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Ask HN: I want to pay people, not just accept payment. What are my options?

5 points by mr_luc ↗ HN
So, accepting credit card payments is a single (admittedly, long) line of code for most languages if you're using most gateway+merchant bundles.

Some, like Authorize.net, let you accept ACH transfers.

Is there anyone out there that lets me MAKE ACH transfers with a few lines of code?

Or am I forced to live in the stone age/use paypal?

5 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 25.8 ms ] thread
HeyLaughingBoy
Do you mean you want to pay employees? What do you mean by "pay people?"
mr_luc
I mean I'd like to give a user of an application money -- preferably, transfer it directly into their bank account. Or not even a user.

If we can't, that's stupid.

I mean, if the customer had a merchant account and a web interface for it, I could use it to send him money from my debit card or a corporate cc.

From my exhaustive research (googling over this crappy latin american wifi), it looks like the answer is "that's impossible; use paypal to do it by hand."

Stupid, if true.

andhapp
hmmm if you can transfer money into your merchant account then transferring money into someone else's account should be straight forward but that's not the case. I would suggest pay-pal but transferring money into someone's bank account would actually take 3-5 working days from it so that sucks...but yes you are right pay pal is the only way...
mr_luc
Thank you! Yes!

It seems insane to me.

I mean, I can see how it would cause all kinds of money-laundering headaches to regulators, but that had better not be the reason. Because money launderers can already operate with near-absolute impunity (their problems are more organizational, scaling their methods while keeping them under the radar).

There's got to be a bank out there that offers an API like this, but I wonder what the entry point looks like, cost-wise.

Man. This seems like an obviously stupid thing. There should be more options than Paypal.

edit: okay, going offline for next week. Will check back next Tuesday.

rms
I have heard that ACH transfers are much more common in Europe. How do they do it there?