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balanced / balanced-api

Balanced API specification.
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Sweep Account functionality #697

Open mjallday opened 9 years ago

mjallday commented 9 years ago

Is there any benefit to Balanced providing a sweep account functionality?

This could help address #689 but also make it easier for the marketplace to ensure that they always have funds on hand.

In this case my definition of a sweep account is a funding instrument which is a proxy for another funding instrument such as a bank account. At the end of the day it would take the balance and create a transaction to zero out the balance. If it has a positive balance is would credit these funds to the underlying funding instrument, if it had a negative balance is would create a debit to draw funds from the funding instrument.

msherry commented 9 years ago

People ask for this occasionally. I believe @andrewnossiter has a better idea of how often it happens.

bpate commented 9 years ago

I asked about this in the IRC Chat today.

As a Balanced Customer, I would love to have a feature that allow us to automatically fund the Balance Escrow to a given dollar amount (that I may define) automatically, so I don't need to dedicate staff time to managing the escrow amounts.

Edit: I didn't read fully the issue, but the idea of having a way to automatically send the extra funds would be great too!

jkwade commented 9 years ago

How is this different from an LOC?

msherry commented 9 years ago

It sounds more like a (soft) reserve -- once the escrow balance drops below a certain soft limit, Balanced would issue automatic debits to top it up.

mjallday commented 9 years ago

@jkwade @msherry it's different in that it doesn't just work for the balance for a marketplace.

it' could mirror a merchant's bank account so that you, as a marketplace, end up issuing several credits per day to the merchant and the merchant would only see the single sweep into their bank account at the end of the day.

e.g. you do two credits for $10 each and one debit for $5 against the sweep account before it settles. The end result is that the bank account would receive a single $15 credit.

remear commented 9 years ago

Does https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/pull/707 satisfy this?