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Simple ATM cards being declined
- whalesalad 14y agoUhh. This is quite catastrophic actually. Not being able to access your funds at all really blows.
- dmix 14y agoRunning a bank is like being a cop, the stakes are high for fucking up.
- w1ntermute 14y agoThe difference being that banks are (relatively) open to free market forces, while the police is not.
- dmix 14y agoUnless you're an exceptionally large bank :).
- Skywing 14y agoAnd on NYE, to make it worse.
- swalsh 14y ago90% of the time I wouldn't notice, but on NYE theres a significantly higher chance i'm at an ATM looking for some cash.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rawb92 14y agoReally? I've seen it on HN several times throughout the last 4-5 months.
- eropple 14y agoIt was called BankSimple until recently, and has had a lot of coverage on HN.
- jellicle 14y agoYou may recall them from their previous, and much much much better name, BankSimple. There have been a number of stories.
- natrius 14y agoHaving the word "bank" in your name means you have to meet all the legal requirements to be a bank. Simple is not a bank.
- barredo 14y agoSimple (altough not as much as other money-related startups like Stripe or Square -hum... what's with the "S"?-) has been on HN several times, most of them through Al3x/Alex Payne, their former CTO (http://al3x.net/2012/07/25/moving-on.html http://al3x.net/2012/07/25/moving-on.html) and co-founder: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=al3x+OR+alex+payne+OR+simple.com+OR+banksimple&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=al3...
- hosay123 14y agoOrdinarily I might consider this worth a loss in reputation, but given the uniquely one-sided battle that is trying to cause any disruption in the banking industry, I'd be willing to cut these guys some slack. In this area the enemy has big guns
- bonzoesc 14y agoThey're literally disrupting banking right now. Is accepting unreliability from financial institutions the disruption banking needs?
- zaidf 14y agoIs being unforgiving to new entrants in a typically scary industry the type of behavior that will encourage new competition?
- jacquesm 14y agoYou should be unforgiving. I have no idea what the root cause behind this is but testing roll-over is obviously part & parcel of the level of reliability required in the financial world. Allowed: scheduled downtime announced ahead of time for reporting, unscheduled downtime with localized effect due to 'acts of god'. Not allowed: customers can't access their funds when they should be able to. When you disrupt the banking industry you especially should be doing at least as good as the established parties do in the reliability department. Let's hope they have it fixed very quickly or it may well kill Simple. Imagine being in a bar somewhere right now and having just bought a round finding out that you can't pay for it. You'll hear about that one for years.
- zaidf 14y agoyou especially should be doing at least as good as the established parties do in the reliability department. Easy to say but I think it is unreasonable to expect a company that is couple years old to have as much reliability as ones who have had decades to figure it out. I think the Simple customers have every right be absolutely pissed. For some, they may even realize that the downside of going with Simple isn't justified by the upside. Hopefully, for the majority of Simple users the upside will make the rare downtime bearable. My view would change if this becomes a regular occurrence with Simple. But that does not seem to be the case.
- barredo 14y agoI'm just curious: who is their transaction partner?
- nullrouted 14y agohttp://www.thebancorp.com/about/ http://www.thebancorp.com/about/ is their partner bank so I'm guessing the issue is there.
- AngryParsley 14y agoIt looks like this started around Jan 1 00:00:00 UTC 2013. I wonder if it's related to the leap second bug discovered in July. Apparently, a some popular NTP servers incorrectly sent out leap seconds at midnight. Even if it's not that specific issue, I bet the root cause is a time-keeping bug.
- fossuser 14y agoI was hit with this, but like I'd imagine every other simple user just pulled out a credit card. I figured it was some issue with Subway's card reader on University, guess it wasn't.
- josephagoss 14y agoIt looks like they are trying to do good, however Banking is not like Google or Amazon cloud. Whilst the odd downtime happens with these technology companies, people forgive and move on, but banking really is different. If my bank went down losing access to my money, I would be naked, I don't always have cash and money is our oxygen is this society, a absolute essential. Hopefully the downtime for Simple will be short, but if they had 100 million people using them as their main bank and this happened, you could expect mass exodus the next day. The only time I have lost access to my money was a few years ago when VISA or MASTERCARD went down (or both), with them you don't have a choice and everyone lost access to their money, but if ever just one bank went down it wouldn't turn out good at all.
- jacquesm 14y agoI don't have anything to do with 'simple' but I'm working with a group of people on another system somewhere in the payment chain. In banking failure is not an option, a little detail that I keep having to drill into my collegues, some of who would rather have an MVP with the occasional bit of downtime than something a lot more solid. So for now we're stuck in the 'hurd' loop. Within any start-up there are always differing opinions on the level of reliability required. My first real job in IT was with the Dutch division of the Chase Mannhattan bank, they made it pretty clear upon hiring me that they did not mind hiring me into a responsible position as young as I was but that my first fuck-up would also be my last. I'm not sure if they would actually follow through on that promise but it certainly made me a bit more wary and more responsible. The fact that I ended up leaving of my own accord means that their threat probably had its intended effect. When you're in the payment chain, whether as an IPSP, a bank or something else that directly affects peoples income and ability to function in society you have no excuse other than 'meteor fragments took out all three of our datacenters'. Stuff is up, check-totals are at '0', transactions are never lost. 24 hours, 365 (of 366) days per year. If you can't do that don't bother playing. The bank I'm with (Rabobank in nl) lost a lot of respect from me (after building that up for 2 decades) when they blamed a bunch of down time on 'hackers'. What bugged me even more than the fact that they were down was the fact that they wanted to blame another party for being down. The one thing I'll leave a little bit of room for is capacity issues during the holiday shopping spree, but even that is pretty bad form and indicative of very bad planning. Judging by the post the error lies with Simple's partner, unfortunately for Simple customers will likely not care about that at all. To them their simple card doesn't work when they expect it to work. I hope for simple they'll be able to fix this very quickly.
- hosay123 14y agoJust to contrast this a little, what you paint here is a panacea, while the reality is that even just this year 10 million accounts in the UK were out of order for a period of months due to a reliability problem: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/25/how-natwest-it-meltdown http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/25/how-natwest...
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- 6thSigma 14y agoAll news is good news? I had never heard of Simple before this and am now semi-interested in getting a card..
- sync 14y agoI have six invites for any adventurous HNers interested in living life on the edge.
- gojomo 14y agoSibling threads touting banks as paragons of reliability, with any momentary loss-of-access-to-funds as unforgivable, must have been dealing with a different banking system than me. With major banks like BofA, Citibank, and others, I've had… • credit cards often disabled for fraud-alert false alarms • check deposits sometimes subject to mysterious fund-availability delays • individual ATM clusters or whole ATM networks down for short periods • account information and ATM withdrawals sometimes unavailable during 'system maintenance' hours (often early Sunday AM) • a check erroneously bounced by a major bank (BofA) when both available-by-rule funds and enrolled 'overdraft protection' would have each been individually able to cover the check amount • my ATM card unusable while traveling to the exotic third-world locale of Ottawa, Canada due to some sort of more-than-one-day network security issue Stuff happens, to banks also. Cut Simple some slack.
- jacquesm 14y agoErrors on individual transactions and reporting being unavailable is not the same as transactions simply not happening at all. Stuff happens to banks and then people switch to other banks, especially when you're a new player. If my bank did this to me I'd be gone instantly, I almost did just over their inability to keep telebanking working through a denial of service attack, and then blaming it on the hackers. All my cards (credit, debit across several companies and private accounts) link back to the same bank. If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine. ATM and pos worked fine during that period, if it had not I'd be gone for sure.
- lsc 14y ago>If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine. If banking is that important to you, then perhaps you ought to consider redundant providers? I mean, that's what you do with connectivity. you don't rely on one provider with a good sla; no, you get two providers.
- jacquesm 14y agoThere are quite a few problems that come with setting up double accounts for every company that I'm involved with. You'd have to spread the funds around in such a way that you could cover any contingency from any account, which in effect would mean that you's need twice the money. It also means a lot more work for the bookkeeper, two two factor auth tokens to keep on me, two account managers to manage, double the contracts and so on. They deal I have with my bank is simple: they do their work, they get to keep transaction fees, screw me on the interbank interest rates and delay foreign transactions just long enough that they can go play with my cash. In return I expect them to deliver one thing: utter reliability. If it gets to the point that there is no single bank that gives me the feeling that they can do just that I will indeed have to split assets across several banks. (there are other good reasons to do that, such as the maximum insured balance per account holder). But the costs of doing so are what is holding me from that.
- jaysonelliot 14y agoSimple has earned such goodwill with me for their amazing customer service, zero fees (even for overdrafts), and overall customer experience that I'm happy to give them a pass on this. The fact that they're being proactive about their status updates, and transparently honest, helps a lot, too. A relationship with a bank is a lot like a relationship with a doctor: bedside manner is sometimes the most important element to patient (customer) satisfaction - sometimes even surpassing outcomes, as long as it's not too serious.
- jacquesm 14y agoThey're back up.
- gerred 14y agoThis actually bit me last night. It was a little bit embarrassing, but it all worked out in the end.