Big update today. Big, big, BIIIIIGGGGG, update. Today’s update is probably the most significant and important update VITY has ever, or will ever, release. Today’s update is for AUTOMATED PAYMENTS!! Finally,  yeah yeah yeah, yes, I know, but it’s FINALLY here. You can now get paid without a human being involved. Finally.

The way it previously worked, we took your billing details and manual created accounts for you on our payment processor, Stripe, and then performed transfers once you had money coming. Sorta sucked for us, but you beta users were none the wiser. And, believe it or not, that was actually intentional. We figured we could hold off going into beta until we had payments 100% or we could go into beta and do things manual for now. I think we made the right choice.

So,  the way it now works is we have it all automated like a professional and grown up platform should. It’s all programmed and built in the most secure way possible following all the latest and greatest blah blah blah. Who cares? The important parts are:

1. Social Influencers create a payment account with VITY. This is separate from your member account (we can’t pay you if we don’t know where to send money)
   1. This includes your billing address and a valid bank account and routing number
   2. (Paypal is in the idea stage and I’m, personally, trying to get the team to consider Bitcoin as an option but that’s another tale)
2. Upon completion of campaigns, VITY will start an escrow timer of 5 days
3. Once 5 days are up VITY will transfer the money to your bank
4. Depending on your bank, you should expect the money in your bank account anywhere from minutes to 3 days later

Done.  And, actually, fairly straight forward.Still, I want to go into a little detail on the hows and whys of things so there aren’t any surprises.

First, as mentioned, we use the payment processor Stripe to handle all payment processing and transfers. This is important since they’re not only enormously popular but also take security insanely seriously. See, VITY doesn’t store any of the important stuff.  We don’t want to even touch it. And Stripe is actually built with that in mind. To be 100% clear: your bank account and credit card information NEVER even touches our servers. It goes straight to Stripe and we can never even   get it once you send it. Everything’s token based from then on. “Transfer $XXX.XX to this user ID’s bank” is all we can do.

Second,  yup, we’re experimenting with some escrow timing. The thinking, at this stage, is preventing any shenanigans by requiring a little social saturation on any posts before payouts happen. After a little thought, 5 days is what we came up with. No clue if it’s the right number, or if it even matters, but we’ll find out.

Last, while we’ll release money to your account, it’s 100% up to your bank to move that money into your account. All we can really do is tell your bank, “Put this much money into this account”, but generally this can take anywhere from a little time to a lot. No real consistency here I’m afraid.

Another thing to keep in mind is when a payment heads off of escrow. Ever hear the expression “bankers hours”? Yeah, 10am to 2pm Monday through Friday.  The lucky bastards. What this means for you though is that if your payment comes out of escrow at 4pm on a Friday then your bank won’t even know about it until Monday morning and THEN your banks normal processing time kicks in.

So, yeah, it gets a little complicated. But money’s working like magic, and it’s all secure, so whatever, amirite?

  Oh. One more thing. You technically don’t have to create a payment account until you’re participating in campaigns and VITY will prompt you when that time comes. We’ve tried to make it as easy and simple as possible but, as usual, if you have any suggestions we’re all ears.