[jtchang]

Pretty cool. I love the competition in the payments space right now. My bet is that Braintree is seeing some serious competition from Stripe and others.

One thing to keep in mind is that 2.9% + 30cents is relatively high. If you go to Authorize and negotiate they will lower the price if your volume is high enough. Stripe will also negotiate once you hit a certain volume.

One thing I really want to do is take on the micropayments space. No one has really managed to do it well. Think about how much it costs to charge someone a dollar. The cheapest way is paypal. But what if you want to take a Visa/Mastercard? You are at their payment network's mercy. In order to really challenge that you need to make your own payment network. And then get banks onboard. And get through all the regulation. Yikes. If anyone is interested though contact me.

[tomasien]

That last paragraph is spectacularly spot on - that's why I started knoxpayments.com - connecting people directly into their banks. No fees on micro, $0.18 on everything else - flat.

Just won Best Enterprise at Launch 2014, and we're moving fast toward solving this problem for folks!

[primitivesuave]

Wow! Thank you for sharing your startup. I see what you're doing and it's really a brilliant idea - it would work very well for payment funnels where consumers trust the brand.

I don't see any developer documentation though - is this intentional, or did I miss the link somewhere?

[tomasien]

Is that intentional - heck no! It's a massive and glaring omission in our offering!

No but seriously, I'm banging away at documentation right now - the problem is it wasn't clear what exactly we needed to document until we launched and got the deluge of customer feedback that we've now gotten. It's now become clear that we're missing some critical features (for a lot of people) and that's it's not clear how to integrate it. Live and learn!

Essentially though, for 1 to 1 payments, you'll just sign up, sync your bank account, and you'll get a JS snippet and an HTML div. Put those on your site, feed the JS a payment amount, and when someone clicks the button - they'll pay, and you'll get the money. Then, at the end of the payment, you'll get a payment ID that you can store and use our entirely undocumented API to retrieve information you need later.

[vamega]

Hey, I just tried signing up and the site says I need to enter a referrer. Any chance you could let me see what this is like?

[tomasien]

Use the code "LAUNCH"

[contacternst]

Hey, I'm wondering if Knox integrates with Key Bank? Thanks

[RobPfeifer]

What am I using to login with my bank? Yodlee?

[tomasien]

Nope - our own custom API that is way faster and (in our opinion) way safer. NOT to say Yodlee isn't safe, we just think we're safer.

[pbreit]

Well, I'm sorry to say, you don't look safer. The URL changes from knoxpayments to paidez which looks super fraud-y! And you're not using good SSL certs. You do realize that you are requesting bank account logins from all your users? I couldn't find any information on your web site to help me determine if I should give you my online banking credentials.

[jaequery]

so who does the fraud detection? knoxpayments?

[tomasien]

We do fraud detection on top of the fraud detection your bank AND the US banking system already do.

[genwin]

Nice! How can end users be confident their username/password for their banking site will be kept between them and their bank? (I'd be reluctant to enter those anywhere other than the bank's own site.)

[tomasien]

As you should be! We're working really hard on educating our users at the point of purchase, but we do a meh job right now. However, users who are able to understand that we don't store any of your information convert at a very high rate.

[thematt]

Do you have any data on conversion rates? I imagine they would tank through the floor if you're asking a customer to turn over their online banking credentials.

[tomasien]

Nope! Conversions are pretty good, same abandonment as CC's right now, and it's rising as we get our UX better. People hate inputting their CC information, and when they've heard of Knox at least 1 time before, they're way more likely to convert than using a CC. However, first time users are about the same conversion as CC's in our betas.

[juanrossi]

Hey, why don't you use HTTPS by default and your signup is in another domain (paidez.com)?

[tomasien]

The Paidez thing is embarassing - we re-branded really fast and couldn't move all the services over before we launched. We're working on it now, but it sucks.

What do you mean about the HTTPS? We load ALL our content via SSL, do you mean knoxpayments.com isn't automatically loaded with SSL? There's nothing secure on it I guess, but even that should be for consistency.

Our payment process requires SSL end to end encryption, but are you suggesting that having Knox Payments not load with SSL by default it looks bad?

If I've missed something more important please tell me - if there's something (other than the atrocious switching of URLs) that is making you nervous, I NEED to fix it!

[jtchang]

Are you able to take visa/mastercard?

[tomasien]

We are not - we sync directly with people's online banking to make ACH payments without asking people to know their account and routing number.

[bostonvaulter2]

Does that mean you require their bank account login info? If not how do you access enough infor for ACH?

[tomasien]

That's the one!

[mamcx]

Is posible to integrate into a IOS App?

[tomasien]

We're building that SDK now - tommy at knoxpayments.com I can tell you more about it and see if it makes sense for what you're building.

[fumar]

Anything on the roadmap for Android?

[tomasien]

RIGHT after iOS, could be a couple months though :/

[superuser2]

it exists; it's called Dwolla and almost no one uses it.

[tomasien]

Don't underestimate Dwolla - they're a fantastic company, and even if "nobody uses it" if that nobody is fast growing into "somebody", that's really something to consider.

[teleclimber]

Agreed Dwolla is one of my favorite startups. Talk about upending an industry! I recommend this TWIST episode if you are wondering why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFeSgN1cQhg

[jtchang]

Yup. If everyone just had a Dwolla card.

[lbarrow]

Braintree will also negotiate with you once you hit a certain volume.

[jgalt212]

It's probably this sort of heated competition that keeps Square from being able to IPO in 2014.

[nayefc]

Square is tackling different type of merchants. It's not quite this that is keeping Square from an IPO; but they messed up in a few ways along with Chase (their merchant acquirer) releasing the same product undercutting the Square margin. Not to mention PayPal's ability to lower the price or the international market is almost gone for Square (others have copied Square).

[jgalt212]

I hear you on that. I guess it depends how narrowly one defines market. And I guess the more narrowly one defines it, the harder it is to justify a valuation.

That being said, I suspect my downvotes were a function of Jack Dorsey fanboys knee-jerking more so that my overly broad definition of the payments market.

[nayefc]

Actually, Stripe's market is smaller than Square's. But these business models will never capture a large percentage of their respective markets anyway due to the high rates (negotiating with an acquirer can get you almost 50% less than their rates). After all, "Simple Pricing" is not as good as it sounds. Why pay 2.9% on a 0.05% debit card for the sake of simplicity? I'm sure Excel can handle these variations. This is an unfortunate consequence of the inefficiencies of that industry.

[pbreit]

No, I think it was just sort of an ill-informed, senseless and inaccurate comment.

[jgalt212]

You're a loser.