[dylanbathurst]

This will be really cool. We use Balanced for our payments system, and have talked with a lot of our users about pay-outs. The top two problems with getting customers to cash out are the security of giving away their bank account info, and the time it takes to get your check book and input the account and routing info.

I'm curious about how this works though. I think Square Cash is doing something similar right? I've heard rumors about how it works where the company basically posts a refund to the card even if it had never been charged. Is that correct?

[rmanisha]

Balanced employee here.

>The top two problems with getting customers to cash out are the security of giving away their bank account info, and the time it takes to get your check book and input the account and routing info. Another benefit is that the debit card information is validated in real time, rather than waiting 4 business days for ACH credit to fail.

This is the main reason that customers have asked us to add this functionality since a debit card number is much more accessible and safer to hand out.

>I've heard rumors about how it works where the company basically posts a refund to the card even if it had never been charged. Is that correct?

That would be the hacky way to do it. We're planning to push money via the ATM rails which would make the transfer instantaneous.

[dylanbathurst]

"ATM rails?" Can you explain that a little more?

[rmanisha]

Sure, the transactions would travel along the same rails used when you walk up to an ATM and withdraw funds. When you input your debit card, the information is validated immediately, your balance is then depleted by the amount withdrawn. The push to debit card functionality will move funds along this network instead of the cumbersome ACH network, which take days to process requests and validate bank account information.