| Stripe is about simplicity (for developers) and being fairly standardized and automated. Payment aggregation has higher risks and Stripe probably doesn't want to deal with them at this point. BrainTree, if you contact them directly, can work with various merchant accounts. We had to get special permission to do payment aggregation. Also, our underwriting merchant held a % of our funds in escrow for the first 12 months of our operation. The main issue with payment aggregation is increased fraud. We had to deal with it and you will too if you get any sort of traction. What happens is people will make fake seller accounts and then make purchases through those accounts using stolen credit cards. Once you ACH those funds to them, guess who is on the hook for chargebacks? If you said "I am", you are correct. In 2011, we lost a good amount of money (five figures) in a 3-month span. Also, if your chargeback rate is too high (> 1%), you will likely get a warning from your merchant processor and possibly get booted. FYI, there is a YC company helping people deal with some of these issues:
https://siftscience.com Using something like Sift Science or simply manually reviewing and approving accounts is the best way to go initially. To answer your other question, I don't think there are US laws regulating payment aggregation (yes). I don't think the new money transmitter laws apply here, but I could be wrong. |