Provide IAT (international ACH transactions)

matin commented 12 years ago

International card processing is quite hard, but it's easier to provide a system to transfer from to and from US and non-US bank accounts. The easiest method is IAT.

There are some limitations to IAT. ACH only requires the following fields:

name
account number
routing number
account type

IAT also requires the following fields for both the sender (originator) and recipient (receiver). See Bank of America's FAQ on IAT

Physical address of the originator including city, state, province, country and postal code

Physical address of the receiver including city, state, province, country and postal code

Correspondent bank name, identification number and branch country code if applicable

Receiving bank name, identification number and branch country code

Reason for the payment

This address part of the issue discussed in #23

pkennard commented 12 years ago

we would certainly utilize a solution for non-US based merchants to accept payments via balanced.

dsog commented 12 years ago

Same for Crowdtilt. Collecting the extra info is really cheap on our end to support international ACH transactions.

kirillzubovsky commented 11 years ago

Likewise, IAT would be very useful for Scoutzie, saving a lot of headache.

chadwhitacre commented 11 years ago

+1 from Gittip.

rpearce commented 11 years ago

+1 from RidePost

jkwade commented 11 years ago

transfast.com reached out to me. how would this help solve things?

alixaxel commented 11 years ago

Have you looked into https://www.ebaclearing.eu/?

jordanmessina commented 11 years ago

+1 from Forge

jordo37 commented 11 years ago

International payout is one of two issues holding us back from switching over to Balance for payout - the other being ease of use with something like a Paypal transfer for small customers.

However, after having built a payment solution that connects with PayPal's MassPay API, I cannot wait to rip out that module of code and replace it with something like this.

Given the extra work required for IAT vs ACH, and I'm assuming the higher cost to Balanced, what sort of price per payout would you all be estimating?

interlock commented 11 years ago

+1 from Picatic.com as well.

chadwhitacre commented 11 years ago

This is newly interesting to Gittip again, as we've been rejected by Payoneer.

jgcotorruelo commented 11 years ago

+1 from Spain

guillermovs commented 11 years ago

+1 from Socialance

adambenayoun commented 11 years ago

I would definitely migrate our marketplace from Stripe to Balanced once IAT is available.

mathiasm commented 11 years ago

Yes, please! +1 from Norway. Would love to hear a little about how much you estimate the cost to be.

adambenayoun commented 11 years ago

I've reached out to Transfast and scheduled a call with them on monday. This is an excerpt from an email with their director of sales.

Our list of payout countries are very comprehensive, we can send direct account credit to all major countries and cash payouts to over 100 countries. We offer a very superior payout service vs wire or paypal as money gets sent directly to a benefs bank account even some of the largest banks do have this facility unless they do a wire and the costs don’t justify the service.

And

Prices depend on volume, transaction size and the type of service you need bank deposit or cash pickup. To give an indication you are looking at prices below 10 USD per transaction.

Just to give an indication of how I move money today - I use PayPal and BoA International wire. Using PayPal and its mass payment - I'm able to put a cap of $20 per wire (2% or $20 - lowest of the two), and BoA wires costs around $35-45 - depends if you send in local currency (and they make a ton of money in converting it to the local currency) or send it as a USD.

I would totally pay anything that is below $10 without thinking twice. I'm currently working with Stripe however I do see myself jumping to use Balanced in the event they do implement transfast as a temporary solution for IAT (this is the only missing feature that stops me from moving to you).

Also by temporarily using transfast - you can bring a great feature to the mass pretty fast, probably enjoy a great bulk rates and pass the savings to your customers and additionally and most important, gauge interest amongst the community (and see if it would make sense to built it yourself).

Edit: I'll bring up Balanced during my discussion with Transfast - I think it makes more sense that Balanced and Transfast work together and I use Balanced, than implementing Transfast on my own.

medecau commented 11 years ago

Here's for Portugal.

zealoushacker commented 11 years ago

:+1: from www.buyvite.com. I was the consultant on buyvite.com's white-labeled API (not marketed to the public yet). They are getting interest in the white-labeled API from the UK and elsewhere. Customers want to get funds in their currency.

matin commented 11 years ago

IAT is one method of providing international transfers. I will start looking into pricing and partners to see if IAT is in fact the right solution for supporting international payouts.

hyperthunk commented 11 years ago

+1 from the UK.

eblanshey commented 11 years ago

+1. Having international payouts is a must for a truly global marketplace.

sdelafond commented 11 years ago

+1 from .fr

Skud commented 11 years ago

Pasting in some comments I had in email with a friend, who suggested I pass them back to the project:

Unfortunately IAT (as per https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/44) doesn't really help me here, for a few reasons. The main one is that it would mean transacting all my business in USD using balanced, then transferring the funds back to Australia. From an accounting standpoint that's a nightmare -- I make $1000 in USD and then send it back to myself and get $1010 AUD but then next week I do the same and get $980 -- and I don't even want to think about the tax side of it.

The other problem is support. Let's say something gets wedged and I can't get my money somehow. Who do I call? At what hour do I have to call them -- or at what hour will they call me back? Do I have any expectation that they will understand my situation wrt Australian banks etc?

So basically my requirements for a .au provider is that they should actually be based in Australia to the extent that there is no currency exchange, and there is a viable local phone support line. IAT would probably be fine if I were just selling some tshirts or something, but I wouldn't be comfortable running my business around it.

alixaxel commented 11 years ago

While researching to switch banks, I found a service that might be interesting to solve the issues with EU payouts.

The characteristics of this service are:

unlimited (free) payouts to all portuguese bank accounts
unlimited (potentially free) payouts to all european union bank accounts*

Regarding the *, it must obbey the following conditions:

currency denomination in EUR or SEK
each payout <= 50000.00 EUR
destination country must be a member of EU
valid IBAN and SWIFT codes must be provided
shared tranfer expenses (sender pays the sending fee, beneficiary pays reception fee)

A friend of mine told me that he payed ~0.80€ to send a ~200-300€ EU transfer using this service.

This service is provided by a portuguese bank for portuguese companies, and has a monthly fee of 8.00€ + VAT (23%).

They also support some kind of CSV specification for automation, not sure if something better exists.

If you like, I could gather more information with the bank.

mahmoudimus commented 11 years ago

@whit537 reports on issue #317:

We just had an influx of Korean users this morning, and they're reporting that "international credit card is a little bit rare in Korea," and are requesting support for Hana Bank.

upamanyudas commented 11 years ago

I surely nee IAT as I am based in India

jeremymarc commented 11 years ago

+1000

toddynho commented 11 years ago

+1, we'd use this at BuySellAds to improve our payouts.

andrewantar commented 11 years ago

We would certainly switch our music marketplace to Balanced if International ach was supported via api. We now use Stripe, SVB eConnect, and looking into Chexx for international. I believe all you need is an IBAN # and BIC # which are the same as account and routing numbers.