Plaid API: Transfer funds between accounts - plaid

I am using the Plaid API for iOS to write a program which accesses banks accounts after authentication and displays the transaction data.
I need to know if it's possible to transfer funds between accounts (checking to savings) and how.
I know acorns uses the same API, and they are able to transfer funds, and Plaid's site claims "Authorize ACH payments in seconds based on the information users know in their heads. No need to know account or routing number. No need for micro-deposits."
But is there documentation on how to move money on the site?

Plaid does not move money via their API.
UPDATES
Dwolla now provides a white-label solution that basically does this all for you. Combine Plaid and Dwolla, and you're basically golden for payments in the US now.
Disclaimer: I co-founded a company that is a customer of Dwolla and one of their first white label customers.
Original content
Moving money with the credentials that Plaid provides requires using the Automated Clearing House (ACH) process in the US.
What won't work
Ripple Labs (currently under federal investigation), Dwolla, BitPay, etc. all require proprietary authentication with their own platforms before they will move money. You can't use them with the routing and account number that you get from Plaid. You have to adopt their entire system...or nothing.
What will work
Plaid's API provides more for you than those other APIs because you have the routing and account number. This allows you to directly enter into the ACH system yourself. All you need to move money is the senders routing and account number, the receiver's routing and account number, and the amount. Plaid gives you 2/5 of this already.
But you need to move the funds. Using an ACH processor (like Vericheck - I was a customer), you can use their API to send money to an account. Or a bank (like Silicon Valley Bank - also was a customer), where you can generate and upload a NACHA file with the instructions.
What you're in for
Compliance and banking laws are strict. Get a good lawyer to help explain what you're up against. ACH processors will want to do comprehensive background checks on you and your business. Banks will require you to deposit a portion of your proposed transactions to cover STOP payments (when a user tells their bank to cancel a payment, like voiding a check). You may have to register as a money transmitter (a small $1M in filing, registration, and legal fees for all 50 states).
Moving money is still difficult to do on behalf of a user, but if you're willing to put in the legal work, the programming is pretty simple!

Plaid's API actually will give you routing and account number information and/or transaction data with cool info like GPS coordinates of transactions but I believe when I spoke to them they explicitly said that they don't provide money moving services in their API.
I've been looking at Ripple Labs, Dwolla, BitPay, etcetera.
If you have any recommendations about getting Plaid and Meteor working well together, then I can add you to a Cloud9 workspace and would be delighted to learn. :)

Plaid recently signed an agreement with Stripe. Stripe allows you to move funds via ACH through their newly realeased API: https://stripe.com/blog/accept-ach-payments
This is very similar to what companies like Peloton Technologies Inc. have been doing in Canada for EFT since 2010. EFT is what most parts of the world refer to as ACH.
Plaid provides Stripe with a higher possibility of being able to instantly verify a bank account, otherwise they fall back to the old Paypal 4 day verification processes of issuing a couple of transfers and waiting for the users to verify the amounts.
The pain of waiting on the user and the fact that 7 out of 10 times a bank account is entered wrong is what has probably prevented Stripe and other companies entering this space until now.

Related

Transfer money from my stripe account to my partners

I'm new with using payment processors, I'm building a platform with Laravel to facilitate business between clients and manufacturers. First client pay for the job to be done and when the job is done we pay the manufacturers.
I'm using Stripe to charge clients and it works fine. However I'm stuck with the process of paying the manufacturers. because Stripe is not clear on how to do that.
please if you have a solution with or without stripe I'll be very grateful
It sounds like Stripe Connect is what you're looking for. In this scenario, the client would be the platform account and the manufacturers would be the Connect accounts. Since you want the payment to the manufacturer to occur both after the job is done and after you pay the the client, you could use Separate Charges and Transfers.

Send automated mass, uniquely tailored messages to a list of participants (is it possible?)

My company wants to conduct a pilot to see if providing doctors with certain risk information about their patients would help them make better decisions. Before we build a full scale app, we just want to determine if the information is useful to doctors, it helps patients, and if generating the data and getting it to doctors is even feasible. Unfortunately, due to institutional data security and privacy rules, I have to use Microsoft Teams messaging to test this. Otherwise, I'd use Microsoft Access VBA, loop through a list of emails, and send the tailored information that way. However, because I won't be able to easily encrypt emails like this (and it prone to people forgetting - unless there's a way to set up encryption from MS Access VBA) I can't use MS Access/Outlook.
So bottom line, say I have a dataset with 20 emails/Teams contact information of doctors, along with unique medical information about 1 of their patients. Aside from copying and pasting the data into a message, and sending it in Microsoft Teams for each doctor, is this a more automated way to do this? Think of this as sort of a Microsoft Teams mail merge.
You can do it with Company communicator app template. Company Communicator is a custom Teams app that enables corporate teams to create and send messages intended for multiple teams or large number of employees over chat allowing organization to reach employees right where they collaborate. Please go through this sample.
Hope that answers your question!

Maintaining and organizing purchases on multiple platforms

I have an application for various platforms. Let them be iOS, Android and Windows. In order to use a app, a monthly fee needs to be paid, but it just needs to be paid once in order to use all platforms. It is the same as with Spotify, so by paying once, every platform can be used.
According to the guidelines of Google and Apple, I need to offer In-App Purchases for the monthly fee. The system is connected to user accounts, which are managed by a server, which is in my control. I am storing the subscription data of users, so if a user uses the In-App Purchases on iOS, the information is transmitted to the central server in order to unlock the Android-App as well (in case it has been paid on another platform already)
The problem is the following scenario:
A user has a valid subscription which has been payed via Google Play. The iOS and Windows apps are unlocked as well. Now the user uninstalls the Android app, goes to the Google Play website and cancels the subscription. In the current scenario, I am not able to detect this and the subscription will be valid for all other platforms.
The question is:
Is there any pattern to circumvent this problem? Spotify and co are solving this issue as well, so there must be a solution for this
Well, the server that handles the authorization of the user (that is, your server) should query the Google Subscription API, to check if the current subscription is still valid. Each SubscriptionPurchase Resource contains information about when the subscription expires.
(see https://developers.google.com/android-publisher/api-ref/purchases/subscriptions)
For Apple, the same stuff applies: You will get a receipt, and with that receipt, you can query the server at any time to check if that subscription is still valid.
There is a slide which summarizes these points and the pitfalls very well: https://speakerdeck.com/rosapolis/the-recurring-nightmare-cross-platform-in-app-subscription-purchases
Bottom line: You won't be able to make that happen without a server that does the communication between the two stores. It comes with issues, though, as the slide shows.
Bonus: The talk from which the slides are taken is also on Youtube

Google Places API - quota increase (1000 to 150 000) only available for businesses?

I recently started an internship concerning Master Data Management in Talend. Part of the Master Data Management proces involves the cleansing of data. In my case I have to cleanse a few addresses. After doing some research I bumped into the Google Places API, which would do the trick for me. At first I wasn't aware of the so called quota limits that are bound to this API so I decided to read up on it some more. Basicly I have quite a few addresses to cleanse, so the 1000 requests per day limit won't cut it. As of yesterday I decided to increase that limit to 150 000 requests by verifying my identity using my creditcard. The requests were indeed increased to 150 000 but after a few hours my billing account was closed without warning and the limit went back to 1000 requests.
My question is: is the increase of the quota limit only available for businesses or are individual users eligible for it too?
I basicly filled in my own name as the name of the business when I created the billing account for my own project. That billing account is closed now. I really need that quota increase to be able to finish my project so I'm wondering if you guys are able to enlighten me. The image below is part of the form which has to be filled in to create a billing account.
for this amount of quota you have to identify yourself through your credit card and thats it. you can use this key for personal use or business does not matter . as the whole app has that much of search quota. no matter how many people install that app.
so the answer is it is eligible for individual users too.
thank you
You may have different terms in your country. We don't have VAT in the US, although we do have state-specific sales tax on some goods and services. I suspect that Google cannot offer this service in your country without a business tracking the VAT for it. I use the Google Search API with Custom Search Engines on both personal and business accounts from the US with just CC validation. You might look to see if there are Google services resellers local to you who can offer you the Place API.

Adaptive Payments application approval - average timescale?

Does anyone have any idea of the average Adaptive Payments application approval time at the moment? It appears there may be a backlog as we've heard nothing from the moderators and it has been over 15 days (their usual timescale apparently). Our case is a crowdfunding website built on CodeIgniter with the Adaptive Payment gateway installed and ready to go live when we are given application approval. Our site has been active for 6months using other methods via PayPal, but it's time to move up a notch.
It depends on the permissions your application is requesting; less restricted permissions usually goes through quicker.
Even so, check with PayPal Developer Technical Services at https://www.paypal.com/dts/ if you're looking for an update.

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