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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 in

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!

teagee 6y ago
Hi Tara, this looks like it solves some of the limitations we've run into using Stripe Connect with ACH, which is very exciting! Will existing platforms using Stripe Connect eventually be able to add Stripe Treasury for existing users?
- tarstarr 6y ago
  definitely! we want to make it as easy as possible for existing Stripe Connect users to add Treasury functionality for their connected accounts. Request an invite [0] (the product team is personally monitoring this queue) and let's chat about what you're looking to do! 0. https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite edit: added a space
  - teagee 6y ago
    Wonderful! I requested an invite, my email is tyler@... and my initials are TG. Looking forward to hearing from you!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nojvek 6y ago
The landing page doesn’t really explain what kinds of problems Treasury solves (may need some customer education since it’s so new) IIUC this is useful for marketplaces like Lyft/Uber/Shopify to automatically provision bank accounts for drivers and have money deposited in there? The value add is faster payouts? Can I use this as a replacement to plaid api? I.e open a bank account through stripe and use that as a way to do finance analytics? What are the banking fees? Basically: which customer audience is this targeting ? and what headaches does it solve for that audience?
- anon589 6y ago
  keyword is Treasury eg handling all the payment operations tasks that an in-house corporate treasury team that’s responsible for moving money in and out of the company’s bank accounts might complete
- tarstarr 6y 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.
  - ReallyFantastic 6y ago
    On the third example about a food delivery service issuing cards for couriers: isn't this what Marqeta already does for Doordash? Is Stripe doing anything differently with Treasury?
griffinkelly 6y ago
The one thing I've been hoping Stripe eventually rolls out is escrow; hopefully this is a step towards that?
- edwinwee 6y ago
  Escrow has a precise legal definition—and while we don’t support straight-up “escrow,” Stripe recently added support to hold funds for up to 3 months. You can use Stripe Connect to manually control (in this case, delay) payout timing: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/manual-payouts https://stripe.com/docs/connect/manual-payouts.
  - pqdbr 6y ago
    Why does the US support holding funds for up to 2 years, while everywhere else (like Brazil) only 90 days?
    - sudhirj 6y ago
      This is usually governed by country specific financial laws.
an_opabinia 6y ago
"Financial services" are verbatim not allowed by Stripe's Acceptable Use Policy. What kind of businesses are permitted to use Stripe Treasury? Which functionality is specifically provided (or anticipated to be provided) by Goldman Sachs Bank? The answer is probably a credit card. Who performs KYC? Is it Stripe FTEs, Stripe contractors, or a vendor? Is it Evolve's vendor? The answer is probably a vendor. When submitting payments or transfers, does your interface provide a way to show purpose of payment when the transfer is initiated? The answer is probably no. Not sure why this keeps getting downvoted, these are not very opinionated or critical questions. It's also pretty reasonable to just guess answers, especially benign answers, based on their competitors, if they choose not to answer. They're all good faith questions.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  This is a bit harsh. Stripe's value add is handing you an API and doing all of the hard work behind the scenes, same as Twilio (integrating with far flung telco gateways with byzantine interfaces). It's not necessary for Stripe to handle payment flows or issue cards themselves. Success is if customers are willing to pay Stripe instead of wrangling all of those vendors together themselves (which sounds like a good bet to make). Disclosure: Stripe CC processing customer, no other relation.
  - senko 6y ago
    I'm not reading it as criticism. Considering Stripe forbids financial services in their t&c's, and this allows Stripe users to implement financial services, the question is, what kind of financial services are now allowed? Would be great to hear a few use cases for Treasury that can't be done with existing Connect platform (and which fall within t&c's). Genuinely curious.
    - patio11 6y ago
      Suppose a driver for a rideshare app wants to pay their car payment. Stripe Connect can't be used to hold funds from many rides for a month; they have to pay it out to a bank account (which they might not have) or to a disbursement card, which (because loan repayments are generally not paid on a card in the U.S.) likely doesn't solve their problem without withdrawing cash and buying a money order. That is extra effort and cost for the driver. Stripe Treasury would let the rideshare platform give their drivers an embedded money management account. That would allow indefinitely holding money, and would allow them to use e.g. bill pay for car payments, similar to the way that many HNers probably pay their own car payments today. This is good for the platform (solves a pain point for many drivers) and good for the drivers (they get faster access to their funds, decreasing the likelihood they'll get dinged for a late repayment, and can spend less of their time managing low-value-added money movement when they could instead be driving).
narrationbox 6y ago
Is this like Stripe Issuing where it is only available to a small number of companies? A lot of newer Stripe products seems to be available to large enterprises only. We applied for that waitlist multiple times but never heard back. What are the revenue or scale requirements for your targeted customers? Is it suitable for fintech e-wallets/banks?
- granzymes 6y ago
  Well from the website Issuing looks to be available to everyone now. Seems like a normal product rollout to progressively increase the audience size.
  - narrationbox 6y ago
    Interesting, it seems their products are geo-locked. The Canadian site still shows "Request invite".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- patio11 6y ago
  We have been ramping up our rollout of Stripe Issuing over time, and will do similar for Stripe Treasury. Can we have your email address? (You can email it to me at this handle at stripe.com) Depending on the specifics of your use case, we may be at general availability. There are no particular revenue or scale requirements; we tend to roll out features to a few users across the spectrum because supporting users from startup-in-a-garage to publicly traded customers is what we do. We would be thrilled to talk about particular potential use cases; we do envision some B2B fintech applications would find the set of capabilities appealing. Just drop some details on the form and we'll be in touch.
  - karlshea 6y ago
    > supporting users from startup-in-a-garage to publicly traded customers is what we do Unless that startup is a site that has naughty pictures!
tim_sw 6y ago
Is this mainly available in North America?
- patio11 6y ago
  (Stepping in for Tara because she is currently dealing with a literal fire. Never a dull moment on launch day.) We're starting the limited beta for businesses serving businesses in the U.S., but our ambitions for products are always bringing them to all appropriate users on the internet. This is one reason why we partnered with global banks to launch this.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    A literal fire? Sounds like a good story. Tell?
    - tarstarr 6y ago
      There's unfortunately a fire in Orange County today and had to pack a bag for evac. Truly, never a dull moment. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-03/wind-driven-bond-fire-threatens-homes-in-orange-county-as-santa-anas-hit-southern-california https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-03/wind-dri...
      - shreygupta 6y ago
        I'm in Orange County too! All Irvine schools are closed. Stay safe.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Ah. So not, like, in your server room or anything. Still bad enough. As shreygupta said, stay safe...
jabart 6y ago
Will this support paper checks that can be written on the spot by a client?
- tarstarr 6y 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.
  - shreygupta 6y ago
    Billing (invoices, specifically) has an invite feature to mail in checks and has auto-reconciliation. Maybe it's possible to integrate that?
  - philip1209 6y ago
    Do the push ACH payments support the per-invoice account numbers from Stripe Billing? (which is useful for automatic reconciliation)
  - jabart 6y ago
    Request submitted. It can be solved by bill-pay, our older clients will want a checkbook to hand checks to vendors on delivery for items which will have them setting up a local bank account for that. Remote Deposit is key for any non-profit/political account as they get mailed a lot of checks.
  - adrr 6y ago
    Curious how customer support works? There’s a dispute for an ACH pull, who is handling the dispute, I’d assume the bank that has the charter? Same goes with remote check deposit, someone has to verify the check.
philip1209 6y ago
When platforms carry float or help issue loans, do they make money?
- tarstarr 6y 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
shreygupta 6y ago
Hi Tara! First off, I've never posted on HN before, but I felt so obligated to write this because this solves so many of the challenges my team has been going through building our application. I'm wondering if students under 18 are permitted under the TOS? I can see how this product will change the open banking game and fill so many gaps in. Thank you for building this!
- bastawhiz 6y ago
  If you sign up for Stripe and you're under 18, you'll be required to have a person 18 years or older register as the business representative for your account (usually a parent or guardian). Depending on your country, the age requirement may vary. If you're under 13, you are not allowed to use Stripe at all regardless of what country you're in.
  - shreygupta 6y ago
    Right, of course.
nlh 6y ago
This is SUPER cool - congrats on the launch! A few questions: Do you plan to offer Stripe Treasury to non-marketplace small businesses / individuals? I ask because the #1 thing I've been wanting for the past few years is basically Stripe Bank :) I hate Bank of America. I'm not happy with any of the other startup banks. And honestly, at this point my first instinct when seeing Stripe Treasury is "Imma just build my own bank for myself!" (and that actually looks like a real possibility, at least technically). If not, do you plan to offer a retail product for individuals?
- mchusma 6y ago
  I recommend mercury.com. Amazing in basically every way IMO.
  - nlh 6y ago
    Yeah Mercury and some other startup banks looks great, but at least Mercury appears to be business-only. I need something that works for business & personal. (And I have no doubt they'll all expand to handle both personal & business, but I'm impatient ;)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- rsync 6y ago
  "I hate Bank of America. I'm not happy with any of the other startup banks. And honestly, at this point my first instinct when seeing Stripe Treasury is "Imma just build my own bank for myself!" (and that actually looks like a real possibility, at least technically)." I did this with Twilio - which is to say, I built my own little personal telco with Twilio. It's not without it's ups and downs but there are a lot of interesting little superpowers I now have over my telco interactions that I would not otherwise have ...
  - nlh 6y ago
    Yes! I totally get it and love that. Sincerely, --A guy who built his own Asterisk PBX-in-a-linux-box that sat on his desk in 2004 and had 2 physical phone lines plugged into it and today, 16 years later, is still running slight variations of the exact same scripts (although now in the cloud w/ VoIP, but same same).
mnehring 6y ago
Hi Tara - first, thanks for coming here for Q&A. My first question is, will any revenue be available for companies that build on top of this platform? Normal banks make money on interchange on bank cards and interest spread (as well as less savory activities like crazy overdraft fees). Is there any revenue split with the partner? E.g., maybe Goldman pays 0.82%, I offer my customer 0.50%, and so I pocket 0.32% of the balance. Second, what about customer service for the end customer? There's clearly a top-level layer that's managed by the partner, a mid-level layer managed by Stripe, and the deep backend banking layer managed by the partner bank. How is customer support split up among those 3? Those were my two main questions. I heard a couple of people asking about use cases. My use case would be an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've been working on a concept for a next-level-totally-awesome personal finance budget app. The fundamental purpose of a personal budgeting app is to assist you in knowing when to say yes, and when to say no to a purchase, and to do autopsies on past purchases that may have messed things up. I tried a basic version using Plaid to get a data feed from my bank, but the Plaid data feed is inconsistent from bank to bank (with how it handles authorizations that later settle or fail to settle). Being able to bundle a budget app directly with banking could be killer. You'd have real-time, 100% accurate data coming in. That would be a game changer that might make me finally finish my dusty app. So, Tara, if you're not doing revenue sharing with partners yet, please consider it:-). Revenue sharing is a great way to make apps-on-top-of-platforms flourish.
- tarstarr 6y 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.
eloff 6y ago
This seems targeted mostly for marketplaces, but I'm curious if this enables a way to accept ACH and wire transfer payments. My thinking is use the API to let the end customer setup a treasury account on my site, they can wire/ACH funds to this account of theirs to pay invoices, and I can use the API to "debit" funds from their treasury account to mine as needed to cover their service bills. Handling invoicing and payments for a class of enterprise customers who can't use a credit card for payments as a matter of policy can be painful. *edit: I think this is actually possible with stripe connect today.
- tarstarr 6y 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.
waffle_ss 6y ago
Is Stripe Treasury still beholden to Stripe's list of restricted businesses?[1] A few years ago I started a company with some partners and we signed up with Stripe Atlas. At the end of the lengthy application we got rejected by Stripe because our business falls under the "regulated" category. Even though we didn't need credit card processing, just ACH, and the former is seemingly where these list of prohibited businesses come from. We ended up going full steam ahead with Dwolla instead. Although the developer experience is not as polished as Stripe, they don't discriminate against fully legal businesses that should be allowed to bank and transact like any other. [1]: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses
- senoroink 6y ago
  What was the business? Stripe's not really making the rules here, it's the financial partners backing them. Just because something is "legal" doesn't mean it's not risky. As an easy example, from the page you linked, "psychic services" are banned.
  - waffle_ss 6y ago
    Pharmacies exchanging prescription drugs. Regulated, not risky - don't confound the two. And there are no "rules" restricting these transactions over the ACH network, Stripe is applying the widest scope of restrictions gathered from across of its partners, which include the credit card processors. And I was asking this question to the Stripe PM, not some uninformed white knight.
    - tener 6y ago
      Things which aren't risky on some level just don't get regulated. There is a ton of risk involved in pharmacies.
- edwinwee 6y ago
  It is—the businesses we’re not able to work with are mostly restricted by the financial partners and banks that Stripe works with. But we do want to support as many business types as possible—and for Atlas in particular, we’ve recently been able to support many more. (For example, we fully support telemedicine companies now.) Would you be able to email me at edwin@stripe.com? I’d like to take a second look at that rejection.
runako 6y ago
Hi Tara, congratulations on the launch! Do you intend to allow Treasury to be used to build new bank storefronts? For example, could someone build a slick mobile app and website and use Treasury to launch a B2B "bank", complete with FDIC insurance? Would it be acceptable to launch an offering like mercury.com entirely powered by Treasury? Or is the intent to only allow Treasury as an adjunct to a "real" business? Thanks!
- tarstarr 6y ago
  Of course, neither Stripe nor users of Stripe Treasury would be launching a bank, but you could provide financial services for other businesses, entirely powered by Stripe Treasury and Stripe Connect. It's pretty analogous to what Shopify is doing with Stripe Connect, Treasury, and Issuing to launch Shopify Balance: https://www.shopify.com/balance https://www.shopify.com/balance
cdnsteve 6y ago
Any ETA when this will be available in Canada? I'd like to learn more.
- edwinwee 6y ago
  No ETA just yet, but we want to make Treasury available in Canada.
james2406 6y ago
Hi Tara, Thank you for dong this Q&A. Really interesting to see that Stripe is heading into the BaaS space! Will you be offering any consumer loans solutions in the future?
- edwinwee 6y ago
  No solid timeline—right now Stripe is mainly focused on helping businesses grow.
einpoklum 6y ago
Hello Tara, Do you allow transactions by and with users in states which the US is (illegally) imposing sanctions on? Like Iran?
- edwinwee 6y ago
  No, regulations would prevent Stripe from working with users that have business in sanctioned countries.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    So it's a faulty and discriminatory service then.
    - lomoeffect 6y ago
      Sounds like something to take up with the US Government to be honest. Every payment processor faces this challenge.
      - einpoklum 6y ago
        So, the "we're just following orders" argument. Very inspiring.
callmeed 6y ago
I was denied access to Stripe Issuing for a project I have in the works. I wasn't given a lot of details why or when I could reapply. Is the same thing going to happen with Stripe Treasury? How can I find out if what I want to do is permissible now that Treasury exists?
- edwinwee 6y ago
  Was it perhaps for a more consumery-type use-case instead of business? Issuing (and Treasury) are mostly focused on building for businesses at this moment (but are also expanding the number of use-cases). Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can take another look?
  - callmeed 6y ago
    Yes and yes. Thanks.
lenitabinol 6y ago
is Stripe merging with PSTH?
- efz00 6y ago
  Yes
rogerthat_au 6y ago
Do you have a time frame on when it'll be rolled out internationally e.g. UK or Singapore?
eloff 6y ago
Could one use this for a micro loan or payday loan platform? And the loan money via this and send monthly payment requests? I've long had in mind doing something like that as non profit to wipe out the predatory payday loans business which preys on the most financially vulnerable in society. It just seems too difficult for me to do with current bank services. This potentially changes the calculus.
webmaven 6y ago
Hi Tara, congratulations on the launch! Will Stripe Treasury support Factoring use cases? If you're not familiar with factoring, let's say you get a large order that you can't actually afford to fulfill due to a lack of cash-on-hand to buy materials, rent equipment, etc. Rather than requiring the customer to pay up front or getting a loan (possibly using the invoice as collateral), you can just sell the Net-30 (or 60, or 90) invoice outright for something like 95¢ on the $ to get the money you need to fulfill the order. This is particular popular in industries like fashion that have long lead times for both manufacturing and for billing. Anyway, could Treasury be used like this?

teagee 6y ago

Hi Tara, this looks like it solves some of the limitations we've run into using Stripe Connect with ACH, which is very exciting! Will existing platforms using Stripe Connect eventually be able to add Stripe Treasury for existing users?

tarstarr 6y ago
definitely! we want to make it as easy as possible for existing Stripe Connect users to add Treasury functionality for their connected accounts. Request an invite [0] (the product team is personally monitoring this queue) and let's chat about what you're looking to do! 0. https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite https://stripe.com/treasury#request-invite edit: added a space
- teagee 6y ago
  Wonderful! I requested an invite, my email is tyler@... and my initials are TG. Looking forward to hearing from you!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nojvek 6y ago

The landing page doesn’t really explain what kinds of problems Treasury solves (may need some customer education since it’s so new) IIUC this is useful for marketplaces like Lyft/Uber/Shopify to automatically provision bank accounts for drivers and have money deposited in there? The value add is faster payouts? Can I use this as a replacement to plaid api? I.e open a bank account through stripe and use that as a way to do finance analytics? What are the banking fees? Basically: which customer audience is this targeting ? and what headaches does it solve for that audience?

anon589 6y ago
keyword is Treasury eg handling all the payment operations tasks that an in-house corporate treasury team that’s responsible for moving money in and out of the company’s bank accounts might complete
tarstarr 6y 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.
- ReallyFantastic 6y ago
  On the third example about a food delivery service issuing cards for couriers: isn't this what Marqeta already does for Doordash? Is Stripe doing anything differently with Treasury?

griffinkelly 6y ago

The one thing I've been hoping Stripe eventually rolls out is escrow; hopefully this is a step towards that?

edwinwee 6y ago
Escrow has a precise legal definition—and while we don’t support straight-up “escrow,” Stripe recently added support to hold funds for up to 3 months. You can use Stripe Connect to manually control (in this case, delay) payout timing: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/manual-payouts https://stripe.com/docs/connect/manual-payouts.
- pqdbr 6y ago
  Why does the US support holding funds for up to 2 years, while everywhere else (like Brazil) only 90 days?
  - sudhirj 6y ago
    This is usually governed by country specific financial laws.

an_opabinia 6y ago

"Financial services" are verbatim not allowed by Stripe's Acceptable Use Policy. What kind of businesses are permitted to use Stripe Treasury? Which functionality is specifically provided (or anticipated to be provided) by Goldman Sachs Bank? The answer is probably a credit card. Who performs KYC? Is it Stripe FTEs, Stripe contractors, or a vendor? Is it Evolve's vendor? The answer is probably a vendor. When submitting payments or transfers, does your interface provide a way to show purpose of payment when the transfer is initiated? The answer is probably no. Not sure why this keeps getting downvoted, these are not very opinionated or critical questions. It's also pretty reasonable to just guess answers, especially benign answers, based on their competitors, if they choose not to answer. They're all good faith questions.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
This is a bit harsh. Stripe's value add is handing you an API and doing all of the hard work behind the scenes, same as Twilio (integrating with far flung telco gateways with byzantine interfaces). It's not necessary for Stripe to handle payment flows or issue cards themselves. Success is if customers are willing to pay Stripe instead of wrangling all of those vendors together themselves (which sounds like a good bet to make). Disclosure: Stripe CC processing customer, no other relation.
- senko 6y ago
  I'm not reading it as criticism. Considering Stripe forbids financial services in their t&c's, and this allows Stripe users to implement financial services, the question is, what kind of financial services are now allowed? Would be great to hear a few use cases for Treasury that can't be done with existing Connect platform (and which fall within t&c's). Genuinely curious.
  - patio11 6y ago
    Suppose a driver for a rideshare app wants to pay their car payment. Stripe Connect can't be used to hold funds from many rides for a month; they have to pay it out to a bank account (which they might not have) or to a disbursement card, which (because loan repayments are generally not paid on a card in the U.S.) likely doesn't solve their problem without withdrawing cash and buying a money order. That is extra effort and cost for the driver. Stripe Treasury would let the rideshare platform give their drivers an embedded money management account. That would allow indefinitely holding money, and would allow them to use e.g. bill pay for car payments, similar to the way that many HNers probably pay their own car payments today. This is good for the platform (solves a pain point for many drivers) and good for the drivers (they get faster access to their funds, decreasing the likelihood they'll get dinged for a late repayment, and can spend less of their time managing low-value-added money movement when they could instead be driving).

narrationbox 6y ago

Is this like Stripe Issuing where it is only available to a small number of companies? A lot of newer Stripe products seems to be available to large enterprises only. We applied for that waitlist multiple times but never heard back. What are the revenue or scale requirements for your targeted customers? Is it suitable for fintech e-wallets/banks?

granzymes 6y ago
Well from the website Issuing looks to be available to everyone now. Seems like a normal product rollout to progressively increase the audience size.
- narrationbox 6y ago
  Interesting, it seems their products are geo-locked. The Canadian site still shows "Request invite".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
patio11 6y ago
We have been ramping up our rollout of Stripe Issuing over time, and will do similar for Stripe Treasury. Can we have your email address? (You can email it to me at this handle at stripe.com) Depending on the specifics of your use case, we may be at general availability. There are no particular revenue or scale requirements; we tend to roll out features to a few users across the spectrum because supporting users from startup-in-a-garage to publicly traded customers is what we do. We would be thrilled to talk about particular potential use cases; we do envision some B2B fintech applications would find the set of capabilities appealing. Just drop some details on the form and we'll be in touch.
- karlshea 6y ago
  > supporting users from startup-in-a-garage to publicly traded customers is what we do Unless that startup is a site that has naughty pictures!

tim_sw 6y ago

Is this mainly available in North America?

patio11 6y ago
(Stepping in for Tara because she is currently dealing with a literal fire. Never a dull moment on launch day.) We're starting the limited beta for businesses serving businesses in the U.S., but our ambitions for products are always bringing them to all appropriate users on the internet. This is one reason why we partnered with global banks to launch this.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  A literal fire? Sounds like a good story. Tell?
  - tarstarr 6y ago
    There's unfortunately a fire in Orange County today and had to pack a bag for evac. Truly, never a dull moment. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-03/wind-driven-bond-fire-threatens-homes-in-orange-county-as-santa-anas-hit-southern-california https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-03/wind-dri...
    - shreygupta 6y ago
      I'm in Orange County too! All Irvine schools are closed. Stay safe.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Ah. So not, like, in your server room or anything. Still bad enough. As shreygupta said, stay safe...

jabart 6y ago

Will this support paper checks that can be written on the spot by a client?

tarstarr 6y 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.
- shreygupta 6y ago
  Billing (invoices, specifically) has an invite feature to mail in checks and has auto-reconciliation. Maybe it's possible to integrate that?
- philip1209 6y ago
  Do the push ACH payments support the per-invoice account numbers from Stripe Billing? (which is useful for automatic reconciliation)
- jabart 6y ago
  Request submitted. It can be solved by bill-pay, our older clients will want a checkbook to hand checks to vendors on delivery for items which will have them setting up a local bank account for that. Remote Deposit is key for any non-profit/political account as they get mailed a lot of checks.
- adrr 6y ago
  Curious how customer support works? There’s a dispute for an ACH pull, who is handling the dispute, I’d assume the bank that has the charter? Same goes with remote check deposit, someone has to verify the check.

philip1209 6y ago

When platforms carry float or help issue loans, do they make money?

tarstarr 6y 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

shreygupta 6y ago

Hi Tara! First off, I've never posted on HN before, but I felt so obligated to write this because this solves so many of the challenges my team has been going through building our application. I'm wondering if students under 18 are permitted under the TOS? I can see how this product will change the open banking game and fill so many gaps in. Thank you for building this!

bastawhiz 6y ago
If you sign up for Stripe and you're under 18, you'll be required to have a person 18 years or older register as the business representative for your account (usually a parent or guardian). Depending on your country, the age requirement may vary. If you're under 13, you are not allowed to use Stripe at all regardless of what country you're in.
- shreygupta 6y ago
  Right, of course.

nlh 6y ago

This is SUPER cool - congrats on the launch! A few questions: Do you plan to offer Stripe Treasury to non-marketplace small businesses / individuals? I ask because the #1 thing I've been wanting for the past few years is basically Stripe Bank :) I hate Bank of America. I'm not happy with any of the other startup banks. And honestly, at this point my first instinct when seeing Stripe Treasury is "Imma just build my own bank for myself!" (and that actually looks like a real possibility, at least technically). If not, do you plan to offer a retail product for individuals?

mchusma 6y ago
I recommend mercury.com. Amazing in basically every way IMO.
- nlh 6y ago
  Yeah Mercury and some other startup banks looks great, but at least Mercury appears to be business-only. I need something that works for business & personal. (And I have no doubt they'll all expand to handle both personal & business, but I'm impatient ;)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rsync 6y ago
"I hate Bank of America. I'm not happy with any of the other startup banks. And honestly, at this point my first instinct when seeing Stripe Treasury is "Imma just build my own bank for myself!" (and that actually looks like a real possibility, at least technically)." I did this with Twilio - which is to say, I built my own little personal telco with Twilio. It's not without it's ups and downs but there are a lot of interesting little superpowers I now have over my telco interactions that I would not otherwise have ...
- nlh 6y ago
  Yes! I totally get it and love that. Sincerely, --A guy who built his own Asterisk PBX-in-a-linux-box that sat on his desk in 2004 and had 2 physical phone lines plugged into it and today, 16 years later, is still running slight variations of the exact same scripts (although now in the cloud w/ VoIP, but same same).

mnehring 6y ago

Hi Tara - first, thanks for coming here for Q&A. My first question is, will any revenue be available for companies that build on top of this platform? Normal banks make money on interchange on bank cards and interest spread (as well as less savory activities like crazy overdraft fees). Is there any revenue split with the partner? E.g., maybe Goldman pays 0.82%, I offer my customer 0.50%, and so I pocket 0.32% of the balance. Second, what about customer service for the end customer? There's clearly a top-level layer that's managed by the partner, a mid-level layer managed by Stripe, and the deep backend banking layer managed by the partner bank. How is customer support split up among those 3? Those were my two main questions. I heard a couple of people asking about use cases. My use case would be an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've been working on a concept for a next-level-totally-awesome personal finance budget app. The fundamental purpose of a personal budgeting app is to assist you in knowing when to say yes, and when to say no to a purchase, and to do autopsies on past purchases that may have messed things up. I tried a basic version using Plaid to get a data feed from my bank, but the Plaid data feed is inconsistent from bank to bank (with how it handles authorizations that later settle or fail to settle). Being able to bundle a budget app directly with banking could be killer. You'd have real-time, 100% accurate data coming in. That would be a game changer that might make me finally finish my dusty app. So, Tara, if you're not doing revenue sharing with partners yet, please consider it:-). Revenue sharing is a great way to make apps-on-top-of-platforms flourish.

tarstarr 6y 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.

eloff 6y ago

This seems targeted mostly for marketplaces, but I'm curious if this enables a way to accept ACH and wire transfer payments. My thinking is use the API to let the end customer setup a treasury account on my site, they can wire/ACH funds to this account of theirs to pay invoices, and I can use the API to "debit" funds from their treasury account to mine as needed to cover their service bills. Handling invoicing and payments for a class of enterprise customers who can't use a credit card for payments as a matter of policy can be painful. *edit: I think this is actually possible with stripe connect today.

tarstarr 6y 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.

waffle_ss 6y ago

Is Stripe Treasury still beholden to Stripe's list of restricted businesses?[1] A few years ago I started a company with some partners and we signed up with Stripe Atlas. At the end of the lengthy application we got rejected by Stripe because our business falls under the "regulated" category. Even though we didn't need credit card processing, just ACH, and the former is seemingly where these list of prohibited businesses come from. We ended up going full steam ahead with Dwolla instead. Although the developer experience is not as polished as Stripe, they don't discriminate against fully legal businesses that should be allowed to bank and transact like any other. [1]: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

senoroink 6y ago
What was the business? Stripe's not really making the rules here, it's the financial partners backing them. Just because something is "legal" doesn't mean it's not risky. As an easy example, from the page you linked, "psychic services" are banned.
- waffle_ss 6y ago
  Pharmacies exchanging prescription drugs. Regulated, not risky - don't confound the two. And there are no "rules" restricting these transactions over the ACH network, Stripe is applying the widest scope of restrictions gathered from across of its partners, which include the credit card processors. And I was asking this question to the Stripe PM, not some uninformed white knight.
  - tener 6y ago
    Things which aren't risky on some level just don't get regulated. There is a ton of risk involved in pharmacies.
edwinwee 6y ago
It is—the businesses we’re not able to work with are mostly restricted by the financial partners and banks that Stripe works with. But we do want to support as many business types as possible—and for Atlas in particular, we’ve recently been able to support many more. (For example, we fully support telemedicine companies now.) Would you be able to email me at edwin@stripe.com? I’d like to take a second look at that rejection.

runako 6y ago

Hi Tara, congratulations on the launch! Do you intend to allow Treasury to be used to build new bank storefronts? For example, could someone build a slick mobile app and website and use Treasury to launch a B2B "bank", complete with FDIC insurance? Would it be acceptable to launch an offering like mercury.com entirely powered by Treasury? Or is the intent to only allow Treasury as an adjunct to a "real" business? Thanks!

tarstarr 6y ago
Of course, neither Stripe nor users of Stripe Treasury would be launching a bank, but you could provide financial services for other businesses, entirely powered by Stripe Treasury and Stripe Connect. It's pretty analogous to what Shopify is doing with Stripe Connect, Treasury, and Issuing to launch Shopify Balance: https://www.shopify.com/balance https://www.shopify.com/balance

cdnsteve 6y ago

Any ETA when this will be available in Canada? I'd like to learn more.

edwinwee 6y ago
No ETA just yet, but we want to make Treasury available in Canada.

james2406 6y ago

Hi Tara, Thank you for dong this Q&A. Really interesting to see that Stripe is heading into the BaaS space! Will you be offering any consumer loans solutions in the future?

edwinwee 6y ago
No solid timeline—right now Stripe is mainly focused on helping businesses grow.

einpoklum 6y ago

Hello Tara, Do you allow transactions by and with users in states which the US is (illegally) imposing sanctions on? Like Iran?

edwinwee 6y ago
No, regulations would prevent Stripe from working with users that have business in sanctioned countries.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  So it's a faulty and discriminatory service then.
  - lomoeffect 6y ago
    Sounds like something to take up with the US Government to be honest. Every payment processor faces this challenge.
    - einpoklum 6y ago
      So, the "we're just following orders" argument. Very inspiring.

callmeed 6y ago

I was denied access to Stripe Issuing for a project I have in the works. I wasn't given a lot of details why or when I could reapply. Is the same thing going to happen with Stripe Treasury? How can I find out if what I want to do is permissible now that Treasury exists?

edwinwee 6y ago
Was it perhaps for a more consumery-type use-case instead of business? Issuing (and Treasury) are mostly focused on building for businesses at this moment (but are also expanding the number of use-cases). Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can take another look?
- callmeed 6y ago
  Yes and yes. Thanks.

lenitabinol 6y ago

is Stripe merging with PSTH?

efz00 6y ago
Yes

rogerthat_au 6y ago

Do you have a time frame on when it'll be rolled out internationally e.g. UK or Singapore?

eloff 6y ago

Could one use this for a micro loan or payday loan platform? And the loan money via this and send monthly payment requests? I've long had in mind doing something like that as non profit to wipe out the predatory payday loans business which preys on the most financially vulnerable in society. It just seems too difficult for me to do with current bank services. This potentially changes the calculus.

webmaven 6y ago

Hi Tara, congratulations on the launch! Will Stripe Treasury support Factoring use cases? If you're not familiar with factoring, let's say you get a large order that you can't actually afford to fulfill due to a lack of cash-on-hand to buy materials, rent equipment, etc. Rather than requiring the customer to pay up front or getting a loan (possibly using the invoice as collateral), you can just sell the Net-30 (or 60, or 90) invoice outright for something like 95¢ on the $ to get the money you need to fulfill the order. This is particular popular in industries like fashion that have long lead times for both manufacturing and for billing. Anyway, could Treasury be used like this?