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What problem does this attempt to solve? Their slack example doesn't seem particularly pressing.

• 1ba9115454 9y ago
  It might be useful for businesses that wish to API control over their money.
  • andy_ppp 9y ago
    Yes exactly. Paying invoices, CRM systems, Taxation etc. The list of uses is almost endless for businesses.
• louwhopley 9y ago
  Hey @tarr11, founder here. We're trying to make banking more accessible to creators/developers so that they can build their own problem solving solutions :)
  • davidpelaez 9y ago
    This is amazing. Are you on twitter or some other place I can find you and talk?
• Sean1708 9y ago
  What about the Uber example? That's seem pretty cool. But I think the problem it's attempting to solve is that without Root a bank must implement any kind of features that you may want, Root you allows you to implement any features you want. Although I can't decide whether this is an amazing thing, or a terrible terrible thing.
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > What about the Uber example? That's seem pretty cool. edit: I didn't see the Uber example, so I was working off an incorrect premise. It actually makes sense. How would that work in real life? Uber doesn't charge you before your ride is complete, and at that point your payment would bounce, and now you're in trouble. Ditto for fast-food diet; nobody's going to be happy when you walk up to the counter at 16 Handles with your big bucket of ice cream and your card doesn't go through. I suppose the idea is to keep all of this in mind, but it still seems odd. But you're right - someone will come up with an interesting use case for it. (My first idea was a card for my kid, so they can only make $10 worth of in-game purchases a month.)
    • Sean1708 9y ago
      > How would that work in real life? Uber doesn't charge you before your ride is complete, and at that point your payment would bounce, and now you're in trouble. Well in the Uber example you're allowing payments to Uber, not denying them. But you do have a very good point about denying pay-after-use type transactions, I'm not really sure what they're doing about that.
      • pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Wasn't their example all about limiting the number of rides you can take? So at that point, you'd eventually be denying them, as I understand it.
        • Sean1708 9y ago
          > Uber card: Let’s say you give your daughter R500 pocket money each month, but you’re worried she might run out of money and be unable to afford an Uber home. So you write a little code and give her a Root card that a) gives her a limit of R500 per month, and b) lets her take as many Uber rides as she needs (enabling her to spend beyond the R500, but only for Uber) That's the one I was thinking of, note the "lets her take as many Uber rides as she needs".
          • pavel_lishin 9y ago
            Oh, I missed that example! That is actually pretty cool.
            • Sean1708 9y ago
              Yeah there's a "Press Kit" link in the footer which should definitely be more obvious because it gives a lot more info than the front page.
          • netsharc 9y ago
            Then the daughter trades Uber rides for cash.. (you can order an Uber to give a friend a ride without you needing to be in the car yourself). I kid, the possibility of putting spending rules as code is neat.
• Larrikin 9y ago
  It doesn't technically solve a problem I have yet, but if more banks did it, it could. I like to immediately take 10% of my pay check off the top for my savings account and investments. As a contractor, I also needed to take money out on my own for taxes. My hours are variable and I was getting paper checks. Being able to just deposit my check and have a script run that automatically takes care of all of that would be great.
• nolok 9y ago
  I can see the use being other for power users who want to have triggers for their own stuff "warn me if the cellphone bill is over the regular price so I check the overcharges". Myself if I go under my limit I have before the end of the day to correct the situation (I don't like to leave much money on the current account), so the first thing I would do is a simple script that warns me when that happens to avoid bank fees or even automatically correct if no correction had been done at 23h30. Or for companies who would like a processing pipeline that treat customer's orders once their wire payment arrive (send a confirmation email, activate the product, ...). Or of course like their snippet shows, for hip companies who want to post activities events on their social powered feed, because "bob bought bagels" is the information you need live at the office !
• snowwolf 9y ago
  How about streaming your transactions to a budgeting service to approve or deny if you've gone over budget for the month. Or build your own rules to deny certain transactions if you are approaching 0 balance. I think there are lots of use cases you could think of that are custom to you that no bank would ever build.
  • chrisfosterelli 9y ago
    Personally, I would rather rely on self control and not have my card forcefully decline transactions. But maybe that's just me!
    • usegolang 9y ago
      While I agree to some extent, if we ever want to get rid of welfare etc and move to a basic income for everyone one of the problems could be people mismanaging their basic income leading to people still starving or having other financial troubles. Something like this API may make basic income more feasible if we could ensure that people aren't able to blow their budget and go hungry even with basic income.
    • snowwolf 9y ago
      That's the point though. Everyone has their own somewhat unique requirements. A traditional bank can't cater to every persons individual needs/wants. It would be nice to have somewhere these scripts are discoverable so you can use/tweak other users ideas.
    • codewithcheese 9y ago
      Ability the decline transactions is my dream. Personally I want to approve every charge as it happens rather than have to scan my statements for anything unusual
  • eutropia 9y ago
    I think it would be great for every purchase of mine to round up to the nearest $5 or $10 increment and transfer the difference into savings, or have it be percentage based, etc. Having payments from clients automatically set-aside tax money would be great, too.
• rrggrr 9y ago
  1. Sweeping funds from one account to another based on business events. 2. Fraud detection. 3. Real-time reporting.
  • haftrine 9y ago
    Why would you be able to build a better fraud system as an end-user as opposed to card issuers and processors?
    • davidpelaez 9y ago
      Because you have knowledge of your own patterns, because you can change technology much faster and test many things as opposed to banks that usually evaluate enterprise super expensive software, usually neglect open source and hence don't always have the best tools. If you think the integration as an individual you probably cant, but if it's a company building on top of something like this, then it's totally possible to be better than the issuers and processors.
    • jacksnipe 9y ago
      No reason they can't do it too, but I'd like to be able to do it as well. I'd like to be more aggressive in assuming a transaction is fraudulent.
• jnwatson 9y ago
  Regulating the spending of my teenage daughter is the first thing that came to mind.
  • semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    Is that any harder than setting her up with her own account and a periodic transfer of $amountYouWishToRestrictHerSpendingTo money into said account? Both of these are available at any bank, methinks.
• azeirah 9y ago
  Analyse your spending habits to see where you can easily save some money is one example.
  • m3ta 9y ago
    My BofA account has a whole spending habits section with graphics and charts and a ton of features, for free, which comes with my debit account. Why would I want to do all this myself? The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.
    • ethbro 9y ago
      Because this locks you into BoA. Hence why they're doing it. If you have a BoA, Chase, Citi, and Fidelity account, then unless there's a push towards exposing data for third party uses your only option becomes trying to look at 4 dashboards. To illustrate only one problem. There's also others, including portability: what can you take with you when you decide to switch your 10 year old BoA account to another bank?
    • ska 9y ago
      I haven't used BofA for a while, but in general the problems I have with these features are 1) inaccurate classification and no way to fix it 2) exported data does not include all of this, so if I move banks or want to do analysis I'm sol ymmv, of course
      • XaspR8d 9y ago
        Yeah definitely. The classifications of transactions is generally poor. Even with Simple, which is very generous in allowing you to (re)assign arbitrary tags on the fly and provide nice data metrics, I'd still like to generate different graphs than they choose to present. The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...
        • hintss 9y ago
• sly010 9y ago
  If only every bank would provide a real time feed of every transaction, pretty much everything could be written as a third party software (except denying transactions, but if you use a credit card that's a non issue)
• jamesrcole 9y ago
  Useful new technologies don't always solve obvious problems. Sometimes a more fruitful way of thinking about them is to ask: what might this help enable? And especially considering this not just in terms of an isolated individual using it, but in terms of if it had broad uptake where lots of people were using it. Think of things like the introduction of cars, or the internet. Their actual effect on most people weren't a matter of obvious problems they had at the time.
  • hasbroslasher 9y ago
    I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". But bigger inventions don't solve a small, narrowly-defined problem: they totally change the game. You can't sum up the impact of the automobile, antiseptic or the internet in a sentence, because these inventions caused a cascade of other inventions that solve other problems. Cars weren't released out of the blue by a well-funded startup as a half-baked MVP, they were built off of advances in industrial metallurgy, the invention of the engine, engineering used in trains and boats. Similarly, the internet didn't just happen - people first figured out electrical engineering, circuit boards, GUI's, COBOL and C++ and a myriad of other languages that made it possible to invent the internet. I'm not saying that this online bank thingie is on that level yet. But for me, these kind of inventions are indicative of the death of institutional finance. The first step in destroying global finance as an institution is to whittle away at where the banks can make profit. Apps like Robin Hood have already helped to decentralize knowledge and participation in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have shown at least a proof of concept that you don't need central banks to have currency. Money transfer apps like TransferWise eliminate currency conversion profiteering. Now what happens when you make a front-end that can wire all of these ideas together? A cashless society? Maybe.
    • jamesrcole 9y ago
      > It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?' I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen. E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.
• mmahemoff 9y ago
  I would use it to do what my bank is apparently too stupid to do - email notifications of anomalous/suspicious activity and monthly spending summaries.
• JonoBB 9y ago
  This is a huge (HUGE) marketplace ripe for innovation. Imagine having all your business transactions automatically pulled into your accounting system, ready for you to process and reconcile? You have (x) different bank accounts all integrated in real time, and you get realtime information. Bank have been very very reluctant to open their systems via API access, which is why there are services like Yodlee. Basic charge is around $20k per annum plus pay per use. They are making a LOT of money, but the service is imperfect because they work by screen scraping the data from bank accounts. They have some direct integrations with banks, but my understanding is that the vast majority is still done via scraping. From end user perspective its terrible - you have to give them your login credentials, and supply OTP/2FA (if your bank uses this) every time you want to pull data in. The banking industry is being dragged kicking and screaming to modernise and offer proper API access like this.
• BlackjackCF 9y ago
  You can totally build your own version of digit.co with this instead of having to rely on a middleman like Plaid.
• jamesrcole 9y ago
  I wonder what could happen in the following circumstances. Multiple companies have such accounts. Perhaps whole industries. And the programmability was used for interactions between those parties. Automated systems, run by those companies, that shift money around between them for whatever purposes. Perhaps it could help automated business functions.
• vlasev 9y ago
  The kind of thing that I would like to be able to do is have a bunch of different virtual accounts that I can use for various different things. Pretty much the envelope spending system, but with cards. I'd be able to take in paychecks and other income into a primary account, pay bills and distribute the rest into various accounts (for example, Eating out, Entertainment, Books, Learning, etc) according to some budget. Then I'd like to be able to see how much money I have left on any of these in pretty much real time. Once you go up to the limit of one of these cards, then you know you've gone over budget. Half-way through the month, you have no more money for Entertainment? Too bad. I think this kind of thing would make it easier to practically stay within your budget. Wanna go on a holiday? Boom, make a Holiday account, put a certain amount of money on it, and then you know you can spend that much on whatever, while everything else remains constant. Holiday gift season? Make a budget, make a card, and spend from there, knowing that it's just a bigger hassle to use another card if you run out of gift money.
  • hintss 9y ago
    simple.com kinda-sorta had this idea, but without the denying transactions bit (and I kinda want the ability to set a goal that just gets money added to it every month, indefinitely, but that's not a feature :( )