As someone who have worked a lot for banks and actually already done some of this work let me offer a viewpoint.
Last year my company managed to get a large Danish bank to implement tracking into their netbank. This is no small accomplishment, which anyone knowing just a little bit about how the IT departments in the banking industry normally works, the systems they work on are arcane.
It took us 18 months from getting the bank to like the idea into actually getting it launched.
The results have been nothing but extraordinary everyone loves it.
The reason they love it is because it's automatic. They get insights into their economy that they could not previously get. There is something quite amazing about seeing your spendings categorized for the first time without you having to do anything.
The banks have a unique identifier on each transaction that can be measured up against a category list. This is something Mint and Wesabe can't do because you can't export that unique identifer from the banks.
The big advantage of BankSimple and why I think it's going to be huge is because they don't have a legacy system to deal with.
In other words BankSimple can potentially be anything you could ever dream of a bank being, because BankSimple will be able to cross reference the data in order to provide not just cost reduction but service improvement.
The banking industry are just waiting to be disrupted by someone like BS. There are thousands of ways to create a better banking experience. BS is a good first stab at it IMHO.
I've said this here before, but when I worked at a big bank all the visionaries weren't worried about other banks, they were worried about Google and Ebay. The core business of a bank is built on hardware and software. They knew that a bank built on distributed systems instead of mainframes could beat the big banks on features and cost. It'll be interesting to see if BankSimple can scale up fast enough to compete or if it'll attract the attention of someone with even deeper pockets who can catch up by simply outspending them.
One of the reasons I'm so eagerly waiting for SEPA (Single European Payment Area) to really come into force. Now banks compete mostly on country level, but when you can easily switch banks inside EU, there is bound to be some competition and innovation.
In Finland we're kind of suffering from being pioneers. Finnish banks deployed nice (for the time) web banking interfaces more than a decade ago. But then, having made the big investments in them and seeing little competition, innovation stopped.
Nordea rolled out a slightly improved web interface a couple of years ago, and ever since then their login page has had the message "the new banking interface is coming to our business customers soon"...
Does anybody actually think this way? As in, do people actually go to their bank's website because they'd like to spend money and want to find out how much they have to spend?
Described this way, this just seems like a tool to facilitate a fundamentally unhealthy way to think about your money. If you're thinking in terms of "How much can I spend today", you've already lost. (Unless, of course, you're 23, in which case your entire goal in life should be to sock away enough money that you never need to ask that question again in relation to food/rent/etc.)
I like the transaction searching capabilities shown in the demo, but I was hoping to see more info on how to do actual "banking" tasks. Can I initiate a wire transfer from an internet cafe in Laos? Can people send a check to an address in the US that automatically gets deposited in my account? That sort of thing. When these guys came on the scene, I got the impression that that was the kind of thing they'd be doing better than other banks. Frankly, sorting my past transactions just isn't a problem I desperately need to have solved.
This is the myopia of the affluent. Many people, not just 23 year olds, do live paycheck to paycheck, and need to know on any given day how much they can spend without overdrawing. The answer to this question is hard to find from most banks, who make money from fees and have an interest in their poorer customers overdrawing their accounts by a few bucks so they can charge an overdraft fee. This is a problem that, for instance, Elizabeth Warren has talked about a lot.
Banksimple is trying to build a bank that doesn't suck, and banks suck for a lot of reasons. These features will be helpful to anyone who is living on a low income, either due to misfortune or choice.
Here is where I hope/pray/etc BankSimple is going:
I want a personal financial API for myself. If you want to bill me for something, you don't write down a bunch of text on a piece of paper, stick that inside of another piece of paper, and then pay somebody to put it through a slot in my door (along with all of the coupon mailers, prepaid credit card offers, and VOTE FOR ME! envelopes that I get), you call up blhack's financial API and request a payment from it.
When this happens, I get an email, or an SMS, or whatever else telling me:
"USBank has requested a payment of $347 from you. They have requested payment by October 20th, 2011 -- Note: Car Payment"
or
"City of Tempe has requested a payment of $60 from you. They have requested payment by October 8th, 2011 -- Note: Water Bill"
etc. etc.
I can log into BankSimple and approve these payment requests (just like paypal, except [hopefully] BankSimple makes it affordable for my city, or my auto loan provider to do use).
It's an accountant for me. Except it's in one place, and it doesn't cost anything. There are companies that have tried this, and failed miserably, mostly because they appear to lack the technical expertise that something like BankSimple is bringing to the table.
The banking system, right now, is a disaster. The things I'm describing are all possible right now, but they're an enormous pain in the ass to use.
I've had exactly this idea! It's sort of like a credit card, except a "swipe" just gives the merchant an end-point to send bills to. You still have to authorize each bill, but your bank could automatically pay any bills that you haven't contested by their due date (or whatever policy you prefer).
I am TERRIBLE at paying bills on time, even though I always have the money to pay them. There's way too much diligence required.
So, what you're talking about to the best of my understanding is the kind of billing systems that are popular outside of America but pretty underused here. Our CEO and CFO are both from outside the US, and our CEO in particular really prefers to pay his bills that way.
It's definitely something we'll get to, but it's also not something that will be totally unique to us; like you said, it's possible today, just clunky. This technology is called "electronic bill presentment", if you're curious.
Here in Norway, anyone asking for a recurring payment will offer either invoice by e-mail or a more automated eFaktura (electronic invoice).
After the first payment to a party offering eFaktura, you'll get the option in your online bank service to start an eFaktura agreement with this company. Once you've done that, the invoices will be sent and paid for automatically (or when you choose).
This system was created by a company jointly owned by all the banks in Norway and is thus supported by all of them.
I more or less get this functionality using Canada Post's ePost integration with my bank's web site, though the implementation could be a lot smoother.
I don't get a paper tax bill from the City, I get a notification by email and when I log in and view the message there is a 'Pay bill' link right next to it. Would be nice if it defaulted to as late as possible.
I don't know what it takes to sign up as a provider, but relatively few of the companies I regularly pay bills to (and don't use a pre-authorized payment) offer this solution.
The problem would be getting all the people who want your money to use this specific new "API" thing. In a banking system where even wire transfers are considered fancy high tech, I wouldn't hold my breath.
US consumer banking is archaic and can't be fixed with just another bank. The whole process is broken and it requires an industry change.
I applaud BankSimple for what they are doing but in the big picture it doesn't solve the major problems.
My biggest gripes with the banks:
- Can't wire money to someone else without going into the bank and paying ridiculous fees (Last time I checked, $25 for domestic, $45 for international). INGDirect attempts to make this better but the receiver still needs to have an email address and go through a procedure to receive the money. It's also slow, average is 2-3 days.
- It's easier and cheaper for me to use checks. It costs me nothing to deposit it but I have to pay a fee to receive a wire transfer. Wires have a lot fever errors than checks and a wire of over $5k doesn't have to be put on hold because the bank has to verify a check. The banks punish you for using wires instead of checks.
- When you go online and use bill pay the bank will pay a 3rd party to print and mail a check!! How is this electronic payment. (This does not apply to large firms like the phone company which will receive the payment electronically but small business can't utilize this!)
- Why no IBAN? Swift requires intermediary banks which charge a fee on your international wire.
- No chips on debpit/credit cards. In Europe most banks issue cards with chips on them. This would eliminate the risk of getting skimmed if only the US would also start using chips instead of the magnetic stripe.
I just don't understand why the banks do this. Someone enlighten me.
A lot of the banks mark up their wire transfer fees. We won't. Domestic US transfers with us (ACH) will be free. International transfers (SWIFT) cost us ~$15, and we'll pass that on to our customers with no mark-up.
We're trying to make electronic payments easier than checks with some UI innovations that today's demo didn't fully address. We want people to move money electronically, not with paper checks.
Bill pay in the US is a mess. We're going to try to have a great bill presentment system to help address this.
A lot of the banking world in the US is baffling to us, too. that's why we're doing what we're doing. We won't be able to fix everything overnight, and there's lots that's out of our control at the moment. But over time, we'll chip away at the problems and try to make banking better.
Agreed. It's frustrating that I can pay money to larger companies online (phone, cable, internet, etc.) but I can't send money to another person. Clearly it's technically possible, but the banks don't want to enable this for normal people, so North American's are stuck mailing IOUs (cheques) around.
Some questions I never bothered to actually ask of my current banking system probably because I've known people that had accounts with them and have seen several branch locations but I'd like to ask of BankSimple.
BankSimple is a bank account yes or no? I mean a real certified banking system? Are they required to meet governmental guidelines of official banks?
What guarantee (if any) do I have that my money will be there in the morning? Is there some guarantee that if I go to login to bankSimple tomorrow morning and the domain doesn't resolve emails get bounced etc, would there be any recourse for me? [again, never bothered to ask that of my real bank but I suppose a brick and mortar institution instills more confidence]
Visa, MasterCard, Amex... Is the bankSimple card backed by any of these institutions? Can I walk into to some random QuickStop gas station and pay using your card like I could with my current bank card?
What kind of development and testing infrastructure do you guys utilize? Are you able to roll out updates to limited groups of real users so you can test changes on a small scale before rolling them out to every one? I'm more curious as to this aspect because I attribute to BankSimple more of a website or new software company [which I envision bugs and glitches that get worked out with feedback] rather than a traditional bank [which surprisingly even though I know is capable of making mistakes, I don't really worry about bugs]
Will BankSimple eventually if not at launch do other bank-y things like consumer loans, offer savings bonds, etc?
What about fraud protection? What if some one steals my card and buys a bunch of stuff with it? [Ok, I've asked my bank about this one at least]
* They are not a bank. They are essentially a web frontend for wholesale banks. Thus they are regulated differently.
* You do have the benefit of FDIC insurance, but it's unclear what ability you have to access your funds directly from the wholesale bank, or whether you are limited to BankSimple.
I haven't followed news about BankSimple, and the firs few minutes of the demo I watched didn't help me understand what it is. Is BankSimple an actual bank (with ATM card, routing numbers, etc.)? Or is it a PayPal competitor? Or is it just a front end that interacts with Banks? Going to BankSimple.com, it seems like it's trying to be an actual bank. But the demo on the website made it seem more like a Mint competitor. So, BankSimple is just another bank but with a potentially super-awesome website? So far, I'm not convinced.
Yes, it is an actual bank. With an ATM card (and no fees). You are right the demo on the website didn't hint to that too much, but perusing through the site it becomes a bit clearer.
I also emailed support a while back wondering if it acts as a layer on top of my existing bank, or whether its a replacement: their answer was "its a complete replacement".
From the customer perspective, they're a bank with an improved website and mobile app. They're actually just a front end to their partnering banks (but you don't need to know that as a customer). Essentially they're a bank with the improved interface you might expect from Mint (minus the aggregation).
Search and categorized transactions are cool, but does the categorization require manual tagging? I'm pressed for time in my day, and I am not going to spend more than 5 minutes to look at my bank statements, unless I'm specifically sitting down to budget. My biggest concern with a service like this is the time it's asking from you. So many services designed to "make my life simpler" actually require spending more time than just not using the service at all. For that reason, your mobile app needs to be killer.
I came to say the same thing - Wesabe had a similar concept of "safe to spend" and for me it made it a great app. I was disappointed to see them go under. Bank Simple doesn't appear to bring a whole lot new to the table.
It's a beautifully clean design. I like the simplicity of it.
What I worry about is the security behind the scenes and the sharing of sensitive information between BankSimple and the banks.
And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.
Maybe I missed it in the video, but what I would like to see from any of these types of websites is a consolidated view of multiple accounts and banks. So if I have chequing and savings accounts at 3 different banks, I would like a dashboard of my entire spending and saving. It's easy to lose sight of this when you look at individual bank statements.
Sadly (for me) it also works just like my iPhone App "Payday" does (without the live bank ability) that was released last year and then sank without a trace (albeit partly due to a silly bug).
Being able to earmark money for bills in advance and set yourself saving goals is really cool (and was also the core feature of Payday).
If anyone would like to try these features before the release of Bank Simple you can find it here:
Just beware of a small bug that makes the calculations go off if you choose the last day of the month as Payday. (Yeah. I know. Sadly the talented programmer I worked with has had to move onto other projects. Maybe one day we can fix it. sigh)
Safe-to-spend balance is great but will it be enforced? I currently calculate my safe to spend balance but nothing stops me from over spending. I don't have the willpower. It would be great if the bank simple card will only let me spend my safe-to-spend balance. So if my safe-to-spend balance is $20 and I go to an ATM and try to withdraw $50, it will decline.
That's exactly what we're doing. If you tell us about your savings goals, you can then "lock" the goals that you really don't want to dip into if you're overspending. We'll prevent transactions from going through, in that case. We keep you honest :)
I am excited by the 'how much can I spend' feature and NLP search. And this is the first bank that I would consider moving to. However, my current bank, rather a credit union is absolutely phenomenal in terms of online banking. I have had quite a few different banks accounts in my young life and am very impressed by the level of innovation from a relatively small institution.
My credit union is UW Credit Union. They have recently launched an updated version of their site as well as previously included Mint like features. It is great. I feel as though that as soon as UW Credit Union gets wind of BS, if they haven't already, will incorporate some of what BS is doing.
Banking is definitely an industry ready to be disrupted.
So I'm getting more interested in banking and accounting, largely because a friend and I are starting a business for the first time. When I saw "Accounting for Computer Scientists" on HN (http://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-comput...) it was a revelation to me, because I didn't realize that accounting could be so cleanly modeled as a graph structure.
Ever since then I've been itching to create some git-like software for accounting, where you have a repository of accounts and transactions. I feel like there is so much unexplored territory here in terms of analysis and visualization. For example, I want a way of saying "this insurance bill is for six months of coverage" and then seeing my bi-weekly breakdown of expenses include two weeks worth of that insurance bill. I want to be able to tag expenses as non-discretionary (taxes), periodic (mortgage), or discretionary (latte) as an easy way of understanding my overall cash flow. I want to be able to amortize my vacations over the whole year. etc.
I want to be able to view what my hypothetical cash flow would be if I cut out certain periodic expenses or added others.
A lot of this is probably more complicated than what most people would want to do -- that's why I think the important part is having a standard repository model that's easily programmable.
This is something that people would want. But I have a question about business model choice here, because I'm curious why they chose to become a front-end to various banks in this way.
Why choose to be a middle-man here (with all of the pain/cost of providing customer service, etc.) when they could be an enterprise software vendor or a SaaS provider? Banks don't actually make that much off of depositors, right? I'm not saying they made a bad choice; I wanted to see if anyone could rationalize it for me.
Surely banks (especially smaller regional banks and credit unions) would pay good prices to have this software power their banking websites so that they could care for their customers in a more sophisticated way. Right now my credit union, in the Bay Area, has a functional but very ugly e-banking and bill-pay platform which has clearly been purchased from a third party vendor and customized (checkfree, I think (http://www.checkfreecorp.com/cda/corp/L5.jsp?layoutId=51501&...).
I guess I don't understand where significant revenues will come from in a model like this.
The user experience, from the website, mobile to device to phone calls, will be a big part of people signing up.
There are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with their banks.
If they get enough users to sign up with them, the actual banks on the back end (which will probably be a collection of smaller, unknown, entitities), wield less and less power, cause in theory BS would be able to switch over from one bank to another and the user wouldn't know, or care. This may allow them to force certain banks to provide revenue sharing.
One of the reasons I ditched Mint was because it was 2-3 days laggy due to having to scrape and process the data from my bank. I have yet to find anything that beats simply recording all my expenditures in a spiral notebook and reconciling it with my bank's online account once a day. That, plus "When I get paid, I pay my bills first". How simpler could it be? (Frost Bank in Texas, here)
Nice looking site! Why did you not use any green in the UI? For example the direct deposit of $100 is black and doesn't stand out too much, whereas if it was a nice green I immediately can make a correlation. For the users emotion's, seeing a sea of green transactions could evoke more happiness compared to black. A green background on the "Safe-To-Spend" section seems more intuitive than a red one, perhaps it can turn red as it gets close to a 'danger zone' of spending (Calculated based on their spending habits/frequency).
Lastly, everyone keeps mentioning that categorization is very important, yet categorization isn't that noticeable. I did not notice it until you demoed it. I might have found it on my own fairly easily if I wasn't being demo'd though, so its somewhat unfair to say. Rather than having users create very common categories (food, rent, transportation) make those default and more visible whether it be adding inset icons, or changing position/color of that section.
I had thought that BankSimple was slimming down the traditional banking model and passing the savings (in the form of interest) to customers. I still love that they're tackling Goliaths but they need to be a little clearer on their vision and value proposition.
Banks should be good at doing one thing. Holding my liquid assets. However, history has proven to us that even that is a challenge for banks. Where banks thrive in size, most banks lack in vision. I believe that banks are not software companies, at least not in spirit. Some banks are better at utilizing technology and others are not.
My challenge to BankSimple: prove me wrong.
We have to remember what a bank traditionally is, break that down, and build it from the ground up without the walls that immobilizes it today.
Love the design! While I think there is quite a ways to go, I will most certainly give BankSimple a shot when it is publicly released.
Upon seeing the video though, specifically when he was searching through for the bar that he went to, I started wondering how long it'll take before we can actually see precisely what we paid for at said location rather than having to dig through receipts.
I have no idea when that time will come, but when it does, I'll welcome it with open arms.
[+] [-] ThomPete|14 years ago|reply
Last year my company managed to get a large Danish bank to implement tracking into their netbank. This is no small accomplishment, which anyone knowing just a little bit about how the IT departments in the banking industry normally works, the systems they work on are arcane.
It took us 18 months from getting the bank to like the idea into actually getting it launched.
The results have been nothing but extraordinary everyone loves it.
The reason they love it is because it's automatic. They get insights into their economy that they could not previously get. There is something quite amazing about seeing your spendings categorized for the first time without you having to do anything.
The banks have a unique identifier on each transaction that can be measured up against a category list. This is something Mint and Wesabe can't do because you can't export that unique identifer from the banks.
The big advantage of BankSimple and why I think it's going to be huge is because they don't have a legacy system to deal with.
In other words BankSimple can potentially be anything you could ever dream of a bank being, because BankSimple will be able to cross reference the data in order to provide not just cost reduction but service improvement.
The banking industry are just waiting to be disrupted by someone like BS. There are thousands of ways to create a better banking experience. BS is a good first stab at it IMHO.
[+] [-] jtbigwoo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergie|14 years ago|reply
In Finland we're kind of suffering from being pioneers. Finnish banks deployed nice (for the time) web banking interfaces more than a decade ago. But then, having made the big investments in them and seeing little competition, innovation stopped.
Nordea rolled out a slightly improved web interface a couple of years ago, and ever since then their login page has had the message "the new banking interface is coming to our business customers soon"...
[+] [-] jasonkester|14 years ago|reply
Described this way, this just seems like a tool to facilitate a fundamentally unhealthy way to think about your money. If you're thinking in terms of "How much can I spend today", you've already lost. (Unless, of course, you're 23, in which case your entire goal in life should be to sock away enough money that you never need to ask that question again in relation to food/rent/etc.)
I like the transaction searching capabilities shown in the demo, but I was hoping to see more info on how to do actual "banking" tasks. Can I initiate a wire transfer from an internet cafe in Laos? Can people send a check to an address in the US that automatically gets deposited in my account? That sort of thing. When these guys came on the scene, I got the impression that that was the kind of thing they'd be doing better than other banks. Frankly, sorting my past transactions just isn't a problem I desperately need to have solved.
[+] [-] rquantz|14 years ago|reply
Banksimple is trying to build a bank that doesn't suck, and banks suck for a lot of reasons. These features will be helpful to anyone who is living on a low income, either due to misfortune or choice.
[+] [-] blhack|14 years ago|reply
I want a personal financial API for myself. If you want to bill me for something, you don't write down a bunch of text on a piece of paper, stick that inside of another piece of paper, and then pay somebody to put it through a slot in my door (along with all of the coupon mailers, prepaid credit card offers, and VOTE FOR ME! envelopes that I get), you call up blhack's financial API and request a payment from it.
When this happens, I get an email, or an SMS, or whatever else telling me:
"USBank has requested a payment of $347 from you. They have requested payment by October 20th, 2011 -- Note: Car Payment"
or
"City of Tempe has requested a payment of $60 from you. They have requested payment by October 8th, 2011 -- Note: Water Bill"
etc. etc.
I can log into BankSimple and approve these payment requests (just like paypal, except [hopefully] BankSimple makes it affordable for my city, or my auto loan provider to do use).
It's an accountant for me. Except it's in one place, and it doesn't cost anything. There are companies that have tried this, and failed miserably, mostly because they appear to lack the technical expertise that something like BankSimple is bringing to the table.
The banking system, right now, is a disaster. The things I'm describing are all possible right now, but they're an enormous pain in the ass to use.
BankSimple: if you're not doing this, do it.
[+] [-] haberman|14 years ago|reply
I am TERRIBLE at paying bills on time, even though I always have the money to pay them. There's way too much diligence required.
[+] [-] al3x|14 years ago|reply
So, what you're talking about to the best of my understanding is the kind of billing systems that are popular outside of America but pretty underused here. Our CEO and CFO are both from outside the US, and our CEO in particular really prefers to pay his bills that way.
It's definitely something we'll get to, but it's also not something that will be totally unique to us; like you said, it's possible today, just clunky. This technology is called "electronic bill presentment", if you're curious.
Thanks for your thoughts!
(Oh: an actual API is in the works, too.)
[+] [-] halvsjur|14 years ago|reply
After the first payment to a party offering eFaktura, you'll get the option in your online bank service to start an eFaktura agreement with this company. Once you've done that, the invoices will be sent and paid for automatically (or when you choose).
This system was created by a company jointly owned by all the banks in Norway and is thus supported by all of them.
[+] [-] aquark|14 years ago|reply
I don't get a paper tax bill from the City, I get a notification by email and when I log in and view the message there is a 'Pay bill' link right next to it. Would be nice if it defaulted to as late as possible.
I don't know what it takes to sign up as a provider, but relatively few of the companies I regularly pay bills to (and don't use a pre-authorized payment) offer this solution.
[+] [-] jarek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bruceboughton|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpinkston|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|14 years ago|reply
I applaud BankSimple for what they are doing but in the big picture it doesn't solve the major problems.
My biggest gripes with the banks:
- Can't wire money to someone else without going into the bank and paying ridiculous fees (Last time I checked, $25 for domestic, $45 for international). INGDirect attempts to make this better but the receiver still needs to have an email address and go through a procedure to receive the money. It's also slow, average is 2-3 days.
- It's easier and cheaper for me to use checks. It costs me nothing to deposit it but I have to pay a fee to receive a wire transfer. Wires have a lot fever errors than checks and a wire of over $5k doesn't have to be put on hold because the bank has to verify a check. The banks punish you for using wires instead of checks.
- When you go online and use bill pay the bank will pay a 3rd party to print and mail a check!! How is this electronic payment. (This does not apply to large firms like the phone company which will receive the payment electronically but small business can't utilize this!)
- Why no IBAN? Swift requires intermediary banks which charge a fee on your international wire.
- No chips on debpit/credit cards. In Europe most banks issue cards with chips on them. This would eliminate the risk of getting skimmed if only the US would also start using chips instead of the magnetic stripe.
I just don't understand why the banks do this. Someone enlighten me.
[+] [-] al3x|14 years ago|reply
A lot of the banks mark up their wire transfer fees. We won't. Domestic US transfers with us (ACH) will be free. International transfers (SWIFT) cost us ~$15, and we'll pass that on to our customers with no mark-up.
We're trying to make electronic payments easier than checks with some UI innovations that today's demo didn't fully address. We want people to move money electronically, not with paper checks.
Bill pay in the US is a mess. We're going to try to have a great bill presentment system to help address this.
A lot of the banking world in the US is baffling to us, too. that's why we're doing what we're doing. We won't be able to fix everything overnight, and there's lots that's out of our control at the moment. But over time, we'll chip away at the problems and try to make banking better.
[+] [-] outworlder|14 years ago|reply
Heck, not even the ATM machines are safe and get blown up quite regularly, even with the systems in place that stain the bills.
Perhaps the fix would be to import a few... "bad guys"?
[+] [-] jessriedel|14 years ago|reply
Is this true? That boggles my mind.
[+] [-] xinsight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raphael|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giberson|14 years ago|reply
BankSimple is a bank account yes or no? I mean a real certified banking system? Are they required to meet governmental guidelines of official banks?
What guarantee (if any) do I have that my money will be there in the morning? Is there some guarantee that if I go to login to bankSimple tomorrow morning and the domain doesn't resolve emails get bounced etc, would there be any recourse for me? [again, never bothered to ask that of my real bank but I suppose a brick and mortar institution instills more confidence]
Visa, MasterCard, Amex... Is the bankSimple card backed by any of these institutions? Can I walk into to some random QuickStop gas station and pay using your card like I could with my current bank card?
What kind of development and testing infrastructure do you guys utilize? Are you able to roll out updates to limited groups of real users so you can test changes on a small scale before rolling them out to every one? I'm more curious as to this aspect because I attribute to BankSimple more of a website or new software company [which I envision bugs and glitches that get worked out with feedback] rather than a traditional bank [which surprisingly even though I know is capable of making mistakes, I don't really worry about bugs]
Will BankSimple eventually if not at launch do other bank-y things like consumer loans, offer savings bonds, etc?
What about fraud protection? What if some one steals my card and buys a bunch of stuff with it? [Ok, I've asked my bank about this one at least]
[+] [-] ctkrohn|14 years ago|reply
* They are not a bank. They are essentially a web frontend for wholesale banks. Thus they are regulated differently.
* You do have the benefit of FDIC insurance, but it's unclear what ability you have to access your funds directly from the wholesale bank, or whether you are limited to BankSimple.
[+] [-] maxklein|14 years ago|reply
It seems to have turned into a credit card statement search & visualisation engine.
[+] [-] jimmar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbird24|14 years ago|reply
I also emailed support a while back wondering if it acts as a layer on top of my existing bank, or whether its a replacement: their answer was "its a complete replacement".
[+] [-] detst|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quintinsykes|14 years ago|reply
http://banksimple.com/blog/BankSimple/partners-funding/
[+] [-] sv123|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|14 years ago|reply
Search and categorized transactions are cool, but does the categorization require manual tagging? I'm pressed for time in my day, and I am not going to spend more than 5 minutes to look at my bank statements, unless I'm specifically sitting down to budget. My biggest concern with a service like this is the time it's asking from you. So many services designed to "make my life simpler" actually require spending more time than just not using the service at all. For that reason, your mobile app needs to be killer.
[+] [-] Q6T46nT668w6i3m|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesgagan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreyf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typicalrunt|14 years ago|reply
What I worry about is the security behind the scenes and the sharing of sensitive information between BankSimple and the banks.
And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.
Maybe I missed it in the video, but what I would like to see from any of these types of websites is a consolidated view of multiple accounts and banks. So if I have chequing and savings accounts at 3 different banks, I would like a dashboard of my entire spending and saving. It's easy to lose sight of this when you look at individual bank statements.
[+] [-] sambeau|14 years ago|reply
Sadly (for me) it also works just like my iPhone App "Payday" does (without the live bank ability) that was released last year and then sank without a trace (albeit partly due to a silly bug).
Being able to earmark money for bills in advance and set yourself saving goals is really cool (and was also the core feature of Payday).
If anyone would like to try these features before the release of Bank Simple you can find it here:
http://toccame.com/
and here
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/payday/id351013628
Just beware of a small bug that makes the calculations go off if you choose the last day of the month as Payday. (Yeah. I know. Sadly the talented programmer I worked with has had to move onto other projects. Maybe one day we can fix it. sigh)
[+] [-] mdoerneman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al3x|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janesvilleseo|14 years ago|reply
My credit union is UW Credit Union. They have recently launched an updated version of their site as well as previously included Mint like features. It is great. I feel as though that as soon as UW Credit Union gets wind of BS, if they haven't already, will incorporate some of what BS is doing.
Banking is definitely an industry ready to be disrupted.
[+] [-] haberman|14 years ago|reply
Ever since then I've been itching to create some git-like software for accounting, where you have a repository of accounts and transactions. I feel like there is so much unexplored territory here in terms of analysis and visualization. For example, I want a way of saying "this insurance bill is for six months of coverage" and then seeing my bi-weekly breakdown of expenses include two weeks worth of that insurance bill. I want to be able to tag expenses as non-discretionary (taxes), periodic (mortgage), or discretionary (latte) as an easy way of understanding my overall cash flow. I want to be able to amortize my vacations over the whole year. etc.
I want to be able to view what my hypothetical cash flow would be if I cut out certain periodic expenses or added others.
A lot of this is probably more complicated than what most people would want to do -- that's why I think the important part is having a standard repository model that's easily programmable.
[+] [-] tealtan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dprice1|14 years ago|reply
Why choose to be a middle-man here (with all of the pain/cost of providing customer service, etc.) when they could be an enterprise software vendor or a SaaS provider? Banks don't actually make that much off of depositors, right? I'm not saying they made a bad choice; I wanted to see if anyone could rationalize it for me.
Surely banks (especially smaller regional banks and credit unions) would pay good prices to have this software power their banking websites so that they could care for their customers in a more sophisticated way. Right now my credit union, in the Bay Area, has a functional but very ugly e-banking and bill-pay platform which has clearly been purchased from a third party vendor and customized (checkfree, I think (http://www.checkfreecorp.com/cda/corp/L5.jsp?layoutId=51501&...).
I guess I don't understand where significant revenues will come from in a model like this.
[+] [-] dr_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bostonvaulter2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbill|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowfiend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoshyosh|14 years ago|reply
Lastly, everyone keeps mentioning that categorization is very important, yet categorization isn't that noticeable. I did not notice it until you demoed it. I might have found it on my own fairly easily if I wasn't being demo'd though, so its somewhat unfair to say. Rather than having users create very common categories (food, rent, transportation) make those default and more visible whether it be adding inset icons, or changing position/color of that section.
Great job! :)
[+] [-] joez|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
That's ING Direct's business model. It was hard to beat until the recession started and interest rates crashed, but even now it's pretty great.
[+] [-] simplify|14 years ago|reply
The video states that the "safe to spend" feature calculates recurring bills and such. Is there a way to view and manage these?
[+] [-] avelis|14 years ago|reply
Banks should be good at doing one thing. Holding my liquid assets. However, history has proven to us that even that is a challenge for banks. Where banks thrive in size, most banks lack in vision. I believe that banks are not software companies, at least not in spirit. Some banks are better at utilizing technology and others are not.
My challenge to BankSimple: prove me wrong.
We have to remember what a bank traditionally is, break that down, and build it from the ground up without the walls that immobilizes it today.
[+] [-] Griever|14 years ago|reply
Upon seeing the video though, specifically when he was searching through for the bar that he went to, I started wondering how long it'll take before we can actually see precisely what we paid for at said location rather than having to dig through receipts.
I have no idea when that time will come, but when it does, I'll welcome it with open arms.