It varies depending on your risk profile and how much the bank wants to do your transactions (dollar volume of deposits matter, and fees). If you're coming in as a customer, it may just be a matter of being a commercial customer and paying enough fees. If you're trying to come in as a third party processor, it's more involved. Relationships help there.
You might need significant volume (hundreds or more per day) to make it worth switching from Balanced to something else for outgoing payments. With enough volume (10k+/month), you might get under .10/transaction. Balanced doesn't seem like they're particularly slow about outgoing payments. (from a quick scan of their site) The slowness comes from the ACH network where nothing is ever confirmed settled, it just hasn't come back returned yet.
My main issue with Balanced is that since I don't use them to collect payments, it takes forever to get the money moved to them. And it is a manual process.
So every Monday morning I get a file with payments. I have to move that amount over to Balanced. This can take 3 to 5 business days, but almost always takes 5 or even 6. Meaning I cannot pay my customers until the Friday (5 days) or the Monday (8 days) later.
Also, Balanced cannot process ACH for payments from clients. Having to verify an account with micro deposits is simply not workable for our clientele, many of which do not want to take credit cards because of the high fees.
While our volume right now is too low, it is interesting info to have, and something I'll look into further.
Hi theflyingkiwi42. I'm a co-founder of Balanced. Happy to answer whatever questions you have about our product and hear how we can make Balanced's ACH products better, but don't want to derail this thread. Would you mind commenting on one, or more, of our ACH related GitHub issues [1]? Or you can email support@balancedpayments.com to expand on your thoughts here. Cheers!
Basically, anything that's not next business day is a delay due to risk. (well, except for online bill pay, which can be printed checks that are mailed out.)
Depending on the risk profile of the business, we've done an array of things from 0 day simultaneous ACH credits and debits to 3 or more day holds on incoming funds (via ACH) before credits can go out. Obviously, the riskier the business, the more expensive it is to go fast. 3 day holds are pretty common, since any NSF sort of return is supposed to happen in that time frame.
You might need significant volume (hundreds or more per day) to make it worth switching from Balanced to something else for outgoing payments. With enough volume (10k+/month), you might get under .10/transaction. Balanced doesn't seem like they're particularly slow about outgoing payments. (from a quick scan of their site) The slowness comes from the ACH network where nothing is ever confirmed settled, it just hasn't come back returned yet.