Stripe Treasury • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Treasury

#61

Post by eloff » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

tarstarr wrote: post #5

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!

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.

Re: Stripe Treasury

#62

Post by radihuq » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

joshuakelly wrote: post #43

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…

This has an incredible amount of potential in the events space --- I'm excited to see what new advances this tech will enable

Re: Stripe Treasury

#63

Post by anon589 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

joshuakelly wrote: post #43

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…

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?

Re: Stripe Treasury

#64

Post by cplantijn » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

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/

Re: Stripe Treasury

#65

Post by waffle_ss » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

tarstarr wrote: post #5

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!

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.

[1]: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

Re: Stripe Treasury

#66

Post by karlshea » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #58

karlshea wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supporting users from startup-in-a-garage to publicly traded customers is what we do Unless that startup is a site that has naughty pictures!

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.

I also edited out something unnecessary.

But maybe Stripe could be pushing back against those limitations or helping to find other solutions. Apple seems to be able to (see Grindr).

Re: Stripe Treasury

#67

Post by tarstarr » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #51

patio11 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Stripe Treasury does not violate our terms... 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 ope…

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.

Re: Stripe Treasury

#68

Post by tarstarr » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

uses wrote: post #39

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.

Re: Stripe Treasury

#69

Post by mritchie712 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

scop wrote: post #20

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.

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.

Re: Stripe Treasury

#70

Post by mritchie712 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

jakozaur wrote: post #36

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 is pretty awesome too. Build a C Corp in a few minutes.