WePay, which was founded by two Boston College graduates, Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman, launched its public beta this week after six months in private beta. What they offer is a website that allows users to manage the collecting of payments, from simply getting rent from your roommates to something as large as organizing dues for clubs and fundraisers.
Aberman described the way WePay sees itself when he told me, “We are focused 100% on building an easy-to-use and robust set of tools that provide a killer alternative to PayPal for normal people.”
They know PalPal is the 500 pound gorilla in the market, but they are not trying to compete with PayPal, as he told me: “If you want to sell something, you should use PayPal. If you want to collect money you should use WePay.”
What WePay can do for you is take some of the stress out of tracking people down in person to collect an assortment of cash and checks. Once registered, users can send out bills to whoever they need to collect money from.
You may be asking, “Why use this service instead of PayPal?” Here is why: WePay allows you to set up multiple accounts for collecting money from different groups of people. This way your collections aren’t all cluttered in one account if you need to collect money from more then one group of people. PayPal lumps it all together.
Another feature of WePay that is very distinctive is the way you can use the money once it is collected. Not only can you have the money deposited into one account for someone to use, WePay also offers a few other convenient alternatives. You can have a Visa prepaid card issued with the money collected, have WePay issue a check for you, or use electronic transfers to move the money into an account.
Like myself, I am sure most of you are always wary of putting your credit card, and depositing money anywhere online. But WePay is no scam, they create an FDIC-insured account for each other its customers. If that isn’t enough to convince you, maybe the fact that they have investors like Max Levchin (founder of PayPal) and Eric Dunn (former CFO and CTO of Intuit) will.
As of now WePay does have a mobile application, but they are actively working to improve the product now. This service could really become even more valuable with a strong mobile presence because mobile payments systems have not truly come into their own yet.
WePay was started a year after Aberman and Clerico graduated college. They were raising money from YCombinator, a venture capital firm that that funds early stage tech startups. YCombinator had been based in both Cambridge and Mountain View California, but a few years ago moved to only Silicon Valley.
Aberman said he thought “Boston suffered a major loss when that happened.”
Aberman told me he and Clerico moved out to Silicon Valley when working with YCombinator, “which requires all of it’s portfolio companies to move out to Silicon Valley for a few months.” Once they started raising money in there they stayed, which is where they are based now.
What do you think of WePay’s unique service? It is a service that appears that it can help make one part of your life less hectic. GIve it a try and let us know what you think of it.
