So does Balanced Payments for Marketplaces[1]. Facilitating transactions is a huge pain point for businesses, so it's a big deal to see another company moving in to solve it.
Looking at Braintree's Marketplace docs, it appears you have to "onboard" each sub-merchant you want to send payouts to, which requires entering their name, address, date of birth, and their social security number. It then says "If [the social security number] is not provided, we will attempt to retrieve the full Social Security number based on the other applicant details."
So my question is: How is it possible / how do they retrieve someone's social security number using apparently just a name, address, and birth date? (Maybe I'm naive, but I thought socials were pretty secure)
Kristi from Braintree here. We work with one of the major credit bureaus to cross-reference the data provided to match it with a social security number.
Elliott from WePay here - don't mean to turn these comments into a corporate stick-measuring contest, but our API has been able to support this use case since August of 2011.
Meh. Welcome to the party, a couple of years late. I'll stick with Balanced. Fantastic product, incredible support. Not even a question. Braintree's bread and butter is card processing. Balanced's is marketplaces / payouts.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 41.4 ms ] thread[1]: https://www.balancedpayments.com/
So my question is: How is it possible / how do they retrieve someone's social security number using apparently just a name, address, and birth date? (Maybe I'm naive, but I thought socials were pretty secure)
Ordered by the launch date of their marketplace offering: WePay, Balanced Payments, Stripe, Paymill, Braintree.
Edit: Added WePay.
Disclaimer: I used to work on it in my past life.
But congrats to Braintree on the launch!
(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced)
Can't edit it anymore...