from Hacker News

Seed (YC W15) Wants to Reinvent Business Banking

by emilepetrone on 2/18/15, 12:59 AM with 36 comments

• by anemitz on 2/18/15, 3:01 AM

  How does this compare to Standard Treasury? It looks like maybe Seed is more on the consumer/business side and ST would be seen as a wholesale banking provider (one level up in the bank chain)?

• by Meekro on 2/18/15, 2:39 AM

  Hi Brian! I've read your API docs, and all this is pretty intriguing. As I understand it, you're offering this service so other people can write consumer apps for banking, and companies can integrate the API into their internal systems. I have just a couple of questions..

  1. What are your thoughts on dealing with fraud? While ACH is often reversible, wire transfers tend not to be. Established banks often have convoluted wire procedures (that often involve showing up in person at a branch) precisely because a fraudulent transfer -- even if the fraud was the user's fault because of phished credentials -- often results in the bank eating the losses. How will your company handle losses where somebody's API credentials got hacked, their balance transferred to Romania, and the victim notices and reports the fraud 59 days later?

  2. One of the biggest limiting factors in bitcoin's growth right now is that exchanges struggle to get and keep relationships with traditional banks. No-doubt fraud prevention has a lot to do with this, but any bank that steps up to the plate could charge its partner exchanges huge fees and still be swimming in business. Have you thought about being that bank?

• by online_reader_ on 2/18/15, 2:02 AM

  Read the article, visited the website, read the docs -- still don't know why this exists or what the value proposition is; however, I'm not a business owner and don't do business banking. That said, I don't think I'm all that far off from the target audience as I do deal with billing, account balances and money transfers through third party api's.

  As an aside, someone needs to 'disrupt' the home mortgage loan process from top to bottom. Super opaque and really annoying to go through (even the information gathering phase) when compared to almost everything else I've experienced as an adult.

• by btmerr on 2/18/15, 1:19 AM

  Hey there, I'm Brian Merritt, the CEO of SEED. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. You can also email me at brian at seed.co.

• by levlandau on 2/18/15, 4:19 AM

  Is Seed similar to Plaid (http://www.plaid.com)?

• by logn on 2/18/15, 10:43 AM

  What tool are they using to write their API docs? I think Stripe uses the same thing. http://docs.seed.co/v1.0/docs/authentication-login

• by justkd on 2/18/15, 8:23 AM

  I really love what you are doing. And it was about time:) I love you for tackling such a huge problem for us. Thx!