[tarstarr]

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!

[an_opabinia]

"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.

[patio11]

Stripe Treasury does not violate our terms, and allows SaaS platforms (and similar) to provide their business users with access to capabilities which are regulated with those capabilities fulfilled by entities with the appropriate licensing and backed by our financial partners. This is similar to how our Connect product lets our regulated entity do money transmission on behalf of a demand economy company without them needing to do money transmission themselves.

Goldman Sachs is one of our financial partners for Stripe Treasury. Specifically, they provide custodial services for the money management accounts. For more details on this sort of thing, I'd recommend reading or having your lawyer read the contracts.

KYC goes through Stripe's processes. This is both operationally complicated and something that we generally do not go into detail on.

Given that the implementing SaaS business will control the UX around initiating a payment, they could control how much or little bookkeeping to do at time of a payment or transfer. Let me know if that doesn't answer the thrust of this question.

[toomuchtodo]

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.

[Kye]

The nice thing about being Stripe is they can decide what the terms are. I'm sure they thought this through.

[nojvek]

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?

[tarstarr]

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.

[anon589]

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

[dreamer7]

weavr.io seems to be an alternative . They may have more resources on the problems it solves

[nlh]

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?

[rsync]

"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 ...

[mchusma]

I recommend mercury.com. Amazing in basically every way IMO.

[leafmeal]

I don't wanna try and sell it here, but I like and use simple.com. If you haven't tried it I recommend it.

[mnehring]

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]

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.

[teagee]

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]

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

edit: added a space

[narrationbox]

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?

[patio11]

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.

[granzymes]

Well from the website Issuing looks to be available to everyone now. Seems like a normal product rollout to progressively increase the audience size.

[griffinkelly]

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

[edwinwee]

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.

[runako]

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]

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

[waffle_ss]

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

[edwinwee]

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 [e-mail]? I’d like to take a second look at that rejection.

[digitaldarwin]

I had the same issue with my startup a few years back that was classified as transacting via rebates. Because the payment method was a rebate against a purchase Stripe dismissed us. And, like Waffle_es, that's when I discovered Dwolla. Nothing against Stripe, every business can choose who they want to serve.

[senoroink]

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.

[webmaven]

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?

[eloff]

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]

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.

[eloff]

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.

[shreygupta]

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]

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.

[callmeed]

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]

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 [e-mail] and I can take another look?

[cdnsteve]

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

[edwinwee]

No ETA just yet, but we want to make Treasury available in Canada.

[jabart]

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

[tarstarr]

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.

[james2406]

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]

No solid timeline—right now Stripe is mainly focused on helping businesses grow.

[rogerthat_au]

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

[philip1209]

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

[tarstarr]

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.

[tim_sw]

Is this mainly available in North America?

[patio11]

(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.

[lenitabinol]

is Stripe merging with PSTH?

[efz00]

Yes

[einpoklum]

Hello Tara,

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

[edwinwee]

No, regulations would prevent Stripe from working with users that have business in sanctioned countries.