Dead-Simple Money Transfers, Thanks to the Power of the Crowd

Illustration: Balanced

If you want someone to transfer money straight into your bank account, you probably have to look up some very long numbers you have trouble remembering. Typically, such transfers require not only your bank account number, but your bank’s routing number.

That’s a bit of a pain. But an online payments startup called Balanced wants to make things easier. Starting today, the company is offering a new service called Push to Card that lets others send you payments using your debit card details. All they need to send you money is your name, card number, and expiration date.

Normally, a company would develop a new service like this in secret, but Balanced took a very different approach.

The service isn’t available to everyone. Balance doesn’t offer payment services directly to consumers. It seek to streamline payments for online marketplaces, such as RelayRides, Tradesy, and Gittip. And, for the moment, the new Push to Card offering is only available to select marketplaces as part of a private beta program. But it will filter down to consumers through these marketplaces–if Tradesy adopts it, it’s available to Tradesy users–providing yet another way we can simplify how we transfer money from place to place.

After PayPal got things rolling in the late ’90s, the payments world is evolving yet again through startups such as Balance and Stripe–a company that aims to simplify things for ordinary merchants in much the same way Balanced hones operations on marketplaces. And then there’s bitcoin, the open source software that could completely overhaul the way we not only send but store money.

The Push to Card tool was launched with a crowdfunding campaign. Customers using its existing payment services were asked to pay fees for the tool before it was even built. “The idea wasn’t to fund the development of the new feature, but to ask customers to put their money where their mouth is,” says Balanced founder and CEO Matin Tamizi. “Our goal was that if people paid $50k in 30 days, we’d build the feature. We hit that goal in 24 hours, including companies that weren’t even customers yet.”

Such an unorthodox approach is typical of Balanced. Tamizi describes it as an “open company.” That means not only that the company’s services are based mostly on open source software–enough that a competitor could build a clone of Balanced’s services fairly easily–but also that the company tries to make most of its decision in public. This lets employees from all parts of the company participate in major decisions and make suggestions about projects they’re not working on, and it lets the company get feedback from customers on new ideas, such as Push to Card. Bitcoin isn’t the only one reinventing payments with the open ethos.