Pin Payments here. This is obviously some great information from our friends at Braintree on traditional banking relationships. At Pin Payments, we actually introduced some new ways of doing things which are different than a traditional aggregated merchant account (like Stripe) or a traditional sponsored merchant account (like Braintree). Pin Payments is currently unique (as far as we know). We onboard merchants instantly for local and foreign currency and we do not handle the money (Perpetual, our custodian, does). We do not operate an aggregated merchant account, each dev/customer is actually represented individually with each banking partner. We actually abstract the bank from the relationship, so we can provide a redundant banking model. We also have SLA's with our banking partners to ensure as-close-to-immediate on-boarding as we can right now (aiming for realtime of course). It's taken us around 18 months to get this model up-and-running in Australia. We think this is pretty awesome for Aussie devs and we also think it will scale well beyond Australia (where the financial regulations are obviously amongst the strictest in the world). Just sayin'
It's supposed to mean that the API responds with JSON data (as opposed to, say, XML). "REST" here just means we use standard URL patterns and rely on HTTP verbs (e.g. GET), to get stuff done.