Last June, BancBox, a payment services platform similar to Stripe, debuted its platform allowing developers to build a lot of different payment services. As cofounder Sanj Goyle claimed at the time: “PayPal could be built on top of our platform.” Now it has launched BancBox Crowd, what is — as far as we can tell — the first independent escrow service aimed at crowdfunding portals that operate on equity, debt or revenue share models.
The company is also announcing partnerships with crowd investing services 99Funding, SoMoLend and Localstake.
BancBox Crowd claims to be the only solution on the market that provides online investment portals with an automated escrow solution that can replace the manual paper escrow process. They also say it is compliant with FINCEN, FINRA and SEC requirements.
In essence it means being able to create independent escrow accounts for each crowd-backed project, collect funds from those many investors, and either safely return funds if the project doesn’t work out, or disburse those funds when the project, whatever it is, reaches its funding goal.
Goyle says: “We want to have the payment part of the experience of an investor to be a sticky experience so we make it as easy as possible to pay and go through the process.” He says the business model is based on a set transaction fee to the platform partner.
You could say they know about payments. BancBox manages $100 million in consumer deposits daily in nearly 200,000 individual accounts. Its transaction volume has increased 100 percent to nearly $2 billion annually.
BancBox was created in 2011 but previously, co-founders Goyle, Praveer Kumar, and Bill Wilson launched the now well-known National Payment Network (NPN), which had investors like Foundation, Floodgate, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal, and Founder Collective.