Seed (YC W15) Wants to Reinvent Business Banking

Re:Seed (YC W15) Wants to Reinvent Business Banking by btmerr on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @05:30PM (#9071399)

We're working to update our docs as quickly as possible, so transaction stuff will be there soon. As for checks, we're not planning on supporting check deposit via API initially. There are a few reasons:

1. Remote Check Deposit is a protected technology owned by Mitek and/or USAA, and we're limited in how we can use it.

2. Checks are a huge fraud vector, so we're going to be careful about how we support them.

3. Checks are literally the worst payment mechanism ever invented and we would love to see them die in a fire. So we're going to discourage their use as much as possible while providing better, easier to use payment mechanisms.

That having been said, you will be able to deposit checks into SEED, just not via API for now.

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Re:Seed (YC W15) Wants to Reinvent Business Banking by ensignavenger on Thursday February 19, 2015 @01:28AM (#9072740)

Cool, I agree that checks are terrible, but I still get more customers paying by check than any other method :)

Regarding item 1: Just curious- Do you mean Mitek and/or USAA have a patent on the process? Or do they own the only technology approved for some back-end process by the Federal Reserve?

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Re:Seed (YC W15) Wants to Reinvent Business Banking by btmerr on Thursday February 19, 2015 @09:10PM (#9078510)

They own or co-own the patent(s). Last I checked they were still battling it out in court.

The relevant legislation that enabled Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) is the Check21 act, which you can learn about here: http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regcc-faq-check...

In theory, anyone can build a system to deposit checks via check images, but software/process patents are a (mostly bad) thing. :(

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