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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that happens to be in Silicon Valley. It's a "Valleyesque" outlier in terms of bank policy — they are terrific at working with startups in unusual situations. (Your average bank equates "unusual situation" to "just hang up the phone".) But their technology isn't like the Tesla of banking or anything. Though they did buy Standard Treasury, so perhaps that'll be an interesting direction.

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absolutely. First Republic and SVB are the only two banks that know how to work with startups. The more mainstream banks really don't understand the challenges of being a startup. They'll ask for things like your businesses tax return from the previous year when you try to open an account... and then get confused at what to do when you explain to them that you have only existed for 2 weeks.

Calling BS on this. I've started several companies and opened Wells Fargo accounts for all of them within days of incorporation. Now, if you are talking about _borrowing_ money from the bank I think it makes sense to have to show some businesses financial history. Simply to open an account : in my experience all you need is the relevant incorporation paperwork and some money.

A while back, I had a major bank in Australia act completely puzzled that I might want a credit/debit card for my 10 year old web business. They appeared to have no offering and couldn't comprehend my need. I was trying to explain that I used it to pay for online services like hosting, domain registration and the like. It was like I was speaking a foreign language.

The only option they mentioned involved keeping thousands of dollars essentially in escrow. The bills I was needing to pay were easily less than that each year, let alone monthly as I paid.

Hearing banks confused by remotely atypical businesses no longer surprises me.

I can only speak to my experience and those of my friends who have started companies. This is the kind of experience we had

I realise theres a proclivity to be anal here but there's a lot of companies incorporated in the US every day and generally one of the first thing every business does is open a bank account. I'm not saying what you said isn't true, but I sincerely doubt it's representative. Borrowing, I agree is a different matter.

It's quite interesting in Poland, where you formally have to have a company bank account in order to register a company and banks refuse to open one for you unless you give them your company registration numbers (which you get after registration). So basically, you have to lie.

What did you have to lie about?

Did you lie about the company registration number to the bank? If so, how did it happen to match the one you were eventually assigned?

Or did you lie about the bank account number when registering the company? How did you guess the one the bank eventually was going to assign to you?

> They'll ask for things like your businesses tax return from the previous year when you try to open an account

What? I've done this in a few hours, both in Colorado and Ontario. Go online, register, print out registration, go to bank, open account.

Or is this a different kind of account or something?

> They'll ask for things like your businesses tax return from the previous year when you try to open an account.

This seems far-fetched... I walked into my Credit Union with my corp documentation and left with checking & savings accounts in less than 45 minutes. It was painless.

If all you are doing is opening an account then your registration docs alone are enough. There has to be more to this.

Paperless billing isn't really high technology. They're already sending an e-statement, so I'm not sure what would be keeping them offering to have that be the only option.

I'm guessing there's a legal component involved, somehow.

In Australia that's the case - paper statements are mandated, and if you want a paperless statement there's a bunch of stuff banks have to do including formally recording your preference to have paperless statements and sending a letter once a year or so to notify you of your recorded preference.

I've never gotten a physical letter from CommBank. Is this a state-based thing?

The confirmation letter was a few years ago so it may have been updated.

The legislation was focused on 'debt' based notifications - e.g. the way the existing laws were written, a paper-based notification was the legally recognised way to notify someone of their debt obligations (i.e. credit card statement)

Ah, okay. I don't have a credit card, I thought you were reffering to paper bank statements not credit card bills. :P

All of my credit card statements are paperless. I 2 different financial insttitutions. Ditto my bank statements from one of those two.

The only paper statmeents I receive are for my mortgage account and its associated (empty) savings account. I suspect that's because until recently the credit union they're with was behind the times.

It's likely a business versus a personal account thing. I use the same (Australian) bank for my business and personal accounts, and while I can go completely paperless for my personal account, according to the bank, for various legal reasons I can't do the same for my business account.

It used to be, but hasn't been for years. Banks slowly switched from paper statements, to summary statements to now you can have entirely electronic statements. I get no physical bank statements from any of the banks I use (CBA, Suncorp, ING & BoQ).

There's no legal requirement to send a statement exactly, the bank can't force the customer to eStatements, but they can choose not to keep the account open if they opt out. There's additional complexity around if it's a debit account vs credit account. But usually what happens is the system the bank bought to run their core is setup one way and hasn't been switched for a long long time.

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