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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 v

by dprice1 15y ago

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&contentId=140&menuId=47774&pId=50062 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_ 15y ago
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.
bostonvaulter2 15y ago
I'm pretty sure that it would be quite difficult to build a nice common system that can integrate with the backends of many banks.

by dprice1 15y ago

dr_ 15y ago

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.

bostonvaulter2 15y ago

I'm pretty sure that it would be quite difficult to build a nice common system that can integrate with the backends of many banks.