Venmo and Square are loss leaders though. Stripe just announced this feature on Wednesday (https://stripe.com/blog/send-mon...) at 25¢/transaction. I just don't see a place for Balanced in the payments space in the long run.

@_jacksmith Other way around. Feature-wise, I'd like to have bank debits and full descriptor control (vs suffix w/ Stripe). The bigger reason is that a dedicated marketplace payments system would help me delay building a few dedicated internal tools. That alone is big.

@_jacksmith I'm actually thinking about making the switch soon. I love their model, but it's hard to make that work in practice when Stripe can observe and preempt their feature set.

@bendrucker I think that Balanced are doing things via an interesting approach that is very appealing for Marketplaces. Certainly, my preference is for them over Stripe in a number of scenarios currently. Agreed it is tough to differentiate though. Apparently (from the dialogue), the way that Stripe are approaching things isn't necessarily the "right" way to do it; so it will be interesting to see how banks and card issuers react.

@bendrucker to switch from Balanced to Stripe?

$1 per transaction seems a bit steep but I'm not sure how much heavy lifting there is behind the scenes. Just that venmo and Square do this free.

Balanced's big win over Stripe is escrow, which is why it's great for marketplaces. Anything else and Stripe seems to be the clear winner.