We currently bank with Starling, which we’re very happy with. We’ve built a pretty tight integration through their personal access token, so payments are reconciled against invoices automatically etc.
One thing that they don’t offer is payment initiation.
I did see Revolut offers this but only with their £25/mo plan which isn’t feasible at the moment given it’s only a small volume of payments, although this is likely to change in the future.
Does anyone here know of any solutions? Not against paying, just needs to be feasible for us.
Biggest use case for the moment is pay day for staff, which is a bit tedious through Starling.
We use Wise, formerly Transferwise. A bit of a mess to set up, but works really well once done. (we need broad international coverage, as well as domestic. If you only need domestic there might be better/cheaper options out there.)
We also investigated Stripe (who insisted we do KYC on all payees - something which I still can’t believe wasnt actually a misunderstanding of some sort), Adyen (who seemed to only be interested in bigger fish), PayPal (whom we disliked), and a few smaller players whose name I have now forgotten. They all offer API payments.
I did look at BrightPay which uses Modulr, but their prices seems quite high compared to what we pay now. Currently we use The Payroll Site, initially because it integrated into our accounting software, but we’ve just stuck with it. I think it’s about £6/mo for upto 5 employees which fits us.
Open to suggestions there too mind you!
My biggest gripe with the Starling payments is having to enter my password for almost every payment, which I guess is down to the value. Just after the first 2 or 3 payments it gets a bit tedious, even with a password manager
I think they call it Stripe Connect. I’m just not sure why I need to do KYC if all I want to do is send payments? My bank doesn’t force me to do KYC for outgoing payments. I guess it’s because Stripe Connect can do more than just payouts, but we didn’t need that extra funcitonality.
This is what we were investigating:
Agreed. They have a solid, well documented, API, and can do loads of stuff for you. Looking at some of their competitors (particularly Adyen, whom I have most experience with) they are just a pain…
Out of curiosity have you got any experience with whatever NatWest just pushed out?
I want to do something with online stores and stickers in Emiru, but I’m still contemplating the business model in entirety. Need to print out Barclays business plan stuff so I can write it out properly and give it more critical thought
It would be great if Starling took a leaf out of the bunq playbook and offered batch payments. Batch verification of payee would be the icing on the cake!
