While the idea of a free payment gateway might be enticing for businesses, you or the businesses you serve need to provide something equally enticing for the users to go through the hoops of installing a Chrome extension. You'll need to figure out what the value is for the users - could it be lower prices? And if so, will the price be low enough for them to use this new method of payment? There are also other psychologies at play such as trust of the system, gaming the system, etc. that you will need to think it through.

Not saying it's not a good idea but there's a lot more to think about when it comes to payments.

Very valid concerns you raise. I am not sure I can answer them sufficiently, partly why I posted here. The primarily sales argument safe the ~3% transactions fee that many big payment gateways charge. In any case, it would properly only be offered as an alternative payment option besides the traditional.

Will properly make a MVP and try pitching it to some users and see what the response is.

Problems off the top of my head: 1) standard bank transfers often aren't instantaneous (idk about Germany) 2) no support for handling disputes etc. 3) banks can simply try to block you if it ever gets traction 4) a lot of friction, no mobile support 5) it's hardly that much better than just having people do the transfer manually 6) you'll have to integrate across many banks UIs

Can you even verify if the transfer really happened based on this csv info?

Thanks for the feedback.

1. The transfer is immediately registered as a transaction on your account statement overview.

2. Yes, disputes would have to be handled by contacting your bank. I don't know the exact possibilities here, but would notice many complain about Paypal's polices too.

3. Yes, but don't see why moving customers away from other payment platforms to the online would be bad business for them.

4. Yes, no mobile. There are some constrains to it.

5. It is essentially just a manual that get verified by a third party. In principle you could pay online shops manually, but the problem is that the shop owner would have to manually verify it, that is reading through his account statements. This Chrome extension does exactly this.

6. To integrate you need to make sure the bank offers CSV data export with following the CAMT format (or something similar). This is required by the bank SEPA agreement in EU.

To verify a payment I reckon you need the following: amount, currency, account number and a token as payee note, see http://i.imgur.com/m1ltZNg.png

The unique token is generated by my server. Naturally there will have to be some testing with the different online banks.

I have done many (failed) projects before so I am likewise critical.

My intuition would be that the cost of lost customers who aren't willing to

1) Install a new Chrome extension they've never heard of

2) navigate through their bank's website

Will be the much higher than payment processing fees.

Also, it sounds like you are storing bank account numbers on your machine.

I imagine it would be an alternative payment method, not the only one. It does necessarily work with the customers specific bank.

This definitely isn't for anyone. A certain level of tech skills are required. But the customer do save money. Foreinstance on a 100€ transfer Stripe charges 3,2€ (0.30€ + 2.9%). The cost saving is the main attraction here.

I will only be storing bank account number (IBAN) which to my knowledge is usually available and doesn't pose a security hazard.

> But the customer do save money

Wait, so the business is the one who needs to integrate this into their system, but it is the customer who saves money? Why is the business going to spend 1000s of euros worth of time in order to save < 5% of their customers 4 euros?

Think very hard about the actual degree to which your product would enable a 200-person business to...

1) Increase revenue

2) Cut costs

Quantify that in euros.

I would really love to know what others think on this ..

Can work if buyers are incentivized in some way to do this (too much friction).

"Free payment gateway" is enough for a lot of businesses to get started.

I imagine it could offered as an alternative payment option besides the regular and more expensive. Making it easy to use together with Stripe and potentially as a plugin for popular e-commerce platforms.

Intercepting data from a banking site? Sure that doesn't sound fucking dodgy at all.

It uses the Chrome download API[1] and only listens to the downloaded files. If a file is from a specific bank site, contains the token and is in .csv format it will try to validate it. No user information is stored on my server.

Edit: I view it as similar as synchronising bank data with an external app.

[1]: https://developers.chrome.com/extensions/downloads