As I understand Balanced Payments, it's for the other side of the transaction: Stripe is about people giving you money, but Balanced Payments is for sending others money (where you do a straight ACH deposit). (As opposed to paying them via Stripe, or PayPal, etc)

That's exactly right, but we do offer credit card processing as well. Our processing and payouts functionalities can be coupled or used separately. Check out the docs if you've got more questions: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api

I believe you can send money to someone using Stripe Connect, but that would require them setting up a separate Stripe account.