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Twitter's Alex Payne quits, heads onto something new.
- dschobel 16y agoPretty shocking, especially considering the equity he's presumably walking away from. More power to him.
- kneath 16y agoI doubt he's walking away from much equity at all. He's been with Twitter a long time. If he isn't 100% vested, he's got to be pretty close.
- dschobel 16y agoYeah but would it be worth anything pre-IPO?
- chl 16y agoMaybe it's worth _more_ pre-IPO!
- nostrademons 16y agoIf he's vested, he can always just exercise his options with saved cash and then hold the shares until the IPO.
- davidw 16y agoWe've had the bank discussion here before, and some of it seems to come down to the fact that banks are required to do a lot of regulatory stuff that is not 'simple'.
- varenc 16y agostartups like WePay seem to be overcoming this.
- barmstrong 16y agoLink to previous discussion? I'd be curious if incorporating outside the U.S. is the best option for them here to avoid the regulation. Or going on a SeaStead :) They'd still need relationships with Visa and Mastercard though.
- barmstrong 16y agoAlso, I'd be interested in a bank which didn't use the fractional reserve system, and did something more like the process described at the end of this video: http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#p/p/CECDA315A8848B99/23/8SAMey9Gl5I http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#p/p/CECDA315A8848B99... It may then be tough to compete with existing banks whose insurance is subsidized by the gov though.
- raphar 16y agoI'm really curious about this banksimple and I hope they have really cool "grave old guys in suits" with them. They'll need it. previous discusion at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049961 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049961 My previous comment in that discussion: I work for a bank (not from USA though) and what I see as the toughest barrier in initiating a Bank is the massive amount of banking regulation that every institution must comply (not negotiable). Also the impact of new regulations on the systems running the business are usually non trivial. Missing any of these, means that you cant operate (or you can't do certain operations, generally critical). As I said, the effort put in keeping with all this is very big. Usually the split is 50/50 with regulation vs new features (my view is as a software developer). The bank being global only makes things worse, as only adds more regulations from different places to equation. Well that was the boring part. I think theres a place for new financial services but perhaps the way to get started is providing those new services and avoiding being a bank. As the institution adds more services and grows, it can begin to take into account the regulation little by little. That was my simplistic view ;)
- al3x 16y agoThere are regulatory challenges, but the other two BankSimple guys (the real brains) have figured out a ton. I'm confident we can do some cool stuff.
- davidw 16y agoBest of luck then, I don't think anyone's not rooting for you here.
- mattmaroon 16y agoI've wanted to do something very much like this in a future startup. Banking does suck. Unfortunately, it's debatable how much of banks' suckiness is avoidable. Retail banking is caught in a vice-grip between fierce competition for low margins and government regulations. For example, from what I understand you pretty much have to run mainframes with certain antiquated, government-approved software to process stuff through ACH. KYC rules prevent extremely efficient account openings. Etc, etc. I'll be curious to see how this goes.
- abstractbill 16y agoThe amount of banking suckage is very dependent on what country you live and bank in (I say this from experience of living in the UK and the US). I'd be really interested to know how much of the variance is due to local laws, and how much is just "this is the way we've always done things here".
- webwright 16y agoOf the value props he describes, the only one that remotely resonates with me is: "A bank that puts your money to work automatically." He writes that nobody LOVES their bank. But does anybody really HATE their bank? Maybe some vocal folks, but a bank to me is a utility-- a hole in the wall where I stick my money. I've never felt gouged by fees (when I was young and stupid, I've been annoyed by overdraft fees, but they seem justified). I've never been overwhelmingly frustrated by the design decisions of my bank. They decidedly don't treat me like crap. Every time I've needed to interact with my bank(s) it's been a pleasant experience. Given the switching cost/inconvenience, I think this is going to be a hard sell for most people.
- imownbey 16y agoThe cellphone was very much a utility for a large portion of the mobile market before the iPhone came along.
- bmj 16y agoAgreed. I've been doing my banking through a small, local bank since I had my first account many moons ago. I don't pay fees for normal banking activities, and have always had good experiences when dealing with the bank employees face-to-face. I don't LOVE my bank, but do I need to LOVE my bank? I'm not sure...I need to be able to trust them.
- smiler 16y agoSimpleBank looks interesting - I assume this is a 'virtual' bank and they are just reselling some other bank but putting their interface on it. Anyone know any details?
- papachito 16y agoSounds like a real bank: http://banksimple.net/faq/ http://banksimple.net/faq/
- jackowayed 16y agoIt's not just a pretty interface to Bank of America or anything like that. But they aren't a normal bank with a charter and millions of dollars put up in bonds to allow them to operate legally. They haven't gone into detail about exactly how everything works, but they have a "network of banks" where the money will be stored (which is how they get it FDIC insured), and they sit on top of that in some way. http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/23/status-update/ http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/23/status-update/ >When we first started thinking about starting a bank we looked into the de novo banking process. This is the process by which new banks are formed from scratch. This is both expensive and, more importantly, it takes too long to launch. It is near impossible to innovate with an imposed three year launch delay. The best way to serve your needs is to launch quickly and to adapt our offering to meet your individual needs. Modern technology lets us do that. To achieve this we are planning to launch with a special corporate structure. We are bringing together a group of financial institutions to provide our underlying banking services. Our partner banks hold all deposits in insured accounts.
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- ErrantX 16y agooh no... Don't get me wrong if they pulls this off it will rock. But we've discussed this before... and it is a hard problem. Extremely Hard
- jon_dahl 16y agoNot to sound glib, but: it is a hard problem. Extremely Hard Isn't that exactly what an ambitious entrepreneur should look for? Especially someone who's had some startup success in the past?
- mdon 16y agothis already exists: USAA Banking and Investing
- 0x44 16y agoUSAA Banking and Investing isn't accessible to most of the public, and is locked down as to be almost indistinguishable from other credit-unions for their non-veteran, non-military customers.
- zzzmarcus 16y agoMy closest military connection is a grandfather who served in the Air Force in WWII and I was able to get into USAA. I think it's more accessible than a lot of people think. And if you can get in, it's definitely worth it. I've used them for several years now and have zero complaints. Their customer service is awesome, their website is very good, and the iPhone/Android apps are great.
- fname 16y agoNot true. USAA Banking, Investments and Life Insurance are open to everyone, regardless of prior military service. https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=why_choose_usaa_eligibility_main&wa_ref=wcu_main_is_usaa_for_you https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=why_ch...
- rdl 16y agoThe other service credit unions (Tower (NSA), Pentagon Federal, and Navy Federal) are all really good, too, although not as good as USAA. USAA's insurance is top-notch, too.
- joanou 16y agoGood luck with that. There is no such think as a bank that doesn't suck. If there are, they are called credit unions. For profit banks have customers. Non-profit credit unions have members.
- julio_the_squid 16y agoThis is at least the second long time Twitterer to found a new business related to finance or payments (the other was Jack Dorsey's Square). I guess they're in a position to perceive a high level need in that area? Pushing money around gives you a lot more chance for revenue than dealing with mere tweets, I suppose.
- zxz 16y agoWhat's up with the .net for their domain?
- bdickason 16y ago.com was squatted?
- dtran 16y agoFrom their about faq page: How do I deposit checks? Take a photo of the check with your smart phone and send it to us with our app. Pretty simple, right? Is this really secure? I know there are some people doing cardreaders as an attachment to the phone, but pictures of checks?
- malbiniak 16y agoI imagine it's as secure as the USAA method of doing it. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/technology/10check.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/technology/10check.html
- eli 16y agoUSAA's iPhone app has been doing this for a while: https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=deposit_at_mobile_main https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=deposi...
- RK 16y agoThey also have an Android app.
- mrkurt 16y agoUSAA lets you deposit scanned check images. The only requirement is that you have to have a credit card setup as overdraft protection. Decent photos seem like they'd work ok.
- dtran 16y agoSo do you think we'll move away from paper checks completely and just move around echecks from phone to phone? I've never really understood how checks are secure. They just have a routing number, an account number, and your signature right?
- jarek 16y agoCheques are earth-shatteringly non-secure. The entire system runs on trust. I've had a several-months-post-dated cheque I wrote cashed by a bank and accepted by mine without apparently as much as a look at the date field. (They also dinged me an overdraft fee. Reversed that when I complained, but not the cheque withdrawal itself.) A while back, there was a pretty loud story about an payday-advance business suing the maker of a subsequently cancelled cheque for the money and winning the amount. The sooner North America weans itself off cheques and external for-profit inter-bank transfer systems (Paypal, grrr), the better off we'll be.
- dtran 16y agoAll of these bad gateways I'm getting from nginx don't give me a whole lot of confidence in this banking website =P I know it's early, but perceptions like that matter.
- maxklein 16y agoI'm sorry, but I want my bankers to be grave old men in suits. I also want my bank to have offices all over the world and I want to know that they are handling money many hundreds of times larger than whatever I have. I don't want a bank started by a guy called al3x, and who just left twitter. It sounds innovative, but it doesn't sound...dependable. And if there is one feature I want my bank to have, it's dependable.
- jgilliam 16y agoThe dependable banks... are those the ones that taxpayers just bailed out for hundreds of billions of dollars because they were about to destroy the entire financial system?
- albertni 16y agoNotice how even when they screwed up, they were still bailed out. Obviously I'm not thrilled that any bank would screw up in the first place, but no one's bailing out BankSimple if they do too.
- ihodes 16y ago
- benologist 16y agoI for one welcome a bank where I can just message "accept $100".
- mortenjorck 16y agoaccept benologist $100
- benologist 16y agoIt'll work.... but not many times unfortunately. Try 'pg'.
- natrius 16y ago> A bank that puts your money to work automatically. This sounds interesting. I don't know how they'll succeed at this while making money, keeping risk low, and beating the rates that something like Ally Bank will give you.
- Bossman 16y agoSounds pretty cool in theory. But can a new bank like this really make it in today's over-regulated, Wall Street controlled market? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it go somewhere and be available nationwide for people to have a better banking experience. I'm just a bit skeptic.
- poundy 16y agoHe needs to fix this soon http://banksimple.net/jobs/ http://banksimple.net/jobs/
- mark_l_watson 16y agoI wonder if his new company will do everything in Scala. If I were starting a company and writing the corporate stack from scratch, Scala would be a good possible choice. He has written a fair amount about Scala, so I am just wondering...
- whyenot 16y agoI currently use Charles Schwab Bank, and don't really see how SimpleBank would be a big improvement. The only feature that SimpleBank has that Charles Schwab Bank doesn't seems to be the ability to take pictures of checks and send those electronically when you want to make a deposit. Is "al3x" from twitter really up on all the details and security concerns of running an online bank? Will his company do a better job than Charles Schwab? My gut feeling is no.
- dzlobin 16y agoCan you please read about the other founders and the actual company before you think they aren't "up on all the details"
- whyenot 16y agoI did look at the bank website and at the team before I posted . As I mentioned, the features of SimpleBank do not appear to be much different from what is available from my current internet bank. As far as the team goes, they may be bright, but none appear to have worked at a bank before, either brick and mortar or digital.
- ThomPete 16y agoActually that might be an advantage to them.
- kscaldef 16y agoI'm not sure that one guy who "specializes in strategy consulting for financial institutions" make me feel all that much more confident. Are there more members of the team missing from their "Team" page?
- jrockway 16y agoSounds like ING Direct.
- joubert 16y agothey will need someone with actual banking experience on their team - http://banksimple.net/team/ http://banksimple.net/team/
- Kilimanjaro 16y agoGuys guys guys, great idea, I applaud your efforts but... More than once I'll be typing banksimple and hitting ctrl+enter so I'll go right to a phisher's page ready to empty my bank account as soon as I type my id/pass. Really, get a dot com.
- jackowayed 16y agoHow would one go about stopping that? Does phishing break the social contract that allows people to keep their rightfully-squatted domains? As in, when someone's using their domain for phishing of your site, will ICANN take their domain away since they're abusing the privilege of having that domain?
- al3x 16y agoWe'll get there. Running lean right now.
- nreece 16y agoFor the nature of business service you are going to offer, a reliable online presence is not an option - it's a requisite.
- davidmurphy 16y agogive em some time, guys.
- luckyland 16y agoA bank that wants to do things differently and be known for customer service should conspicuously publish their privacy policy and reveal their network of partner banks. It's not clear what happens with the statistics of your bank usage nor where your money actually is. Is this version 2 of Mint with banking 'features'?
- cageface 16y agoI wonder if Twitter is still happy to have crucial pieces of their backend written in Scala. Have they found other Scala hackers to pick up the slack?
- fizx 16y agoYes to both :)
- pxlpshr 16y agomust be easier to make money when your business model requires cash up front as oppose to finding it later.
- rythie 16y agoIt would be cool if bills appeared in an inbox on your online bank account so you could review and pay it in one click. Also, you would have the full details of what you bought in the history of your account. Also a graph and projection of your bank balance would be neat. Actually, an API for a bank would be really cool.
- dkasper 16y agoIt would be cool if bills appeared in an inbox on your online bank account so you could review and pay it in one click A lot of banks have some sort of bill pay feature. I have a feature that is exactly like this in my Schwab account including being able to view the bills to see what's on them and pay in one click.
- rythie 16y agoWhat's Schwab? These people: http://www.schwab.com/ http://www.schwab.com/ ? My Banks have sort of a bill pay feature though it's not like I described, it's just a pre-populated list of payees like Electric, Gas, Water etc. companies and it's not even that simple because each company often has several accounts so you have to pick the correct one.
- rythie 16y agoAlso, it would cool if you could graph a particular bill against time e.g. your phone bill.
- hoggle 16y agoExactly what I am thinking. There is so much inefficiency involved when dealing with money and in fact much of bureaucracy. My bank offers the same "services" now for almost ten years. It always feels like the 90s all over again when I have to manually handle csv files. I don't even want to talk about advanced stuff like processing of invoices. I don't care enough about it to really have some script scraping it for me automatically and the lack of an API does contribute to that. There is so much overhead to all of this it's unbelievable.
- mscantland 16y agoI suspect that not charging overdraft fees will result in adverse selection-people that have no money and therefore can't be used to build a loanable savings asset. I really hope this works, but due to switching costs, BankSimple will have a very uphill road to climb if they aren't planning to pay very high interest rates or otherwise attract people with some savings.
- prs 16y ago"Starting a Bank for Fun and Profit" has become more popular topic in recent years (See: http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/ http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/). Starting a bank from scratch is not impossible but will certainly be no easy feat. I wish Alex Payne and the team he is going to be working with good luck in cracking existing banking structures.
- Judson 16y agoI just don't think that the "fee" play is going to cut it as innovative. Others have mentioned ING Direct and Ally. The real innovation will be cutting out things like the 3 day "clearing" window for funds. Or eliminating the delay for ACH'ing funds (an all electronic transaction). The problem, banking is too regulated to really innovate, though I applaud the attempt. Edit: If they create an iPhone app for depositing checks (Just like USAA). I am sold. I would also like to think that many tech-savvy people would be sold also.
- ax0n 16y agoI kind of wondered if this was coming, due to the very specific nature of Twitter's job postings as of a few months back that kind of treaded on al3x's turf. Best of luck to him. Also, I think I want in. On being a customer, not an employee. I just got my dream job.
- tszming 16y agoImagine, for a moment, a bank that doesn’t suck... A bank that display funny pics when system goes down... The money in your account is eventually consistent... A bank allow users to type command to transfer money, e.g. "accept $1000"...
- marvin 16y agoThis is going to be interesting. Sucky banking services are largely an American phenomenon. My bank in Norway has no physical offices and conducts all of its services over the internet, phone or mail. There are (practically) no fees and the interest rates on its savings/checking accounts (there are interchangable, since there are no fees) are within 0.2% p.a. from the best that can be obtained anywhere in the country, regardless of capital amount. All funds are insured from bankruptcy through the national bank security fund. The young crowd almost never uses checks in Norway - all bills are paid online. The only problem with this system is speed and service - if you suddenly lose your credit/debit card, you will have a few days of worry while the bank sends you a new one. Identification can be complicated, since there isn't a person 15 minutes away that can physically talk to you and verify your identity. All in all, I think this is very promising. Someone needs to pull American banking into the 21st century. This guy will have problems with legislation and bureucracy and huge competitors, though..count on that.
- mootothemax 16y agoIf they wanted to be truly innovative, they could kick-start anonymous internet banking by being the first institution with a public face to do so. That would be revolutionary, and whilst I admire the aim of making a fantastic bank, it still leaves me feeling a bit unexcited :-/
- synnik 16y agoI have worked in the banking industry. Building a better technology stack for a bank is possible. But you need to understand the current technology first, including how it got to where it is today. You also need to understand the banking industry. And you need to be focused on reliability. Twitter's reliability history is not adequate for a bank. So do I think he can do this by himself? Not a flippin' chance. But I do think he could contribute some innovative ideas, if teamed up with people who have deep experience in the industry.
- FabriceTalbot 16y agoThat's a huge leap for him. It's true, it doesn't sound to dependable, but it might be worth the risk in the end.