Even if there is no harm in giving out your bank account number, your bank account number is longer then your debit card and harder to recount. I think this is a great idea and hope it pans out.
Balanced Will Release an API to Push Money to Debit Cards
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Re: Balanced Will Release an API to Push Money to Debit Cards
#52Such an API already exists, you can get it directly from Visa: https://developer.visa.com/vpp/ Note that, pushing money to anybody as a service also involves a lot of regulatory compliance issues in almost any country you would want to be able to do this in. In the US for example, facilitating money laundering, terrorist financing or transfers to a named person (even accidentally facilitating if you don't have enough…
As you noted, that would only work with Visa, ours works with all debit cards. And we have really strict regulatory compliance, a laywer was something like our 5th hire. We do a lot with KYC and such, so those details are all handled for you, by us. All merchants on Balanced marketplaces get underwritten individually.
That's great to hear that you are on top of this. So many payment startups fail to think through or manage their compliance risk until they discover too late that it is a barrier to scaling or killer for their entire user experience. Compliance is one of the biggest challenges for creating new payment services.
You guys should also take a look at the Visa push-payment apis. In reality they are designed more for other API providers like yourselves to fold-in to their available push-payment options. Particularly handy for applications like marketing rebates, bill payment or expense reimbursements for payments already made on a card. Visa transfers do have a few advantages over straight ACH - you can push funds to a debit account, a credit card account or a reloadable prepaid account. Works across borders, in some countries works real time. Also a card number can be easier and less error-prone for consumers to enter than full bank routing info (as you probably know, handling rejects on ACH is a real pain). Downsides: only works on Visa cards, but you can mitigate that with traditional fallback options like ACH, instant-issuance prepaid, or mailing a check.
source: I don't have a stake in that service anymore, but I used to work on developing it.