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Goodbye Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the credit cartel! You will never be missed. Hello Wealthfront, Robinhood, Simple, and the rest of

Goodbye Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the credit cartel! You will never be missed. Hello Wealthfront, Robinhood, Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers!

FireBeyond 9y ago
> Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers Yeah, a bank that announce that 1% of their customers had their account involuntarily closed with 30 days notice is sure to build trust in the new world order. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-closures/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-closures/
- tadfisher 9y ago
  Simple engineer here, not representing the company's views necessarily but relaying my own opinions. That situation was indeed a load of bullshit, but the other side of that coin is that we were doing something that has never had to happen in the history of modern banking, probably because it's insane. You see, normally when a bank is acquired by another bank, the acquirer gets the acquiree's FED terminals, ACH numbers, deals with Visa, etc. that make the transition more-or-less seamless for customers. So customers keep their cards, their direct deposit still works, their checks still work, and all they need to do is log in to a different website to manage their accounts. What we were forced to do was to essentially close hundreds of thousands of bank accounts at our former banking partner, open new accounts at our new partner, transfer funds, and issue new cards. And we had a contractual deadline before which the transition had to be 100% complete. We explored literally every other option available, including having BBVA acquire our ACH and Visa prefixes, but that was a no-go for reasons I'm not aware of. So we got the vast majority of our customers to make this painful switch, which was a miracle in itself, but we could not make it all the way down the list, and that sucked. New bank means new account-holder rules, customers changed email addresses/phones, customers moved, we underestimated the complexity/time requirements, all sorts of reasons applied; but the bottom line is that it was an inevitable situation for this kind of transition, and while we did what we could, we let some customers down (0.7% to be exact). At least I can say that we won't have to go through this again, and we're finally out of the woods with all of these platform transitions, and we're back to building products again. Feel free to AMA.
  - baybal2 9y ago
    Are fed terminals still are actual physical vt100 like contraptions? Or it is simply a metaphor for a kind of API access over the internet?
    - tadfisher 9y ago
      I believe the vt100 terminals have been phased out for FedACH/FedWire, which are the "modernized" APIs (read: the same weirdo fixed-width NACHA format but sent over HTTP/SFTP).
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    I do appreciate your response, and it certainly sounds like you were between a rock and a hard place. The end user experience, not so great.

Goodbye Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the credit cartel! You will never be missed. Hello Wealthfront, Robinhood, Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers!

FireBeyond 9y ago

> Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers Yeah, a bank that announce that 1% of their customers had their account involuntarily closed with 30 days notice is sure to build trust in the new world order. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-closures/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-closures/

tadfisher 9y ago
Simple engineer here, not representing the company's views necessarily but relaying my own opinions. That situation was indeed a load of bullshit, but the other side of that coin is that we were doing something that has never had to happen in the history of modern banking, probably because it's insane. You see, normally when a bank is acquired by another bank, the acquirer gets the acquiree's FED terminals, ACH numbers, deals with Visa, etc. that make the transition more-or-less seamless for customers. So customers keep their cards, their direct deposit still works, their checks still work, and all they need to do is log in to a different website to manage their accounts. What we were forced to do was to essentially close hundreds of thousands of bank accounts at our former banking partner, open new accounts at our new partner, transfer funds, and issue new cards. And we had a contractual deadline before which the transition had to be 100% complete. We explored literally every other option available, including having BBVA acquire our ACH and Visa prefixes, but that was a no-go for reasons I'm not aware of. So we got the vast majority of our customers to make this painful switch, which was a miracle in itself, but we could not make it all the way down the list, and that sucked. New bank means new account-holder rules, customers changed email addresses/phones, customers moved, we underestimated the complexity/time requirements, all sorts of reasons applied; but the bottom line is that it was an inevitable situation for this kind of transition, and while we did what we could, we let some customers down (0.7% to be exact). At least I can say that we won't have to go through this again, and we're finally out of the woods with all of these platform transitions, and we're back to building products again. Feel free to AMA.
- baybal2 9y ago
  Are fed terminals still are actual physical vt100 like contraptions? Or it is simply a metaphor for a kind of API access over the internet?
  - tadfisher 9y ago
    I believe the vt100 terminals have been phased out for FedACH/FedWire, which are the "modernized" APIs (read: the same weirdo fixed-width NACHA format but sent over HTTP/SFTP).
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  I do appreciate your response, and it certainly sounds like you were between a rock and a hard place. The end user experience, not so great.