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Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

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Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#31

Post by codelitt »

tyre wrote: post #30
codelitt wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the support! And thank you for your feedback. We do have some stuff that ZenPayroll currently doesn't have such as the btc (which you mentioned) and our paycheck distribution which allows for employees to automatically take their paycheck into any number of bank accounts/bitcoin wallets. RE integration: Yes. We realize that the taxes is a huge part. Currently we're offering a free month and plan to have…

Hey there! Just to give some context from a ZenPayroll engineer: ZenPayroll does have splits between multiple bank accounts[1]. You can split your net pay by amount ($100 in Account1, $200 in Account2, the rest in Account3) or by percentage. Employees can even chose to donate a portion of their paycheck to any 501c3 in the United States[2]. Regarding BTC payouts, that's an interesting area, though currently runs into…

Hey! I didn't know that you guys had splits! I stand corrected on that account. And apologies for the misrepresentation. We even signed up for your service when we were doing our research. Was this recent?

You're right about some states having certain laws around this. One of the biggest challenges of working in the US is that every state has a different money transmitting policy and every state has different labour laws.

We hope that even if we step on some toes, that we can move this forward. There are some incredibly cool concepts in how people get paid that Bitcoin could enable. We talked a bit about areas in the Bitcoin ecosystem and payroll in general we think we can push things forward in our launch post: http://blog.incoin.io/introducing-incoin-bitcoin-distributed...

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#32

Post by wdewind »

codelitt wrote: post #27
wdewind wrote: post #25

Nice to see some more people in the payroll space. Very interested to hear how you are handling fraud/risk with bitcoin and with split payments (what happens when you need to clawback a payment half of which was made through USD/ACH and half through BTC?).

Thanks! We're not nearly where you are though. :) We have a couple of things in place. When an employer is running payroll: they have 2 points to review (both employee and their payroll as a whole) the totals in USD, 2FA step, and then there's a countdown before payroll begins to run (which they can opt to rush if they so decide). We have policies and tech in place to make sure that when we're distributing we can gua…

> Bitcoin itself doesn't increase our fraud/risk

Yikes, I disagree highly. You are operating a service that allows people to transfer USD from bank accounts into a relatively untraceable, irreversible currency. You will absolutely become, if you are not already, a big target for fraud.

The most common pattern we see is people trying to pay other bank accounts using a stolen bank account number. I don't think your ACH provider will care if the money is in bitcoin if you did not have authorization to pull that money in the first place.

All I'm saying is, your KYC process can and will fail, make sure you know your liability to your ACH provider/bank.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#33

Post by tonyhb »

wdewind wrote: post #32
codelitt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We're not nearly where you are though. :) We have a couple of things in place. When an employer is running payroll: they have 2 points to review (both employee and their payroll as a whole) the totals in USD, 2FA step, and then there's a countdown before payroll begins to run (which they can opt to rush if they so decide). We have policies and tech in place to make sure that when we're distributing we can gua…

> Bitcoin itself doesn't increase our fraud/risk Yikes, I disagree highly. You are operating a service that allows people to transfer USD from bank accounts into a relatively untraceable, irreversible currency. You will absolutely become, if you are not already, a big target for fraud. The most common pattern we see is people trying to pay other bank accounts using a stolen bank account number. I don't think your ACH…

Thanks for the note, and the concern. It is an issue.

The risk I think you're saying is: if we charge a company with a stolen bank account and pay in bitcoin, it's irreversible. That's true. We're mitigating this — that's why there's an ACH chargeback period that we wait out. And why we verify bank account ownership before charging. These are standard KYC rules that we have to comply with before accepting a company on payroll, and charging bank accounts is all done on the company side. I hear that they might fail, but we're not allowing anyone to run payroll and pay out in high volumes (eg. 80+%) of BTC to start with until they've been manually verified.

We've checked this through our lawyers and via Fincen, and we're mitigating risks every way we can.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#34

Post by payrollpeeps »

codelitt wrote: post #11
agilebyte wrote: post #8

So is this like http://wagepoint.com/ that does bitcoin too?

It does have some similarities, but we put the majority of the control in the employees' hands. This not only makes the employer's lives easier, but also allows the employee to update how their paid at any point in time. This is of course empty until it's fulfilled, but for what it's worth - we have a lot in our roadmap that will also set this apart in a lot of ways.

Just a quick check in from Wagepoint. We also allow the employee to split their pay between multiple accounts via percentages - checking, savings, bitcoin. Just as an interesting point of fact, 80% of the employees using the bitcoin feature in our app take a 100% of their net pay in bitcoin. So it's definitely gaining popularity.

The biggest benefit in the way we do it is that we take out all the Fed/ Sate and Local taxes first and then only allow people to take home a % of their net pay in bitcoin. This way we get to avoid questions from Uncle Sam :)

Always happy to see the bitcoin payroll community expanding - props!

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#35

Post by wdewind »

tonyhb wrote: post #33
wdewind wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin itself doesn't increase our fraud/risk Yikes, I disagree highly. You are operating a service that allows people to transfer USD from bank accounts into a relatively untraceable, irreversible currency. You will absolutely become, if you are not already, a big target for fraud. The most common pattern we see is people trying to pay other bank accounts using a stolen bank account number. I don't think your ACH…

Thanks for the note, and the concern. It is an issue. The risk I think you're saying is: if we charge a company with a stolen bank account and pay in bitcoin, it's irreversible. That's true. We're mitigating this — that's why there's an ACH chargeback period that we wait out. And why we verify bank account ownership before charging. These are standard KYC rules that we have to comply with before accepting a company o…

Yeah, sorry, I definitely don't mean to imply legal liability so much as financial liability. No one will really care legally (about you), you'll just be on the hook for the money.

As I said before, it's not a matter of whether or not your KYC process will fail, it's simply when and what happens after that. It sounds like you have your head in the right place, but I can tell you from experience that verifying bank account ownership and expecting the ACH chargeback period to be sufficient to protect you is not enough (for one thing a lot of banks are simply not great adherents of the ACH rules). You're essentially on your own, and you'll need to protect yourself, not just "follow the rules," if that makes sense.

> and charging bank accounts is all done on the company side.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Anyway, my contact info is in my profile and I'd love to chat more off-HN about this and compare notes against what you guys are doing.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#36

Post by codelitt »

wdewind wrote: post #35
tonyhb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the note, and the concern. It is an issue. The risk I think you're saying is: if we charge a company with a stolen bank account and pay in bitcoin, it's irreversible. That's true. We're mitigating this — that's why there's an ACH chargeback period that we wait out. And why we verify bank account ownership before charging. These are standard KYC rules that we have to comply with before accepting a company o…

Yeah, sorry, I definitely don't mean to imply legal liability so much as financial liability. No one will really care legally (about you), you'll just be on the hook for the money. As I said before, it's not a matter of whether or not your KYC process will fail, it's simply when and what happens after that. It sounds like you have your head in the right place, but I can tell you from experience that verifying bank ac…

We'll get in touch to discuss further for sure!

We do have measures in place to protect ourselves and we appreciate your comments. There's always more that we can do.

It's also worth noting that an employer and employee have given all of the normal KYC information and have connected bank accounts so while the BTC wallet is "anonymous" on the network, we can link it to a specific person. The danger is near the same level as someone getting the money via ACH and immediately withdrawing in cash. (Many banks immediately mark the deposit as not-pending).

I'm not saying that there's not risk. Just that the risks are fairly similar even though the network is different.

Also I think what Tony was saying about debits only company side, is that we're only debiting company accounts which does decrease the fraud level vs a situation where we allowed an a personal account to be debited and money sent somewhere.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#37

Post by codelitt »

payrollpeeps wrote: post #34
codelitt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have some similarities, but we put the majority of the control in the employees' hands. This not only makes the employer's lives easier, but also allows the employee to update how their paid at any point in time. This is of course empty until it's fulfilled, but for what it's worth - we have a lot in our roadmap that will also set this apart in a lot of ways.

Just a quick check in from Wagepoint. We also allow the employee to split their pay between multiple accounts via percentages - checking, savings, bitcoin. Just as an interesting point of fact, 80% of the employees using the bitcoin feature in our app take a 100% of their net pay in bitcoin. So it's definitely gaining popularity. The biggest benefit in the way we do it is that we take out all the Fed/ Sate and Local…

Hey guys! We saw that the other day when we checked out your platform. I was referring more to how the settings are updated. It just felt like it was all up to the employer. Where everything is controlled by employee only on Incoin. Personal preference I guess.

Also great little tidbit of information!

We don't have taxes quite yet, but we do the same with only handling Bitcoin/ACH deposits post tax.

Thanks for dropping in and the support.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#38

Post by codelitt »

atmosx wrote: post #29
AJ007 wrote: post #13

There are Bitcoin related startups which are run by people with no experience in either finance, cryptography, or security. Hopefully you guys are very strong in this background. I don't see any personal profiles on the site. Codelitt Incubator has no names either which is even more concerning.

I see a total lack of understanding of currencies in most of BTC-related startups. For example a bitcoin based payroll is like giving away shares (less volatility of course, but you get the point). If someone would work for shares, he probably will (think about) accepting bitcoin as payment. In Silicon Valley people takes risks easily, but in Europe I think no one in their right minds will wanna do this. Payrol autom…

I don't know quite what you are referring to. Giving away shares of stock in any public company could possibly be compared to it because they're liquid like BTC is. BUT I don't see it as being similar to giving away shares of a private company which are not very liquid.

The risk of getting paid in BTC does exist as far as price volatility, but it's not a far cry away from being paid in cash being as it's liquid and many merchants accept it as payment.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#39

Post by wdewind »

codelitt wrote: post #36
wdewind wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sorry, I definitely don't mean to imply legal liability so much as financial liability. No one will really care legally (about you), you'll just be on the hook for the money. As I said before, it's not a matter of whether or not your KYC process will fail, it's simply when and what happens after that. It sounds like you have your head in the right place, but I can tell you from experience that verifying bank ac…

We'll get in touch to discuss further for sure! We do have measures in place to protect ourselves and we appreciate your comments. There's always more that we can do. It's also worth noting that an employer and employee have given all of the normal KYC information and have connected bank accounts so while the BTC wallet is "anonymous" on the network, we can link it to a specific person. The danger is near the same le…

Sounds good look forward to it. Btw I think I found a typo on your site:

http://www.codelitt.com/technologies A successful product requires lorem ipsum dolor sit amet in tenebris.

Re: Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll

#40

Post by codelitt »

wdewind wrote: post #39
codelitt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll get in touch to discuss further for sure! We do have measures in place to protect ourselves and we appreciate your comments. There's always more that we can do. It's also worth noting that an employer and employee have given all of the normal KYC information and have connected bank accounts so while the BTC wallet is "anonymous" on the network, we can link it to a specific person. The danger is near the same le…

Sounds good look forward to it. Btw I think I found a typo on your site: http://www.codelitt.com/technologies A successful product requires lorem ipsum dolor sit amet in tenebris.

Awesome and thanks for the heads up. We noticed it a while back and it got lost in the shuffle. We really should get that fixed though.
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