Payments Startup Balanced (YC W11) Is Processing $370M a Year

I know the part about interest. You can't collect interest on money that's not actually your own, which is the same case with any payments company.

Out of curiosity, why don't you release the money faster?

(ceo of balanced)

We don't have any plans to offer interchange+ pricing. We found that would create more work for our customers. The predicability in pricing is part of the value that Balanced provides.

All I can say is that my experience with Balanced has been most excellent, I really love what they do.

In my experience their team is extremely responsive and receptive to feedback, to the level customers can (and do) have impact on the product itself, that's pretty huge in my book.

Very happy to see them doing so well and growing.

No

I really want to like Balanced, and we signed up a few weeks ago. Before signing up, I contacted them on the IRC channel and asked if there were any other requirements to get started and send out payments. We would be sending out approximately $160k on our first batch that we'd have to fund through a bank and I wanted to make sure there would be no delays.

I was assured that this would be fine, and no additional information would be required. Well, reality turned out to be different. After sending the funding requests from our bank account, nothing happened for a few days. I didn't want to be impatient annoying customer so I waited till day 3 and shot them an email.

Turned out the transactions were flagged by their risk management team, and that they just made a mistake by not contacting us. They did process the withdrawals that day, and while the funds have now left the bank account, our Balanced account is still not funded and we can still not send out the payments.

My customers were expecting to be paid by today. Now, due to the bank holiday, if I am lucky, they will be paid by Wednesday. These are people's mortgage and rent payments. Completely unacceptable.

Balanced did apologize but did not attempt in any way to speed up the payment process. I even offered to wire the funds as it was essential that things would go through on time.

I completely understand that there is risk management involved, which is why I contacted them to begin with. I also understand that mistakes can be made, and I'll cut them slack for that. But the fact is that I now have 100s of very pissed off customers (understandably so) and that I think Balanced could have made more of an effort to help getting this batch out on time.

Hopefully this was just a glitch and the rest will go smoothly. Like I said, I want to like them but if you are like us and are already somewhat established, make sure you are not on a tight deadline and pro-actively follow-up.