Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdiaz5513 | Hacker News Reader

One comes immediately to mind: financial services for the poor. Check cashing, payday loans, overdraft fees, etc.. Fortunately the CFPB has been fighting in their favor but the scales are still tilted in an extreme direction. It is a social injustice that the middle-upper classes enjoy mostly free banking while the poor have to pay a significant portion of their income to access liquid cash.

Disclaimer: I work for a startup that provides low-cost banking services to the poor. http://www.onefinancialholdings.com/bee/

View on HN

Yes, payday loans are a good example. In fact I would argue that this extends to ordinary consumers, with late fees, overdraft fees, credit card interest, and so forth. Even traffic tickets can be a form of this.

By the way, I'm glad you're working on this problem. At the end of the day, money flow is information flow, and there is no reason for the poor to be victimized the way they are.

Checking out the startup you work for - seems like it offers the same services as Simple, but charges a monthly fee.

Is there something I'm missing that's different? Only thing I can tell is that Bee allows two free ATM withdrawals a month.

It's not a free account, but you've basically just named two of the very few fees; this makes it significantly cheaper than a Chase Total Checking account ($12/mo for those who do not meet balance requirements, not even counting massive overdraft fees).

Bee makes it (nearly) impossible to put the account into a negative balance, and has no concept of an overdraft fee.

Another big win is mobile check deposit. Customers can deposit checks with instant availability for a 1% fee or use standard clearing for free; this is substantially cheaper than check cashers.

Interesting - yeah the big differentiater seems to be that with Bee you can get instant access to your check for 1%.

Simple has ATMs you can use for free which are pretty common which covers that and also has no overdraft fees (or concept of overdraft really).

Simple has no monthly fee though which is a point in its favor - it also lets you do most of the same thing (lock cards, mail a check etc.).

One difference that immediately jumped out at me is with bee you can send a paper check. My landlord for instance will only take a paper check or money order and with simple it isn't possible to easily pay my rent without a fairly significant inconvenience. I'm sure many poor people are in similar situations.

Simple allows you to mail a paper check too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com