kind of retail frontend emulating limited banking services and backend-ed by GS and the likes as Stripe doesn't seems to have a license themselves ("commoditize your complement" comes to mind). Though it doesn't sound like a service for the driver, it only looks like it. It is the service for the platform. Interesting who really owns the "embedded" account/money - platform or the driver. If the driver then it looks more like bank, if the platform - interesting can of worms, like you employer providing an imitation of a real account for you and holding money in your name. I.e. it seems that the point here is to find a way to keep money in the system (the platform keeping drivers' money in Stripe - i.e. "That would allow indefinitely holding money" seems to be the key here) instead of just merely piping the money.
Thanks! This makes sense, we could've definitely used it on a project a while ago (ended up using Connect but had to modify the product to accommodate).
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?
Here are some of the common use cases we’re seeing so far:
* Bank account replacement for SMBs and sole props, integrated directly into the platform or marketplace they’re already using. For example, today a Shopify merchant earns their revenue on Shopify but then has to transfer funds out to manage overall cash flow elsewhere (e.g., pay bills). Shopify is building Balance [0] with the Treasury API so this user can manage all of this in one place with a single view of revenue and spend. Other benefits of course include faster payouts, rewards specific to the ecosystem, and adding product features enabled by read/write access to the money management data (e.g. you could roll your own invoice reconciliation or alerts, or give users a discount on your SaaS if they ran sufficient volume on your card).
* Open loop wallets, like offering a “spend” account within your product that a user can either use to buy in-product purchases, or use the card/ach/wire functionality to buy external goods. E.g. a car leasing platform for drivers adds Treasury, drivers can use the wallet for discounts on car leases, also use the card to spend on gas.
* Product operations, like having a platform-level Treasury balance you use for reserves, chargebacks, and as glue to make your product flow work. E.g. On demand services marketplace that “buys items customers need and delivers it to their door” can issue cards from a central Treasury balance to their drivers, so that they can use a physical card to buy the burrito for the customer at the restaurant.
...but part of the point with Treasury is that we don’t know every use case prior, just like we didn’t know every way developers would use Stripe Connect (developers are pretty creative!). Our goal was to build for specific use cases, of course, but also build composable enough primitives that people could recombine them in ways we didn’t imagine. We wanted to make a tool that helped unlock developer creativity, because flexible tools were so lacking in the existing fintech infrastructure space.
On the third example about a food delivery service issuing cards for couriers: isn't this what Marqeta already does for Doordash? Is Stripe doing anything differently with Treasury?
keyword is Treasury eg handling all the payment operations tasks that an in-house corporate treasury team that’s responsible for moving money in and out of the company’s bank accounts might complete
This is SUPER cool - congrats on the launch! A few questions:
Do you plan to offer Stripe Treasury to non-marketplace small businesses / individuals?
I ask because the #1 thing I've been wanting for the past few years is basically Stripe Bank :) I hate Bank of America. I'm not happy with any of the other startup banks. And honestly, at this point my first instinct when seeing Stripe Treasury is "Imma just build my own bank for myself!" (and that actually looks like a real possibility, at least technically).
If not, do you plan to offer a retail product for individuals?
"I hate Bank of America. I'm not happy with any of the other startup banks. And honestly, at this point my first instinct when seeing Stripe Treasury is "Imma just build my own bank for myself!" (and that actually looks like a real possibility, at least technically)."
I did this with Twilio - which is to say, I built my own little personal telco with Twilio.
It's not without it's ups and downs but there are a lot of interesting little superpowers I now have over my telco interactions that I would not otherwise have ...
--A guy who built his own Asterisk PBX-in-a-linux-box that sat on his desk in 2004 and had 2 physical phone lines plugged into it and today, 16 years later, is still running slight variations of the exact same scripts (although now in the cloud w/ VoIP, but same same).
Yeah Mercury and some other startup banks looks great, but at least Mercury appears to be business-only. I need something that works for business & personal.
(And I have no doubt they'll all expand to handle both personal & business, but I'm impatient ;)
My first question is, will any revenue be available for companies that build on top of this platform? Normal banks make money on interchange on bank cards and interest spread (as well as less savory activities like crazy overdraft fees). Is there any revenue split with the partner? E.g., maybe Goldman pays 0.82%, I offer my customer 0.50%, and so I pocket 0.32% of the balance.
Second, what about customer service for the end customer? There's clearly a top-level layer that's managed by the partner, a mid-level layer managed by Stripe, and the deep backend banking layer managed by the partner bank. How is customer support split up among those 3?
Those were my two main questions. I heard a couple of people asking about use cases. My use case would be an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've been working on a concept for a next-level-totally-awesome personal finance budget app. The fundamental purpose of a personal budgeting app is to assist you in knowing when to say yes, and when to say no to a purchase, and to do autopsies on past purchases that may have messed things up. I tried a basic version using Plaid to get a data feed from my bank, but the Plaid data feed is inconsistent from bank to bank (with how it handles authorizations that later settle or fail to settle). Being able to bundle a budget app directly with banking could be killer. You'd have real-time, 100% accurate data coming in. That would be a game changer that might make me finally finish my dusty app.
So, Tara, if you're not doing revenue sharing with partners yet, please consider it:-). Revenue sharing is a great way to make apps-on-top-of-platforms flourish.
We definitely want platforms to make money on Treasury - there’s a lot of flexibility in how platforms can structure monetization (and revshares are totally possible) so please contact us to talk more about how this works.
With respect to customer service for the end customer, this follows the same process as Stripe Connect. Depending on the type of connected accounts you choose, you can have either Stripe take on customer support for you entirely, or manage customer support yourself. While our bank partners power this product, they’re never interacting with end users at all: that layer, from a customer support perspective, is abstracted by Stripe.
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?
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!
Is this like Stripe Issuing where it is only available to a small number of companies? A lot of newer Stripe products seems to be available to large enterprises only. We applied for that waitlist multiple times but never heard back. What are the revenue or scale requirements for your targeted customers? Is it suitable for fintech e-wallets/banks?
We have been ramping up our rollout of Stripe Issuing over time, and will do similar for Stripe Treasury. Can we have your email address? (You can email it to me at this handle at stripe.com) Depending on the specifics of your use case, we may be at general availability.
There are no particular revenue or scale requirements; we tend to roll out features to a few users across the spectrum because supporting users from startup-in-a-garage to publicly traded customers is what we do. We would be thrilled to talk about particular potential use cases; we do envision some B2B fintech applications would find the set of capabilities appealing. Just drop some details on the form and we'll be in touch.
You're getting downvoted but it's fair criticism. Unfortunately it's also probably out of Stripe's hands, given that it tends to be driven by partner limitations.
Or maybe people could push back against normalizing support for these types of businesses. Many don't agree that this should be supported, and think Stripe is correct here.
Escrow has a precise legal definition—and while we don’t support straight-up “escrow,” Stripe recently added support to hold funds for up to 3 months. You can use Stripe Connect to manually control (in this case, delay) payout timing: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/manual-payouts.
Do you intend to allow Treasury to be used to build new bank storefronts? For example, could someone build a slick mobile app and website and use Treasury to launch a B2B "bank", complete with FDIC insurance? Would it be acceptable to launch an offering like mercury.com entirely powered by Treasury?
Or is the intent to only allow Treasury as an adjunct to a "real" business?
Of course, neither Stripe nor users of Stripe Treasury would be launching a bank, but you could provide financial services for other businesses, entirely powered by Stripe Treasury and Stripe Connect. It's pretty analogous to what Shopify is doing with Stripe Connect, Treasury, and Issuing to launch Shopify Balance: https://www.shopify.com/balance
Is Stripe Treasury still beholden to Stripe's list of restricted businesses?[1]
A few years ago I started a company with some partners and we signed up with Stripe Atlas. At the end of the lengthy application we got rejected by Stripe because our business falls under the "regulated" category. Even though we didn't need credit card processing, just ACH, and the former is seemingly where these list of prohibited businesses come from.
We ended up going full steam ahead with Dwolla instead. Although the developer experience is not as polished as Stripe, they don't discriminate against fully legal businesses that should be allowed to bank and transact like any other.
It is—the businesses we’re not able to work with are mostly restricted by the financial partners and banks that Stripe works with. But we do want to support as many business types as possible—and for Atlas in particular, we’ve recently been able to support many more. (For example, we fully support telemedicine companies now.) Would you be able to email me at edwin@stripe.com? I’d like to take a second look at that rejection.
I had the same issue with my startup a few years back that was classified as transacting via rebates. Because the payment method was a rebate against a purchase Stripe dismissed us. And, like Waffle_es, that's when I discovered Dwolla. Nothing against Stripe, every business can choose who they want to serve.
What was the business? Stripe's not really making the rules here, it's the financial partners backing them. Just because something is "legal" doesn't mean it's not risky.
As an easy example, from the page you linked, "psychic services" are banned.
Pharmacies exchanging prescription drugs. Regulated, not risky - don't confound the two.
And there are no "rules" restricting these transactions over the ACH network, Stripe is applying the widest scope of restrictions gathered from across of its partners, which include the credit card processors.
And I was asking this question to the Stripe PM, not some uninformed white knight.
Will Stripe Treasury support Factoring use cases? If you're not familiar with factoring, let's say you get a large order that you can't actually afford to fulfill due to a lack of cash-on-hand to buy materials, rent equipment, etc. Rather than requiring the customer to pay up front or getting a loan (possibly using the invoice as collateral), you can just sell the Net-30 (or 60, or 90) invoice outright for something like 95¢ on the $ to get the money you need to fulfill the order. This is particular popular in industries like fashion that have long lead times for both manufacturing and for billing.
This seems targeted mostly for marketplaces, but I'm curious if this enables a way to accept ACH and wire transfer payments. My thinking is use the API to let the end customer setup a treasury account on my site, they can wire/ACH funds to this account of theirs to pay invoices, and I can use the API to "debit" funds from their treasury account to mine as needed to cover their service bills.
Handling invoicing and payments for a class of enterprise customers who can't use a credit card for payments as a matter of policy can be painful.
*edit: I think this is actually possible with stripe connect today.
Stripe Invoicing is purpose built for exactly that problem: serving enterprise customers who don't want to use a card for payment. While I think Treasury or Treasury+Connect could help in a pinch, Invoicing is likely the best solution with the smallest implementation lift.
Could one use this for a micro loan or payday loan platform? And the loan money via this and send monthly payment requests?
I've long had in mind doing something like that as non profit to wipe out the predatory payday loans business which preys on the most financially vulnerable in society. It just seems too difficult for me to do with current bank services. This potentially changes the calculus.
Hi Tara! First off, I've never posted on HN before, but I felt so obligated to write this because this solves so many of the challenges my team has been going through building our application. I'm wondering if students under 18 are permitted under the TOS? I can see how this product will change the open banking game and fill so many gaps in. Thank you for building this!
If you sign up for Stripe and you're under 18, you'll be required to have a person 18 years or older register as the business representative for your account (usually a parent or guardian). Depending on your country, the age requirement may vary.
If you're under 13, you are not allowed to use Stripe at all regardless of what country you're in.
Was it perhaps for a more consumery-type use-case instead of business? Issuing (and Treasury) are mostly focused on building for businesses at this moment (but are also expanding the number of use-cases). Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can take another look?
Money management accounts created with Stripe Treasury can send bill payments, which depending on the payee may be delivered entirely electronically or as checks. We have no current intentions of making printable paper checks a feature, but please get in touch if you have a compelling use case for that that isn’t solved by online bill pay.
The accounts can also do both push and pull ACH payments.
While we do not currently support depositing checks into the accounts, we expect to soon, via “remote deposit capture.” You may have seen this sort of experience in mobile applications for many U.S. banks the last few years: take a picture, check gets deposited. If we offer this, we will do it in a fashion which minimizes the engineering work required by the software company, like we broadly try to minimize non-value-creating engineering work for our users.
Request submitted. It can be solved by bill-pay, our older clients will want a checkbook to hand checks to vendors on delivery for items which will have them setting up a local bank account for that. Remote Deposit is key for any non-profit/political account as they get mailed a lot of checks.
Curious how customer support works? There’s a dispute for an ACH pull, who is handling the dispute, I’d assume the bank that has the charter? Same goes with remote check deposit, someone has to verify the check.
We absolutely want platforms to make money on Treasury and our other financial services products (Capital and Issuing.) For our Issuing and Treasury products, contact us to talk more about how this works -- there’s a lot of flexibility in how a platform can structure monetization. For loans, it’s more immediately straightforward: you’ll earn a revenue share on all loans extended, with zero financial liability on credit losses.
(Stepping in for Tara because she is currently dealing with a literal fire. Never a dull moment on launch day.)
We're starting the limited beta for businesses serving businesses in the U.S., but our ambitions for products are always bringing them to all appropriate users on the internet. This is one reason why we partnered with global banks to launch this.
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?
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.
Bit of an aside, but as a new entrepreneur selling physical products (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.
(since a few folks have been interested in the mask and this is hn, I should mention that I'm currently looking for some freelance frontend dev help right now - I don't have time to fix the hideous parts of my homepage and it's giving me heartburn. Email in profile).
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:
Yeah, I actually had an attachment to filter the exhale valve. I decided to just swap out as soon as they asked rather than explain (because I had a 3M 1860 N95 in my pocket) which seems to have been the right choice since one of them started to get belligerent about the respirator very quickly as I started taking it off. It looks like they're very sensitive to people doing non-standard things.
I'm not even one to argue with people in these situations so I was happy to play along but that attendant seemed eager to escalate.
Perhaps having the extra filters like you recommend might help, but I suspect it wouldn't have. Hope things have improved since then (a month ago on Alaska).
What a shame that the flight attendants are either
1) so scared of their management that they won't listen to people explaining the masks are filtered or
2) simply unable to understand that a non-standard mask could have a filtered exhale valve (which is much safer than a cloth mask for others, too).
I had the exact same thing happen to me on 4 different flights, with the flight attendants becoming very aggressive. I brought a short note with a diagram of how the filtration works, and pointed it out to them, and they just told me "sorry, Mayo Clinic guidelines say you can't wear that." This was on United, American Airlines, and Delta.
The tip I figured out on my last flight was to wear a hoodie that covered up the respirator on the side, and then wear two surgical masks over the respirator in front. Haven't gotten a second look since then. I don't think this would be possible with the narwhal mask (unfortunately).
Honestly, I was very surprised by the belligerence. My strategy for interacting with any authority with disproportionate power over me is to tend towards normalcy so I was pretty rapidly complying with the mask swap.
A friend of mine postulated that they couldn't hear me through my mask, but as I took it off and was swapping I said "I'm complying, I'm complying, I'm not arguing" in a conciliatory tone, it didn't seem to help. I was playing the 100% doormat. Didn't stop the attendant from saying to me as I was leaving to go to my seat: "It's not that dangerous".
I can only guess that they encounter people who do insist or that they are on web forums / chat groups with other attendants who have encountered people who do argue and so they're primed for someone like that. Puzzling interaction, to be honest. It was the first time I've had any sort of negative interaction with a service professional.
Same here! I'm a very concilliatory person, and I always try to be courteous, but I couldn't calm any of them down (even when I was flying first class for a business trip!).
One gal even made me take off the mask and put on a surgical mask (which she gave me, she wouldn't let me wear my non-vented N95) in front of a security camera. That was pretty embarrassing, to be holding up the line, and felt like a scene out of a dystopian comedy.
I can only reason that it's for liability reasons, and the airlines don't want to be sued for someone getting infected.
But then again, people right behind me had cloth masks on with their noses exposed, who obviously didn't care, and they didn't get a second look. Neither did the airlines keep the middle seats free like they had promised too. Clown world.
Once I was on the flight I put my respirator on with a hoodie over it and slouched against the window, and they didn't bother me.
What's your supply capacity on these masks? I have a friend who works in a medium-sized hospital system in the South, and we talked about using snorkelling masks back in May. (They were reusing one N95 mask for 10 days per person.) I was surprised no one had repurposed snorkelling masks yet.
I sent him the link. If he gets back to me and his hospital system is interested, perhaps we could arrange a call. Would your HN profile email be okay for reaching out?
We have over 15,000 on the way this month (some are spoken for). Yes, do reach out!
Some folks actually did do this in April, just with 3D-printed adaptors: maskson.org and pneumask.org. They don't have built-in exhale filters, though, which limits the utility.
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!)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).