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Echoing what many others on this thread have said - FinTech isn't just hard, it's insanely fucking hard. The technology piece is truly the easy part. Build the

Echoing what many others on this thread have said - FinTech isn't just hard, it's insanely fucking hard. The technology piece is truly the easy part. Build the app, design a nice interface, and so on. Then you have to deal with the banks, and yes, you absolutely must deal with the banks. There is simply no way around it. Anything having to do with money is heavily regulated and for good reason. The first rule of creating a product that involves money is that people will look for ways to exploit it (read: fraud). There are many great FinTech startups out there right now wanting to do great things and the simple truth is that it is orders of magnitude harder than just about anything else. Barring, maybe, sending people to Mars or disrupting the car industry. :)

mianos 10y ago
First sensible comment in a long long thread.
gerbilly 10y ago
I worked for a startup where we had to take credit card payments. The first bank we dealt with let us sign up for a merchant account, even knowing the kind of business we were in would require 'cashing out' winnings, without batting an eye. Then in the first weekend with our shiny new merchant account [1] we racked up 5 figures in sales and they froze the account. They said they suspected fraud. It was an insane hassle to get people their money back. I assume the guy got a commission for signing us up; no loss to him if the merchant account didn't actually work for us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Later on we found another way to pay people out, and signed up with a better merchant account that has redundancy,[2] i.e. it is backed by two merchant accounts behind the scenes, so we can switch to another one if one of them get's 'upset.' Credit card merchant accounts can be shut down on you for any reason at any time, we've learned, leaving a complicated mess to sort out. [1][2] After a considerable amount of development work to integrate with their API.

mianos 10y ago

First sensible comment in a long long thread.

gerbilly 10y ago

I worked for a startup where we had to take credit card payments. The first bank we dealt with let us sign up for a merchant account, even knowing the kind of business we were in would require 'cashing out' winnings, without batting an eye. Then in the first weekend with our shiny new merchant account [1] we racked up 5 figures in sales and they froze the account. They said they suspected fraud. It was an insane hassle to get people their money back. I assume the guy got a commission for signing us up; no loss to him if the merchant account didn't actually work for us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Later on we found another way to pay people out, and signed up with a better merchant account that has redundancy,[2] i.e. it is backed by two merchant accounts behind the scenes, so we can switch to another one if one of them get's 'upset.' Credit card merchant accounts can be shut down on you for any reason at any time, we've learned, leaving a complicated mess to sort out. [1][2] After a considerable amount of development work to integrate with their API.