[AMA] I am the CEO of DiviPay. Ask me anything!

Hi there,

My name is Daniel and I'm the CEO of DiviPay.

DiviPay lets you instantly create virtual cards that keep you in control of your money. DiviPay virtual cards are powered by Mastercard and can be used to protect yourself from online fraud, stop unwanted subscription fees and spend abroad without paying any transaction fees.

A lot of our users have originated from Illumination's post: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/329572 so we thought it would be helpful to open up a direct line of communication with you all.

Also, if you're interested, Illumination interviewed us about some of the technical aspects of the business on his blog:

https://www.thebulgingwallet.com/home/2018/3/28/interview-wi…

AMA

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    • Hi, you currently can't set custom billing addresses on a DiviPay card, however we are working to provide this functionality. If shopping at a merchant that required billing address please use DiviPay address, 50 Bridge Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000

      • It would be fantastic if you could do that, do you know of any cards that currently do this?

        • I haven't heard of anyone to date. We are looking to be one of the first companies to build a robust range of controls and logic into virtual cards.

        • @divipay:

          Why? Retailers can't verify billing addresses associated with Australian debit/credit cards, unlike in other countries.

        • @Comfortably Numb: I think that's why @SimpleRoger wants the feature so when purchasing from an overseas provider that will do this kind of check they Will receive the relevant information @SimpleRoger chooses to set up.

  • Wow I have been waiting for this for ages. I showed a bunch of friends privacy.com but sucked it was us only

    • Great, please let me know if you have any feedback so we can build a better product.

  • Hey Guys, How can you log into the browser extension when you signed up with Google? There is no option to login with google on the browser extension.

    • Hi, sorry for the inconvenience here. To be honest we haven't actually built browser extension login via Google yet. We launched the extension as an MVP to guage interest and get early feedback on the functionality. We will be looking to build additional support and Google login for the browser plugin shortly.

  • This isn't a question, but clicking the signup button on your home page does nothing, i have to go to login then signup. Tried on both desktop and phone.

    • Hi, Thanks for pointing this out. We have seen some ad blockers cause problems with our signup buttons. To help us better diagnose this issue it would be great if you could let us know what browser you are using.

      • Ah, it's probably due to adblockers, but i tried on my mac and it still works with a adblocker. However, samsung internet with the adblock plugin and mozilla firefox on win 10 with adblock plus doesn't work. Awesome potential though. The experience seems to be very appealing to use and simple. Maybe start making an android app? And possible extra security features such as a SMS every time you want to log on as a option. Just keep working on it and i'm sure it'll be popular in the future!

        • And possible extra security features such as a SMS every time you want to log on as a option.

          They have this functionality already and I already gave them negative feedback on it. Oops.

        • Haha, how's your experience with it?

        • @steven231: It's been fine. The negative feedback is not because it sucks.

          I felt that there were better alternatives; namely Google/Microsoft Authenticator.

          Pros over SMS:

          • Can be used overseas (currently, the registered mobile number has to be Australian. What if you're overseas with a carrier with no roaming?)
          • Does not rely on having reception, or even data/WiFi

          Can't think of any cons. I assume it might be harder to set up from DiviPay's end.

        • +2

          @illumination: V2.0 will deliver this soliution! stay tuned, comming soon.

  • I will definitely try using this service. Seems very interesting.

    • Thanks, let me know if you have any feedback or feature suggestions.

  • Your service has been down since last night…Is this a production issue or have you got a daily limit on payments?

    • Yea I've been trying to make a payment all morning. There was a maintenance banner at some point, but it's gone now.

    • Hi Sorry for the inconvenience. We do have a daily payment limit imposed on us by our card issuing partner. This is something that we are looking to permanently solve in the very near term. We have been experiencing a rate of growth and larger payments that we did not adequately account for. This limit generally resets around midday each day. Again im sorry for the inconvenience, it is as frustrating for the team here as it is for our customers. Thanks for your patience!

      • Ah, so that would be why the card I just made gives a 'withdrawal limit exceeded' error?
        I'll try again after lunch.

  • +1

    How can you honestly say on the front page of your website that you "take [our] privacy very seriously" when you sell our personal information to third-parties for advertising to us?

    "We may also sell or trade your de identified Personal Information to third parties in order to facilitate direct marketing by that third party." - https://divipay.com/privacy/

    • Hi, Thanks for pointing this out. I will admit there does seem to be an oversight in the drafting of this Privacy Policy, the intention was always just to give our business flexibility to potentially share data in the future only if it would significantly enhance your experience with the product. We will review the policy and how we can accomplish this.

      • Thanks, I look forward to reviewing the revised policy. I really want to use your service, I've been looking for a local version of privacy.com precisely because I want to get out of the system of my personal information being bought and sold by hundreds of companies all without my knowledge.

        If I may ask a second question, surely there has to be a price-point between "free" and $144 per year. Can we have a $60 per year level which just includes the advanced card security controls? I don't need another bank account or free shipping insurance, I just want to be able to use merchant-locked cards so when they are inevitably breached I don't need to worry about the card number being re-used elsewhere.

    • When I saw that DiviPay were having issues I thought I'd follow up on this and they have indeed updated their "privacy" policy to the following:

      "We may also sell or trade your de identified Personal Information to third parties in order to facilitate direct marketing by that third party. You may request us to stop facilitating the direct marketing of your Personal Information at any time by using the contact details set out at the end of this Privacy Policy."

      So they're still planning on selling your personal information to whoever pays enough, unless you specifically ask them not to, but with no way for you to verify that they have indeed stop selling your information.

  • +1

    what is your salary

  • DiviPay looks interesting but would need AMEX or Paypal as funding options to make it worthwhile for me.

    • Hi, we are definitely looking at those options, however at this stage they are proving too costly to implement. I would be interested to understand why not having those funding options make it a deal breaker for you. Thanks.

      • Can I also add to this conversation, I'm a small business owner for an IT company. Amex funding or at least Paypal would give us a lot of benefits, one for being able to have lots of points from the transaction and also flexibility when paying suppliers that only accept Mastercard / Visa. Huge benefit!

        And yes, deal breaker for me. I just signed up but havent used it and may not use it until other funding options are provided. Simply.. for the purpose I mentioned before.

      • Funding via Amex or Paypal (from Amex) would allow me to indirectly pay anything with the Amex. And yes its for points.

  • Good to hear about the 0 balance auto top-up options that are being worked on. A few questions if this AMA is still going, otherwise I'll just email them in. Sorry for the length i kind of saved them up.

    1) How would your service support the the use of automated financial tracking/budgeting solutions such as MoneyBrillant, Pocketbook etc.?
    2) Can multiple user accounts be created for your service to allow read only or change access for multiple users trusted users?
    3) Is your service looking to other social identity providers?
    4) Does your service support the direct use of Multi-factor Factor Authentication (MFA)? e.g. Yubikey, software authenticators such as google, lastpass, duo etc.
    5) Have you heard of Cloud Native Computing Foundation? (https://www.cncf.io) Have you registered any projects with them? :)

  • Can you please get this working with Apple Pay? Would be awesome to use this in store too.

    • +1

      Thanks, this is at the top of our priorities, however requires some lengthy integrations. We hope to launch in the next few months

      • Thanks, that’s Great news. Thanks for bringing great value virtual credit cards to Australia too!

        • Google pay over apple pay any day.

          Google pay, available to all makes, apple pay only available to apple.

  • Hi Daniel,

    If the merchant I am paying accepts card payments over the phone (so I read out the card details to them over the phone and they punch the numbers into their terminal), would a DiviPay virtual card work in this scenario?
    If you're wondering, my aim is to buy multiple $100 Only1 VISA cards, load 10 of them into a single $1000 VCC, then give the details of this single VCC to the merchant to process, then repeat the process ~12-13 times (to pay a ~$13,000 bill).

    Is this a viable solution for DiviPay?

    Cheers and thanks again for this AMA :)

    • +1

      MathNerd, I've asked them this question and the answer is yes this would work.

      Their main issue these days seems to be their payment limit!!

      • Thanks mate, much appreciated :) Have you ever loaded up a card to its maximum $1000 limit?

        • HI, yes this is possible. You may want to do a small test payment with the merchant first to ensure it works, however a number of our customers have transacted with this type of payment. As illumination points out we are currently having issues with our daily payment limit which may effect some of yoiur $1,000 payments. Many customers have loaded, and subsequently spent the $1,000 limit.

        • @divipay:
          Thanks Daniel, fingers crossed it all works out :)

        • +1

          @divipay: If that is the case,our user interface should show something to indicate it.We do not want to be flagged on a shopping website by using a to-be-declined card several times.

        • @Neoika: Thanks for this suggestion, we will implement something over the next 24 hours that flags to users when our payment limit has been hit. As mentioned we are also working to resolve this issue permanently.

        • @divipay: So that was 3 days ago and I just got declined on a payment, there was not flag in your webpage?

  • What is Divipay's source of income despite your premium service. Is there a transaction fee of some sort?

  • +2

    I tried your card at 2 places and they both declined.

    Spell and Gypsy and Auguste the label. Not sure why? Tried multiple times.

    I have loaded up multiple prepaid visa cards on the account and you cannot put money back in them.

    The first one said card declined and the 2nd one said insufficient funds.

    I have $583 sitting on the Divipay card…

    What is the recourse here???

    • +1

      Same here.I made an ASOS purchase and was declined by using this virtual card.

      • Hi Sorry for the inconvenience. We do have a daily payment limit imposed on us by our card issuing partner. This is something that we are looking to permanently solve in the very near term. We have been experiencing a rate of growth and larger payments that we did not adequately account for. This limit generally resets around midday each day. Again im sorry for the inconvenience, it is as frustrating for the team here as it is for our customers. Thanks for your patience!

        You can always refund your DiviPay cards back to your original funding source at any time but if you are able to wait until tomorrow around midday you will be able to successfuly make your purchases.

  • Is there a list of websites/services that will not accept your cards?

    I was initially using your service to buy bitcoin on coinbase, it worked for the first transaction of $1000, then after that coinbase kept saying some general error and customer support was never very helpful.

    I am currently trying to buy from JDbuy and it keeps giving me an insufficient balance error. Also on chat with there customer support now.

    • no point, its the virtual card.

      • The point would be saving time on our end.

        Yes, i understand that its not DiviPay that the sites are not compatible with, its virtual credit cards, but there is no information on these restrictions on merchant websites generally.

        • Yes. I meant no point being on chat as its at Divipay's end and not JDBuy.

    • Hi, we do not have a list of merchants that don't accept the cards. This list would be very small. A lot of the issues that are curently happening are a result of our systems. We have a daily payment limit imposed on us by our card issuing partner. When we hit that limit transations will decline. We are working hard to permanently fix this issue. Our limit generally resets around midday each day. I can confirm that CoinBase no longer accepts our card. This was part of much larger shift Coinbase made recently to no longer accept credit cards on their platform.

      • You should have highlighted that there is a set daily limit and not left it to the consumer to get a shock.

        What is your daily limit? How can I be assured that I will be able to spend my money in 1 hit without declining??

        I intend to spend it around 10am today.

        Edit - just read Above i need to wait till midday to spend my money.
        This is poor form mate!

        • Hi mate, i understand your frustration, it is as frustrating for the team here at DiviPay as it for our customers. I apologise for the inconvenience, ultimately it is a poor lack of planning on my behalf. The limit was never meant to effect our customers however with some unexpected growth we were unable to keep up with the demand. As mentioned we are working to permanently fix this issue. Thanks for your patience.

        • @divipay:

          Cheers appreciate it.
          To confirm, will i be able to use my balance in total after midday today? $586

          Also, are you able to receive messages? I cant see the option when i click on your name.

        • @Elektrikrevamp: Can you please send me an email at [email protected] and i will message you as soon the limit resets.

        • @divipay:

          Sent Daniel.
          Thanks for your help

  • Haven't been able to proceed with setting up my funding card due to only 1 test charge being applied. Now I've been told to submit my license to prove my identity. i've mentioned that this seems excessive, to have to give out a primary form of ID is a bit risky from my side. No word back yet?

    • I actually think the amount of KYC checks for DiviPay is on the light side.

      Try opening any other sort of financial service, especially one for a crypto exchange.

  • More of a technical question… I emailed support a few weeks ago regarding logging into the chrome app when I signed up with my Google account - there is no option to login to the chrome app using my google account. When I go to the "Security" section, the page is blank and there is no option to add a password.

    • Hi, sorry for the inconvenience here. To be honest we haven't actually built browser extension login via Google yet. We launched the extension as an MVP to guage interest and get early feedback on the functionality. We will be looking to build additional support and Google login for the browser plugin shortly.

      • Hi Daniel

        Could you please advise as per my email

  • Now I'm surprised this doesn't seem to have been asked.

    You write: "We never store your card details."

    Yet my card is now shown under "Funding Cards".

    Please explain?

    Also: how do I delete my card from the "Funding Cards"?

    Edit: glad to see you have 2-factor authentication. Any plans to allow the use of Google Authenticator instead of SMS? Cheaper for you and more convenient when I'm travelling and use a different SIM…

    • Hi, Thanks for the question. I agree that maybe our terminology here is a little misleading. We 100% do not store your card details. When you add your funding source that information is stored securely with our third party banking provider who are PCI-DSS Level 1 certified. We store a token that represents your card details and the last 4 digits. In the instance that we need to charge your card we provide the token to our provider to make the transaction against your card. If you would like your funding card removed we currently have to do this manually. Feel free to send us an email at [email protected] and we will action it for you.

      Google Authenticator is in the pipeline and will be enabled shortly.

      • Thanks for the quick reply.

        So just to confirm my understanding: going via that token means that if someone hacks you they can not get my card details. I assume the token is linked to your business, so no one else can use it to draw funds from my card?

        That leaves as the scariest scenario I can come up with at the moment: someone hacks you, issues lots of virtual cards drawing from all the different tokens you have and happily spends the money before you notice something went wrong. I presume your customers get their money back via chargebacks in that case, leaving you a fair bit out of pocket. Do you have nightmares about this scenario?

        If for that reason or any other Divipay goes belly up, what happens to the funds that were stored on your virtual cards at that time?

  • Do payments to Divipay count as a cash advance? If anyone wants to comment, even if you're not Daniel, let me know

  • To verify my CC S you took two small debits, amounting to $3. What happens to the debits, are they returned to my CC or added to the virtual card.

    • They're returned to your credit card

  • -1

    Just used your service and you charged 11c on a $10.24au conversion from $4 US. Cheaper than PP I guess.

    • +1

      Not sure why someone negged you, I believe you made a valid point that although Divipay does not add their own exchange fees they use the Mastercard rates which seem to be nearly 1% away from true mid market rates.

      Something's not right with your numbers though. US$4 won't convert to AUD10, hopefully not ever ;-)

      • +1

        My apologies purchased two cables so actually $8 US.

  • Can I add a virtual card into google pay?

    • Not yet but they're working on it

      • Awesome! The perfect way to say screw you to the banks that make their own tap to pay options instead of allowing us to use others, like citibank and combank.

        • Haha. I actually have wondered why the banks want to make their own way… more control? More revenue I'm guessing?

  • Since you're involved with banking and how cards and transactions works, how can purchases instantly take money into your account, but refunds can sometimes take days?

    • Your purchase is never instant with credit cards. It is pending for 1-2days before being posted to your account.

  • Anyone looked into paying the ATO with it?

    Got a bill to pay. My cc's will no longer give out points for ato payments.

    @ 20000 ~ x earn rate of cc at 0.15% surcharge, I see this as a no brainer for 15k points for a tax refundable $30 fee?

    Can anyone spot any problems, or would loading this amount on Divipay be an issue? or would the daily transfer limit block me?

    • 0.4% surcharge for this card.

      • ta. so even then $80 for 15000 points. Still sounds good?

    • Underlord probably pointed out the biggest issue. Doesn't mean it's not possible, but you've have to break it up into multiple transactions and it'll take longer.

      • Yup, will trial it and let you guys know how this goes.

  • +1

    So.. can't pay anything with Divipay at the moment.. is this cause for more concern? I have an auto payment coming out end of the week for car insurance… should I be changing cards or something here to avoid fee's.

    • +1

      They just sent an email out letting people know they're having problems with their backend provider and they expect the service will be down for the next 7 days. Here is a link to Daniel's e-mail.

  • Here is Daniel's e-mail for anyone that may have missed it.

    Hi Kyle-K,

    Our virtual card partner is experiencing a temporary outage with their card issuing platform. Unfortunately this means that we need to put DiviPay on pause whilst they address these issues.

    We expect to be live again in the next 7 days.

    Please rest assured that all funds are safe. If you want to refund your available balance, simply close your virtual card and the refund will be processed within 5 business days.

    What does this mean for me?

    • You will not be able to create new virtual cards
    • You will not be able to add funds to or make payments from existing virtual cards
    • You can refund any available funds from DiviPay by closing your virtual card

    There's no question that this is completely inconvenient for you. We are incredibly disappointed that we have hit this speed bump. The engineering team and I are working closely with our virtual card partner to assist them in any way we can.

    We will email you as soon as we are live again but if you have any questions in the meantime please live chat with us or send me an email me directly at [email protected].

    Best regards, Daniel and the DiviPay team

    • brutal… i've just made a new card the other day and needing to spend now..
      not ideal….

  • Bahahahah their experimenting with prices yet their service is completely out without warning for an estimated 7 days but they really have no clue.

    The investment of nightmares.

  • Anyone heard from them yet?

    • Hi, we will be sending out a status update email tomorrow. As of right now 14:39 30/4/18 the platform is still temporarily paused. We apologies and once again thank you for your patience.

  • +3

    Unfortunately DiviPay will need to remain on pause as our virtual card partner’s temporary outage continues. We are waiting for an update from our partner and are likely to receive one in the next few days. We will email you with any new information as soon as it becomes available.

    We remain confident that DiviPay can return with our current provider. However, we have relationships with a number of other card issuers that we can partner with. In summary, DiviPay is not going anywhere.

    Your funds remain safe and if you want to refund your available balance, simply close your virtual card and the refund will be processed within 5 business days.

    What does this mean for me?
    * You will still not be able to create new virtual cards
    * You will still not be able to add funds to or make payments from existing virtual cards
    * You can still refund any available funds from DiviPay by closing your virtual card

    Again we apologise for the inconvenience and we are continuing to work closely with our virtual card partner to assist them in any way we can. We are doing everything within our power to get the platform back up and running.

    We will email you as soon as we are live again but if you have any questions in the meantime please live chat with us or send me an email directly at [email protected].

    Best regards,

    Daniel and the DiviPay team

  • So let me get this straight you are a MasterCard but basically generate a unique card number for every transaction making the transaction essentially contain a random virtual card so others cannot track you. Kind of like a bitcoin ledger kind of.

    Am I correct?

  • What's happening with DP?

    • The banking/card issuing institution they are using is having issues at the moment

      https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/5877624/redir First email
      https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/5903182/redir Second email

    • Hi, We are currently undergoing a migration to a new card issuing partner. During this time (approx 3 months) existing DiviPay virtual cards will not work for online transactions. However we are excited to announce that with this upgrade we will be able to deliver a product that is infinitely better than the last and launch a number of new and highly requested features. Please let me know if you have any questions.

  • I guess this thread was ill timed. All the momentum it might have generated would have more than been killed by the extended outage…

    • Hi, I'm really sorry we have had to pause our service for the time being whilst we migrate our issuing to a new partner. As you can imagine it is extremely frustrating for the entire team here at DiviPay that we have to patiently wait before we can continue growing the service. We hope that with our many product upgrades and new features that will be included in the relaunch that the Ozbargain community use the product again.

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