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Comment by programbreeding | Hacker News Reader

I believe what apostacy meant was the ability to prevent a recurring payment from occurring without approval. I may have misunderstood what they meant but something along the lines of: a debit shows up in your account as pending, and you have X amount of time to approve or decline it. That way you are preventing a debit from even occurring in the first place, rather than having to fight your bank to get the money back.

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What I basically want, is to have more control. I want a similar amount of control as to what I have with paper money, or even virtual in game currencies.

Right now, the scale is not tipped in my favor. I would be happy to pay for it.

I understand that banks have reasons for things to be arraigned the way they are.

I would love to have a "personal firewall" level of control over my money. I'd like to see that Widget of the month club is requesting $50, and I can confirm/deny it.

I only signed up for a widget of the month because it seemed like a good idea, but they deceived me into thinking I could back out at any time, and then when I cancelled my account, they just "paused" it for three months.

We don't use the "banking" model for other resources that are supposed to be our property. An app on my phone isn't supposed to be able to delete my photos, and the accepted solution is not that I call some external entity to undelete them. I know that these examples are very different, but that is what I would like.

I can also simply block someone from contacting me if I want, without having to justify it to my isp. I want to be able to do that with my money. If someone disagrees with me doing this, and thinks I still owe them money, they can be free to sue me, or do some other sanctions.

Right now, I create virtual credit cards and only fund them enough to pay my recurring payments. I want to automate it.

95% of the time, recurring payments that fail for me are done in bad faith, and these actors will not make a fuss if they can't process their payments.

I know this is probably a pipe dream, and that there are already system I can use, and that our financial system is set up the way it is for reasons. But that's a pain point for me, and a lot of people. People would like to be empowered, and feel that they have control. I think, in the end, things won't really change. Most people will still pay legitimate charges.

This screenshot from the front page seems to be offering something like what you want? [1] And they clearly support virtual cards so why wouldn't automating that work through their API? [2]

[1] https://root.co.za/images/rootcode.svg

[2] https://root.co.za/images/mobile-desktop-mockup.jpg

EDITS: added 2nd part and formatting

True, although I wonder whether the transaction can be asynchronous. For example, if you don't approve or deny within a few seconds, I'd be willing to bet that the transaction times out.

This would be fine for in-person transactions, where you can approve it on your phone, but for transactions you aren't expecting (e.g. recurring monthly subscriptions) it seems like you'd need some notice -- or a long timeout period.

I'd love to collapse all of my recurring payments into a monthly report, that I can review and authorize. This is exactly the thing banks are suited to handle.

It would also be cool if a bank could abstract bill payments for me, where they present the debit, and show the time window to pay it, and let me select what business day to process it on.

Actually, all of these services exist in one form or another. If you have a business account. And most banks have bill payment processing. But I'm surprised that no bank is offering these services bundled together, directly to consumers. I'd happily pay for a checking account console.

> I'd love to collapse all of my recurring payments into a monthly report, that I can review and authorize.

Yes, even just a list of the recurring payments (that is updated in realtime and that you can centrally discontinue) should be available to the banking consumer -- and it should be the responsibility of the banking entity to provide this feature.

The do not, because the financial sector makes its revenue from payments occurring, rather than not. A consumer would naturally gravitate towards a bank that was not limited by this concern (or derived equivalent profit elsewhere for provision of value)

What I've found, is that every virtual credit card provider has to try to process recurring payments, even if that virtual credit card is depleted, kind of defeating a big use of virtual credit cards. I am sure that this is something they were obligated to do by other financial institutions. So virtual credit cards just end up being solely for online transactions that are not recurring.

The only company I have found that actually does what I'm describing is entropay.com, and they are based in Malta and I don't trust them for big transactions, as they have been known to steal people's money.

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