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Comment by curryhowardiso | Hacker News Reader

Is the problem that the "stanford disruptors" are sticking to offering value as a payments facilitator/money transmitter and not trying to move up the value chain and get some banking licences? I assume this would be orders of magnitude more difficult but I really want to see it happen somewhere in the world!

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Even the money transmitter play is harder than you'd think (all of what I wrote above is applicable to that class; being a bank is even harder). Since Paypal failed to convince the regulators that they were not an MSB, they are much less likely to let a small fry under the radar.

Cards on the table: I work for a money transmitter "app" headquartered in SF (I say "app" because we still operate in a somewhat speculative niche in the industry) as a software engineer - but I have a degree in law as well. To me the regulatory compliance seems to be an issue with the tech people not properly collaborating with the "banking proper" types (financial services/legal/banking professionals) Note: in "easy" jurisdictions we are seeing some progress[0]

Would you be able to take this offline and discuss with me further? I do not know the protocol for off site discussions from hacker news. Do I give you my public key? haha LOL

[0] www.monzo.com (with whom I haveno affiliation whatsoever)

I think you're right about there being a significant collaboration issue; having a lawyer on your founding team makes this a lot easier.

Happy to chat more offline, I've linked a public key in Keybase to my HN profile, you should be able to do the same and message me there, or just use my key to encrypt your contact details and put that on HN somewhere.

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