PHP question

Hi everyone, Im developing a large site at the moment in php, and one of the requrements are that users can depost money from their bank accounts (aswell as paypal etc, which is easy enuff to set up) into their acocunt on the site, and also withdraw from their accounts on the site back into their bank account.

Anyone have any idea how to go about this?

Thanks in advance

Tom

 

Is it absolutely vital that you let your users do this? Personally I wouldn't recommend you even approach this unless you have insurance to cover yourself.

 

Yea, its vital to the site that we do this.

 

Alright, but I would recommend you get insurance if you haven't already, otherwise you're playing with fire. Unfortunately I'm not sure how you would actually code a system like this that would allow you to transfer money into a bank account.

Maybe you should contact a few bank firms to see how they would accept incoming transactions like this, they could also probably give you more advice on the legalities of it.

 

Basically your PHP system would break up the pooled balance which resides in a real bank account to all the users individually upon verifiable and successful deposit/withdraw transfers. The service provider you use to make the transfers should notify you of successful/failed transfers be it email or online logs of some sort. You could automate the process of reading these to update user balances without administrative work.

 

I believe that the "standard" for financial information transfer from client to bank (as opposed to bank to bank) is OFX (in North America, at least).

I'd look into that: I'm 99% sure that that is what QuickBooks uses and possibly even Quicken.

Note that even then, it probably won't let you help a user transfer money into your site, it will only allow your site to verify that a transfer has taken place.