Yeah, the capital requirements are painful, as is the entire process behind getting a charter.
How are you figuring out what people actually want? What have you built and how have you started getting it into the hands of customers?
How are you figuring out what people actually want? What have you built and how have you started getting it into the hands of customers?
I think we started like most people would here, by partnering with existing banks. So we have a signed pilot with one major bank and are working on a partnership with another one. But knowing how slow they move we started looking at other avenues that could make a more immediate impact.
The pilots are around lost or stolen cards and being able to have your autopayments as proxy cards so when the number of the card on your Target or Home Depot account gets stolen the number of the card in your wallet doesn't have to change and vice versa.
What we're working on now is a way for people to identify bills in their email that we can then process and remind them when they're due and how much money they may have left in their accounts when paying them. This allows us a couple of opportunities.
1. To get consumer eyeballs on something and to see if people would like to pay bills via a simple Venmo-like product.
2. Building a base of potential users for an actual bank launch.
In that vein some of the underlying tech behind an actual bank itself becomes the most interesting part of the problem once a transaction is approved.
But until we get behind the kimono we really don't think theres a way to know how much we'll have to build or improve with the underlying tech and systems but we suspect what is built can be leveraged in several ways.
What we do expect is a complete questioning and re-thinking of how every single thing is done from how customers deposit money to how we issue new accounts and how underwriting is done on loans of all types.
When that happened with one bank we used the first relationship to leverage into a second one with another large bank, after going through a near identical process we realized that big banks all move much slower than we can (even the ones that claim they can move very quickly).
At that point we started pursuing relationships with smaller banks and those seem to be significantly faster albeit still very slow in comparison to a startup.
The most recent revelation with the bill pay stuff has literally been over the course of the last 7-10 days because we threw out what we thought was a hairbrain idea to buy a small bank to an investor we knew well.
He got excited and offered to fund the entire deal if we could find one that we thought could work well.
That kind of kicked ideas into hyperdrive about what we could build to attract users now instead of waiting, and the tool to identify bills within emails was thought up and began progress on just so us and some of our friends can try it.
It’s not a launched product yet, but its close to something we could stick in the chrome store as an extension and see the feedback we get.