How can I send money to users (much like how Patreon sends money to their creators)?<p>Payment gateways don't seem to cater to this - except Stripe which only supports US debit cards.
It really depends on who you are sending money to. Assuming your sending to people with bank accounts a remittance service would work, like transfer-to (recently renamed Thunes) [1] and EMQ (sea only) [4]. There are several services like this, and its how mobile wallets and remittance agents (electronic ones) send cash. You may need several to provide maximum coverage if operating globally.<p>Each country also has their own remittance providers [2] so if you are serving a specific country it would be worth digging to find out who has the best APIs. Mastercard has a service [3] that supports 80 countries but your recipients require a card. Note if your recipient is a business with an EDC machine there is a nifty way to send them cash using MC VCNs (what some global hotel booking sites use).<p>Most remittance providers now send to wallets in addition to bank accounts, which can be used to send cash to non-banked users. Though in practice this could be a pain for them and coverage is limited and the mobile wallets vary in quality and KYC restrictions.<p>1. <a href="https://www.thunes.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thunes.com/</a><p>2. Only use licensed ones! Spotted this one operating in us: <a href="https://www.dwolla.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dwolla.com/</a><p>3. <a href="https://developer.mastercard.com/product/mastercard-send" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mastercard.com/product/mastercard-send</a><p>4. <a href="https://www.emq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.emq.com/</a>
If it's something like refunds, the common approach is to have some ewallet with credits and track how much you owe them.<p>There's a popular mobile game show here that does that. Once you win $50 or some treshhold, they let you cash out, which is handled through a manual process. It's tedious but it meets anti-money laundering and gambling regulations.
Actually, how to send money to end users at scale is a terrific problem. Scenario is something like you run a federated "micro-work" site and you want to compensate ~1M. Ideally, what we want is something like Square Cash for small business with an API.