allow for underwriting as a business

[chadwhitacre]

Balanced provides for underwriting a merchant as either a person or a business (docs). Gittip only allows for people, not businesses.

I'd like to use Balanced underwriting as a way to verify identity of businesses and organizations that want to use the new Teams features.

We should probably split out identity verification into a separate step from bank account connecting ... #987.

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[bruceadams]

+1 from the Tor Project, http://tpo.is/, via [email protected]

[bruceadams]

More specifically, the Tor Project wants to receive support via Gittip, which is a different use case than the original description of this issue. The basic problem of merchant setup is essentially the same, but the money flows in the other direction.

[chadwhitacre]

For dereferencing EIN: https://www.einfinder.com/
For dereferencing VAT: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/ but see http://www.vatcheck.eu/ https://nephics.com/euvat

[techtonik]

@whit537, can you, please, decipher provides for underwriting a merchant
for mortals? I understand that Gratipay work with finance theory, but can
we keep our jargon simple for ordinary folks and refer to complicated and
specific terms only when it is necessary. I don't mind educating myself
with "rocket science finance", but don't want to lose contact with fellow
open source folks once I get deeper in these dark waters.

[chadwhitacre]

@techtonik Yeah, that's language I got from Balanced. Basically I understand it to mean "vouch for." In the global financial system there's a concept called "know your customer" (KYC). It basically means that the dominant governments of the world require us to have some idea of who our customers are, enough to vouch for them being good citizens and not criminals. Providing compliance with KYC regulations is a key part of Balanced's value proposition.

Does that help?

[techtonik]

That helps to understand that governments require to give up the ids of people in the system, but it is still obscure - why? Isn't it the job of government to prove that somebody is a criminal? Also, there are no customers in Gratipay, so there is no need in legal conflict resolution between parties.

I'd start with real problems first.

[chadwhitacre]

From #3557:

Reticketed from #2449. Part of gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#119.

and:

http://www.experian.com/decision-analytics/bizid-business-verification.html
http://www.lexisnexis.com/backgroundchecks/business/company-background-checks.aspx
https://blockscore.com/
http://www.equifax.com/business/business-identity-reports

[chadwhitacre]

I think this is a key next step for us after we get through the 1.0 refund (#3539), for three reasons:

• This is a prerequisite for payroll (bring back take-what-you-want #3433).
• We'll get our feet wet with storing and verifying identity, with less risk than handling personal identity (implement a customer identification program (CIP) #3289).
• We'll be able to offer invoices from Teams to their corporate sponsors (provide monthly invoices #1199), which will help us greatly to tap into corporate wealth (the other big piece here is breaking anonymity: Break anonymity #3112).

[chadwhitacre]

I'm taking this off of Bring Back Payroll because we've downscoped that to be only about one team, Gratipay, and six ~users (gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#569 (comment)). We don't need programmatic business identity verification for that.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃