tarstarr

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
228
Submissions
61
Member since
Aug 7
GM of Stripe Treasury. Long time Stripe, and used to work on PM Subscriptions (Billing), Connect,& Radar. Formerly: Thiel Fellow.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Stripe Invoicing is purpose built for exactly that problem: serving enterprise customers who don't want to use a card for payment. While I think Treasury or Treasury+Connect could help in a pinch, Invoicing is likely the best solution with the smallest implementation lift.
Comment · 5 years ago
We definitely want platforms to make money on Treasury - there’s a lot of flexibility in how platforms can structure monetization (and revshares are totally possible) so please contact us to talk more about how this works.

With respect to customer service for the end customer, this follows the same process as Stripe Connect. Depending on the type of connected accounts you choose, you can have either Stripe take on customer support for you entirely, or manage customer support yourself. While our bank partners power this product, they’re never interacting with end users at all: that layer, from a customer support perspective, is abstracted by Stripe.

Edit: made "connected accounts" lowercase.

Comment · 5 years ago
Stripe isn’t a bank either! We hold various financial licenses and partner with a number of large global banks to power Stripe Treasury. That said, you can definitely build atop Stripe Treasury to offer your customers fintech services, so that they can perform all of their money management needs on your product. Though we’re interested in helping entrepreneurs build financial services for many use cases, today we only support businesses (which includes sole props!)

To the point of legal requirements -- there are absolutely a lot of legal requirements here, but Stripe Treasury abstracts a lot of the complexity of those requirements and makes it easier for you to comply than if you had to go at this alone.

Comment · 5 years ago
There are many financial services companies which are supportable. For example, Clearbanc, a financial services company, uses multiple Stripe products. We try to help users by offloading some of the regulatory and compliance work to us, but as you are aware regulation in financial services is complicated and nuanced. I can’t speculate on each possible use case serially, but we’re interested in hearing specifics and trying to support more legitimate fintech businesses versus less with this product.

As for handling exceptions on individual transactions: this is something which Stripe does very frequently with respect to our Stripe Connect users. For example, we might need to inquire about a large payment made over a Stripe Connect platform, particularly if it appears out-of-character for their usage or for that platform. (We might have questions about a million dollar “pizza” order.) Depending on our specific business relationship with the platform, the flow might be the platform reaching out to the customer for documentation, it might be the platform reviewing information provided contemporaneously with the transaction, it might involve us reviewing metadata on the transaction, or it might involve us reaching out to the user.

Depending on the specifics of what a platform does, it might have internal compliance or fraud teams. Many of our large platforms do; we interface with them (and create interfaces for them) to maximize their effectiveness and minimize silliness.

Comment · 5 years ago
Stripe Treasury currently supports businesses whose customers make business use of the platform. We are interested in innovation in personal financial services, too, but see more need currently from B2B platforms. We will see how things develop as we improve this offering!
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
We absolutely want platforms to make money on Treasury and our other financial services products (Capital and Issuing.) For our Issuing and Treasury products, contact us to talk more about how this works -- there’s a lot of flexibility in how a platform can structure monetization. For loans, it’s more immediately straightforward: you’ll earn a revenue share on all loans extended, with zero financial liability on credit losses.
Comment · 5 years ago
Money management accounts created with Stripe Treasury can send bill payments, which depending on the payee may be delivered entirely electronically or as checks. We have no current intentions of making printable paper checks a feature, but please get in touch if you have a compelling use case for that that isn’t solved by online bill pay.

The accounts can also do both push and pull ACH payments.

While we do not currently support depositing checks into the accounts, we expect to soon, via “remote deposit capture.” You may have seen this sort of experience in mobile applications for many U.S. banks the last few years: take a picture, check gets deposited. If we offer this, we will do it in a fashion which minimizes the engineering work required by the software company, like we broadly try to minimize non-value-creating engineering work for our users.

Comment · 5 years ago
Here are some of the common use cases we’re seeing so far: * Bank account replacement for SMBs and sole props, integrated directly into the platform or marketplace they’re already using. For example, today a Shopify merchant earns their revenue on Shopify but then has to transfer funds out to manage overall cash flow elsewhere (e.g., pay bills). Shopify is building Balance [0] with the Treasury API so this user can manage all of this in one place with a single view of revenue and spend. Other benefits of course include faster payouts, rewards specific to the ecosystem, and adding product features enabled by read/write access to the money management data (e.g. you could roll your own invoice reconciliation or alerts, or give users a discount on your SaaS if they ran sufficient volume on your card).

* Open loop wallets, like offering a “spend” account within your product that a user can either use to buy in-product purchases, or use the card/ach/wire functionality to buy external goods. E.g. a car leasing platform for drivers adds Treasury, drivers can use the wallet for discounts on car leases, also use the card to spend on gas.

* Product operations, like having a platform-level Treasury balance you use for reserves, chargebacks, and as glue to make your product flow work. E.g. On demand services marketplace that “buys items customers need and delivers it to their door” can issue cards from a central Treasury balance to their drivers, so that they can use a physical card to buy the burrito for the customer at the restaurant.

...but part of the point with Treasury is that we don’t know every use case prior, just like we didn’t know every way developers would use Stripe Connect (developers are pretty creative!). Our goal was to build for specific use cases, of course, but also build composable enough primitives that people could recombine them in ways we didn’t imagine. We wanted to make a tool that helped unlock developer creativity, because flexible tools were so lacking in the existing fintech infrastructure space.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Hi everyone, I’m Tara, PM on Stripe Treasury. Treasury is a banking-as-a-service API for platforms—built in partnership with the world’s leading banks. Embed interest-earning accounts, bill pay, ACH and wire transfers, and faster access to revenue directly in your platform. Happy to answer any questions here—and I’d love to hear your feedback!
Comment · 7 years ago
PM on Stripe Billing here! Happy to help with any of your questions re: migration or Billing functionality.
Comment · 7 years ago
Hey there! I work on Stripe subscriptions -- would love to hear what's been difficult for you today. We're actually rolling out a bunch of changes to make upgrade and downgrades easier and the entire experience more simple. Feel free to email me: [email protected]

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton