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Comment by timedoctor | Hacker News Reader

I would want to get some feedback from Braintree on this. Requiring a NAB foreign currency account is a pretty big deal. I used to have a NAB foreign currency account and it was a bit hard to operated, might have improved in the last few years however.

I personally use Braintree but with a US account for a US company (even though I live in Australia). This is more of an exceptional case however I think.

For Australian businesses charging in US dollars is not exceptional, probably very common.

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Braintree here. You all are right. Getting a merchant account and setting up a foreign currency account has been notoriously difficult to get in the past with extremely high fees and approval requirements. This is no longer the case. Braintree sponsors merchants to get setup with a merchant account in Australia and has built an accelerated process to creating foreign currency accounts.

If a provider states that no merchant account is required, you are most likely being placed on an aggregated merchant account. This has many disadvantages for the merchant as you are grouped under one umbrella account. As the provider grows, this becomes unsustainable and often leads to poor customer experiences (a la Paypal account freezes).

We're working to create a sustainable solution where customer service and great software are the central focus. We'll be constantly improving the on-boarding timeline and look forward to helping the fast growing tech scene in Australia.

Pin Payments here. This is obviously some great information from our friends at Braintree on traditional banking relationships. At Pin Payments, we actually introduced some new ways of doing things which are different than a traditional aggregated merchant account (like Stripe) or a traditional sponsored merchant account (like Braintree). Pin Payments is currently unique (as far as we know). We onboard merchants instantly for local and foreign currency and we do not handle the money (Perpetual, our custodian, does). We do not operate an aggregated merchant account, each dev/customer is actually represented individually with each banking partner. We actually abstract the bank from the relationship, so we can provide a redundant banking model. We also have SLA's with our banking partners to ensure as-close-to-immediate on-boarding as we can right now (aiming for realtime of course). It's taken us around 18 months to get this model up-and-running in Australia. We think this is pretty awesome for Aussie devs and we also think it will scale well beyond Australia (where the financial regulations are obviously amongst the strictest in the world). Just sayin'

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