BC SOFTWARE
Saved by @Alex1Powell

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

 I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.
This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.
For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.
It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.
Stripe Billing goes to some crazy lengths to do this (virtual bank accounts, bespoke contracts with banking partners, etc); most SaaS companies offering invoicing as a feature probably shouldn't. You would want to spend your developer time elsewhere.
Stripe Treasury, now in limited beta, will allow software companies to provision money management accounts for their users, and then operate on those accounts like they expect to operate on data, servers, Stripe charges, or anything else you have an API for.
What’s the difference between a money management account and e.g. a standard banking checking account? As a user, not that much. You get a card to buy things with and get cash, and the ability to send ACH payments, bill payments, and the like.
The distinction is mostly implementation-layer concerns in banking-land.
It's difficult to envision what you can create given powerful primitives. Almost everything you see on a screen sits on top of NAND gates; looking at a NAND gate doesn't show you Twitter.

But let me speculate a bit:
B2B SaaS which deals with money, which is most of it, just got a whole lot more interesting, because it can directly operate on the money.
Take Shopify, for example. Shopify gives users an online storefront, and naturally needs to keep track of the total in the virtual register.
But with Stripe Treasury API, Shopify launched Shopify Balance, which lets them build a much better register. They always know the real total inside of it, not just what "should" be there.

They can automate its operations.

https://t.co/fMOqHh2Tlv
And because of Stripe's global payments and treasury network, we didn't just make these capabilities *accessible* to developers.

We made it *better* for your users than many business bank accounts.
What does every small business care about? Cash flow. What's a top 10 customer support request for every business which sees funds flows, like Shopify?

"When do I get my money?"

Can you imagine needing to email Google to ask when that email that you know was sent will arrive?
If the money just arrived faster, there would be less angst for users whether it would arrive at all. Less tickets opened. Less questions you can’t usefully answer.

Why is money *so slow* and *so opaque*?
*sigh* That is a complicated topic, but at the end of the day, you're generally rate limited by the slowest rail between where the money comes in and where it goes out.

In the U.S., you’ll often be blocked on the ACH network. Fast compared to stagecoach; slow compared to email.
But with Stripe Treasury, money doesn't have to lag its way through the ACH network between a customer paying it and a business receiving it.

Stripe has an arrangement with the banks that ultimately hold the business users’ funds.
So when your software says "OK, disburse the money they've earned from the platform", it's in their account (and spendable!) on the same day.

(We are working on making that even faster by default. It’s not called HTTP 200 Check Back In An Hour.)
SaaS platforms are one use case for Stripe Treasury, but you can envision another one: novel fintechs, with different UXes, brands, and target business users, built on a core set of primitives.

Putting together fintech products is historically a pain in the keister.
Every significant feature you add requires an integration with a banking partner, often a *new* banking partner, often *several* banking partners.
That integration requires lengthy negotiations, bespoke legal work, approvals, etc just to unblock your engineering team.

Then your engineering team receives the spec, and the *real* fun begins.
We did away with most of that for Stripe Treasury, just like we did for Payments before it.

No negotiation required. No bespoke legal work. More of the necessary levels of complexity in touching money businesses depend on; less of the overhead.
And, of course, the care and attention to the developer experience that you'd expect from us.
A day may come when Stripe forgets what is was like to build software, when we ship a 400 page PDF file as the sole documentation for an API, but it is not this day.
So if you want to build a vertical fintech targeting carpenters? Offering payments in and out, a place to hold insured funds, and a card to spend them with?

You can build all of that on Stripe APIs now.
And if your users need financing? Snap in Stripe Capital for Platforms and we can facilitate access to loans based on their predicted future revenue through your platform. https://t.co/Ye28gyMPRh (This also came out this week.)
And now, back to being an erstwhile small businessman who has had bank accounts for many years.

AAAAAAAARGH.
Small business banking has a poor UX, because of structural issues.

It is managed at most banks as an offshoot of personal banking, because the userbase is basically the same people who show up at the branch.

But the needs are quite different.
Banks specialize in one-size-fits-most products. The basic checking account you have is designed to cover more than 60% of the total population. It functions effectively the same for almost all of its users.
This kinda makes sense for individuals. Financial circumstances differ, but tend to rhyme: money in from a job or pension; money out to housing, utilities, debit card payments; some cash management.

(Narrator: This is not, in fact, an adequate spec for a checking account.)
But the needs of businesses are _wildly different_ from each other!
A small scale landlord cares quite a bit about mortgages and timely rent collection (and super-timely notice of non-payment), but rather little about payroll or expenses for consumables, and probably almost nothing for cash management.
A pizzeria, on the other hand, thinks it is inconceivable to make almost all the money on one day a month, spends most of revenue on payroll and consumables, and cares quite a bit about cash management.
These businesses deserve fundamentally different application-layer experiences from their banking. And they don't get them, because banks are incapable of offering hundreds of vertical software solutions.
(Just making the one-size-fits-most personal banking and mobile apps *actually good* is hard enough! It seems like we’re just getting there in the last 5 years!)
Who does offer hundreds of vertically-specialized application experiences? The software industry. Shopify specializes in e-commerce merchants and understands them, thoroughly. They don't sell to dentists.
Dentists have thriving ecosystems of firms that live and breathe every aspect of their practices.

So do graveyards. And hotels. And landlords. And spas. And tutors. And yoga teachers. And...
Why is software so varied but banking so… not? One reason is that businesses pay an awful lot for software, but pay relatively little for banking. Banking is a scale game.

Not enough dentists pay not enough dollars for banks to put software teams against dental practice UX.
But because a software company can address dentists by the nation, not by the square-mile-around-a-branch, and because they charge more, a software company serving dentists can reliably generate enough money to pay an engineering team.
Here Stripe acts as an aggregator: we can gather up *many* businesses attached to *many* software companies. These product teams understand their customers’ businesses *thoroughly*.

We can then take that package to leading banks. That reach is *very interesting* to them.
That is why Goldman Sachs, Citi, Barclays, and Evolve Bank and Trust partner with us.

A pizzeria can't walk into Goldman Sachs and walk out with a bank account.

A software company serving pizzerias could if they had, uh, a lot of dough.
But a material chunk of the software industry, that's a different story altogether.

And so our partner banks have made great products available, at pricing and terms that small businesses just don't usually get in direct banking relationships.
Take account maintenance fees. Please.

I know exactly how many times I paid the $14 account maintenance fee for my software businesses, ten years later. That’s how much I hated them.
I had gone below $X,000 in deposits (I was bootstrapped! Rent was due!) and hadn’t managed to spend at least $250 on the debit card because, whoops, mis-timed a billing cycle by two days.
(Being a bit older and wiser I probably should have just considered that $14 a cost-of-doing-business and spent my time on sales, not timing debit card transactions, but my emotional state at the time was closer to “Gah I feel like a chump.”)
We have agreed, with our partners, on a pricing structure where a SaaS company or fintech doesn't need to charge an account maintenance fee.
(As the software company, you *could*, because you control your pricing, but presumably you will make better choices, and your users will not say, ten years later, “I trusted you, and you made me feel like a chump. Six times.”)
How is this possible, and why didn't the banking system do it years ago?

One way to think of it is that banks have huge expenses to attract SMB deposits, including marketing campaigns and branch networks, and those drive the pricing of SMB banking.
The cost of *servicing* SMB accounts has gone down over the years, now that account statements are not calculated by highly-trained artisans, but the cost of *acquiring* them is increasing over time.

Nationwide advertising, branches, and sales reps aren’t as cheap as cron jobs.
Since the software industry is doing their own customer acquisition, and there is sharply less need for the branch network (itself more a sales tool than a servicing tool), some banks are happy to pass the savings back to Main Street.
There's obviously a lot more detail here (hosted onboarding flows, KYC and AML compliance workflows built for you, all accounts have deposit insurance, etc), but I have to end this tweetstorm somewhere.

I'm very excited to see what software people do with the Stripe Treasury.
Anticipating a FAQ: "Is this the product you were referring to here?"

No. This was my number two. You're welcome to your guess at the number one. (Though, who knows, I heard of a new project last week and might steal the zeroth spot for it.)

https://t.co/osjjx8gNM0

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
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@patio11
Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.
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@patio11
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
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@patio11
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.
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@patio11
Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):


Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.


"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."


Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
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