I understand there are a number of account aggregators out there which allow businesses to get access to customers's transaction data (Plaid, Yodlee, Intuit Customer Account API, open to others...). I'd like to know which ones DO or DON'T also allow for:
Determining the DUE-DATE of a customer's credit card balance.
Making PAYMENTS across accounts and parties.
Response from Yodlee
1) Determining the DUE-DATE of a customer's credit card balance
Yes , Yodlee do provide credit card bill due-date though their API.
2) Making PAYMENTS across accounts and parties.
Yodlee does have a Bill-Pay product but it's not available to API customers as of today.
I've been working with a loan repayment API and ran into this issue as well with Plaid. For US banks only, it seems that there are three items you need for this system:
The bill due date (and amount) for the credit card
The banking information. At a minimum, a user's routing and account number (which Plaid can provide) and the credit card's banking information (their routing and account number for direct payments).
An ACH processor or US bank that will let you upload a NACHA file. This is the step that actually moves the money from one account to the other. Expect lots of compliance paperwork from the partner that you use.
It's a complicated world when you try to pay on behalf of a user. Outside of programming, get a good lawyer who knows bank law!
Response from Plaid (as of 9/22/2014): No/Not yet and No
"1) Within a customer's credit information, does Plaid provide their credit card bill due-date? what would be the appropriate call for that?
Currently no, but it's something we may add in the future.
2) Does Plaid offer anything by way of making payments or money transfers across accounts? (I'm assuming 'no,' but just want to confirm)
We do not, however we can help with the authorization of accounts for ACH & Wire transfers. Feel free to reach out directly for more information."
Related
I am a college student and I want to launch an online store for dropshipping. I am allowed to have one credit card, where I live, say Mastercard. But for the customers convenience I would like to enable VISA, Discover, Mastercard, American express, Debit card, and PayPal checkout. I know that there is a PayPal credit card that allows payments from all these cards but it requires a business license, which I am not allowed to have as a student. Is there a way I can receive payments from the above mentioned cards to a Mastercard? If there is a better solution to my problem I would like to hear it from you. Thanks!
When you set up an online store, you will also be signing up with a Payment gateway that will be collecting money on your behalf and transferring it to you. In this way, you will be able to set up your store to be able to accept any payment methods supported by the payment gateway(s) that you set up, and any money you make will be transferred from the gateway to the account that you registered with. This might be a credit card or directly to a bank account depending on what the gateway supports.
Using a trusted payment gateway (such as Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.) will let you focus on your store and not have to worry about accepting credit card information directly, and you will get your earnings transferred to you regularly in a form that you can accept. Note also that taking credit card info directly comes with a host of security concerns and regulations. By using a payment gateway you will never see anyone's credit card info directly, so you won't have to worry about all the security and legal concerns surrounding that. The gateway companies make their money by taking a small transaction fee for each purchase, but this fee is definitely worth it to get your business started.
I am starting a business and I would like to offer Paypal as a payment option, but for my business it is essential to be able to block an amount of money, just like a car rental or a hotel does on a credit card. Would it be possible to block an amount from my users PayPal account and release it or book it for good later?
My business is of course an online service, and I want to do this pragmatically in a Spring based application.
I think what you are looking for is Authorization and capture.
I haven't used that feature from Paypal, but have used it elsewhere. What you are looking for is usually called card authorization, preauthorization, or preauth.
Yes it's possible
PayPal's REST API offer 3 primary ways to ensure you paid for product/services that you give to your customers
sale. Makes an immediate payment so you get paid immediately
authorize. Authorizes a payment for capture later.(this is what you see in a car rental or hotel)
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/payments/authorize-and-capture-payments/
order. Creates an order. - which gives you the flexibility to
multiple to do multiple authorizations and captures (these are for
complex use cases such as when you buy a computer from Dell you would
be authorized for the desktop, monitor, keyboard at different points
of time based on availability and then the funds captured when they
are shipped)
We'd like to find a payment provider that lets us do something similar to Hailo, ie:
Users sign up and give us their credit card details/authorise us to charge their account. They only need to do this once.
In Hailo's case, users might take a cab journey at any time and be billed any amount (within reason). In our case, users might need a job done at any time, again with an invoice for an arbitrary amount.
So ideally we'd be able to charge users accounts at any time, for any amount, without further authorisation. This is possible because Hailo (and I believe Uber) have it implemented. However, I don't know if they use a third-party payment provider or rolled their own.
Something like BrainTree's recurring payments is close to what we want, but not exactly. We want to be able to bill at arbitrary times, not on a fixed schedule.
The best option we currently have is to use recurring billing, ie save invoices and then charge them all at once at the end of the month. This isn't ideal from a cashflow -perspective, though. Another option is to use GoCardless' variable billing, (you ask customers permission to bill up to £X per month), though from speaking to people it seems they'd be leary of that as it seems like an upfront commitment.
Can we do it our way? How do companies like Hailo and Uber do it?
We're in the UK, by the way.
In PayPal world - we call this kind of functionality as Reference Transactions - here are the 2 how-tos that would give you more info on how to implement reference transactions with PayPal accounts and direct credit cards:
Reference Transactions for PayPal users
Reference Transactions for Credit/Debit cards
You can also use our Preapproval functionality - which would give you delegated access to a PayPal account to make payments on behalf of them. Here is it's how-to.
Full disclosure, I work as a developer for Braintree.
Using Braintree you can create transactions at any time, not just on a recurring basis. In fact Uber is a Braintree customer. You would store the card in the Braintree vault and create a new transaction when you are ready to bill the customers credit card.
Braintree has recently announced an international expansion that will support merchants in the UK and other countries in the next few months.
From your description Authorize.net CIM will do the job - http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/cim/
It's PCI compliant and let you store your customer credit card details with them and return a token for the customer. Then you can use this token to charge customer credit card whenever you need. Also their recurring billing facility would let you charge a fixed recurring charge if needed - http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/automatedrecurringbilling/
DataCash will let you do this, amongst many, many other things. You just provide their 16-digit reference number in the XML rather than a card number.
(Note: I'm an ex-DataCash employee, and we use DataCash as a payment gateway at my current work.)
I'm looking for a payment provider (or any other method) of taking payments with credit card details. Then immediately transfer the money to one of possibly hundreds of bank accounts (This has to be based on bank account number and sort code).
Does anyone know of a provider or other way of doing this?
This sounds like you want to integrate two technologies, a credit card processing service for bringing money in and then an ACH API for sending money out.
You can either look for two discreet services for doing this such as WePay and BancBox (cc and ACH respectively) or look at integrated services that provide both technologies such as Balanced (whom I work with).
Then depending on if you're taking the payments in directly on your site or not, you should be able to map from a card to a bank account and shoot the money out to the correct bank account via the ACH API once you've received the funds.
One thing to consider is that there is a 30 day window for disputes on credit cards, called a chargeback, and you could be liable for this and caught short if you've already sent the money on its way to the recipient.
I wanna build a web store for selling people's second hand products.
A customer adds the products into a shopping cart.
He/she pays (credit card, bank account) for it and I get the money.
The seller sends the bought products to the customer.
I get send the money to the seller (and have taken a fee for it).
People tend to mention Amazon's, Google's and PayPal's payment service but recently I came across services like Chargify and Recurly.
My questions:
How do these two differ from the other three?
Which one would support the above mentioned transaction process?
How should I set up the above transaction process?
The "big 3" require an account. How do I charge with just a credit card or bank account only?
Thanks!
Thanks for thinking of Chargify.
We're not the right thing for your need... we focus on helping a business manage many things involved in recurring billing of customers.
For what you want to do, I think one of the "Big 3" is the way to go. You've got the extra "wrinkle" of this, however: you're essentially collecting money on behalf of each Seller, and each Seller may be selling very different things and will have different levels of honesty, etc.
All of my experience is with merchants that have a traditional merchant account and payment gateway, which together allow them to charge credit cards. But the banks that issue merchant accounts want to know what each merchant (each Seller) is about. I'm 99% sure the banks dislike a single merchant account being used to sell / collect credit card payments for more than one merchant.
Anyway, to the degree that it's useful, I wrote a blog post last year about merchant accounts and payment gateways. It may be helpful to you as you explore options:
https://lancewalley.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/merchant-accounts-payment-gateways/
See my answer in Online payments for a middleman.
PayPal Adaptive Payments allows you to accept guest payments, without requiring buyers to have a PayPal account.
Another thing to think about is regional availability; Amazon / Google may sound interesting, but are not very useful if you don't live in the US or UK. Whereas PayPal Adaptive Payments is available pretty much globally (with the exception of a few countries where PayPal hasn't launched yet).