Show HN: Hack Club Bank – A Bank for Student Hackers
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My company is working on similar problem and solution for youth sports teams and clubs which are also non-profits (formally or informally).
Seems to me it is a traditional bank offering the banking services...only in authentic Silicon Valley style its being marketed exactly as you describe, a non traditional bank disrupting the status quo.
Available to whom, though? Companies with millions of dollars of capital or VC money?
I've been asking for, in the past decade, is a read/write API access to my personal account. I can make it work from there myself, and I can do it better than the bank. Hell, even just read-only access would streamline my banking and solve 90% of the use cases I have in mind. But no, it didn't happen, and it's not going to happen.
And I suspect why: because web and mobile apps are first and foremost a way for the bank to upsell financial products.
Every student should have the opportunity to go to a hackathon.
Infrastructure like this is crucial to increasing access.
High school hackers are one of the most under-appreciated technological innovators.
Congratulations on your launch!
This doesn't seem to include insurance, liability issues, etc.
Get a teacher at any public school in the USA to sponsor you (i.e. a school club), and suddenly the Public School System will handle ALL of this insanity for you, and ran through the schools bookstore(usually).
Plus they will eat all of the costs of running it, the insurance problems, the liability issues, etc. If you are under 18 and need this stuff, it's probably easier to just find a teacher to sponsor you and let them deal with all these headaches.
I imagine other countries have similar system(s) in place through their schools. It's not like "hackers" suddenly created these problems.
Student organizer teams assume liability for their events with our model, but we equip them with liability releases for attendees and have a relationship with a great insurance broker they can use to acquire insurance if needed.
You're right: some schools offer financial services, but they're often poorly managed due to lack of resources and are usually only available in well-off areas. Even then, most teachers and school administrators are already crushed by the burden of their workload and are hesitant to take on additional work, especially if it involves potential liability issues. There are probably students in this thread who have had that experience of being turned away—it's pretty common.
In his class you could buy snacks, passes to get out of homework or pop quizzes, rights to sit on the couch, etc.
He also made us pick stocks and bring in cash so he could buy them for us and said we’d get the $$$ + any profits back when we graduated.
When we were seniors and asked for the cash from all those stock picks he acted like we didn’t know what we were talking about.
Years later he got fired for accidentally stabbing a student during a very realistic wagon train history unit.
This guy was really amazing. Before being a teacher apparently he owned a strip club in LA but claimed to be converted by evangelical christian protesters outside his club so he packed up and moved to Erie, PA to become a HS teacher.
This is the kinda guy you want handling your club finances. ;)
That said most public schools now are required by law to have a bunch of checks and balances and it's probably fairly rare that teachers are allowed to directly handle money much anymore. In my schools every employee has to go through a training every year about how the district handle's money, and your role in it (as a teacher/employee/etc) so it's at least now very clear what you are allowed and not allowed to do.
I'd be very surprised if a public school in the USA didn't offer such things, but I'm sure there is some school somewhere that exists just to prove me wrong! :). But I imagine it's a rare exception. Obviously charter schools and private schools are an entirely different mess, and I can't comment on them.
I know when I was a student (in a 80% people of color school) I had teachers sponsor my random events and things all the time, and it wasn't overly hard. You just have to have a good relationship with A teacher. I found my support in the "technology" dept, i.e. VICA and the other vocational groups. Even though nobody in that dept. did anything with computers, they didn't stop me from doing whatever I wanted. :)
Of course we never phrased the playing games event as playing games it was ... exploring 3d virtual worlds.. I believe we called it. :)
I happen to work in public education (90+% free/reduced lunch, so not a well off area) and I know the people that do the student finance stuff at the district level, they never say no, they just crunch the paperwork. I do know we sponsor all sorts of random stuff, including out of country travel for random things. So if a no is happening in "my" public schools, it must be at the local school/teacher level. But I agree I'm sure it happens. I'll have to go poke at them about that, see what I can do to help them get the local teachers/schools to say yes more often.
Public libraries are also a great way to get someone else to handle all the evil paperwork, but it's generally harder to get them to commit as they are always over-worked and not generally focused on school aged children, but if you happen to get lucky and can convince them your event/etc fits in with whatever their public outreach goals happen to be at the moment, they will do all the heavy lifting for you. Otherwise you can just rent out their space for your event (usually very cheaply) using something like what you do. Schools also rent space very cheaply, usually.
This is a popular myth, but false; most US jurisdictions allow minors to form perfectly valid contracts, whether oral or written or otherwise, though such contracts, while they are still executory (that is, while some required obligation is still outstanding), are generally voidable by the minor until and unless ratified in adulthood.
This would be a real problem if credit cards were provided (though IIRC jurisdictions are mixed as to whether an unpaid financial commitment alone makes a contract executory), it's less of a problem with debit cards.
> Get a teacher at any public school in the USA to sponsor you (i.e. a school club), and suddenly the Public School System will handle ALL of this insanity for you, and ran through the schools bookstore(usually).
Perhaps, but...
> Plus they will eat all of the costs of running it, the insurance problems, the liability issues, etc.
If they agree to sponsor the activity. Which is why schools tend to have policies on the activities school clubs can engage in, based on what they are comfortable and experienced with handling, and which don't have uncomfortable administrative, liability, political, or other burdens.
And also why teachers, who often don't get paid extra to take on the role of club advisor, may not want to take the role on. Sure, if you are lucky you may have a teacher into the idea at your school, who d is willing to. You also may not. Or you may not want the activity to be limited to your school (especially if while there is interest in your area, it isn't concentrated on your school.) Getting a public school club to cover administrative, liability, etc., burdens for an activity not limited to the school’s students gets a lot harder.
I.e. If I'm under age, and I get you to loan me $$$ for a computer, I promptly destroy it, return it, and claim I don't owe you any money anymore either, well most states would say it's your fault for being dumb enough to loan a child money and you are out the $$$'s you gave me, with no recourse.
I did say Sponsor. Yes, all schools have limits to what they will cover, and definitely as you say, if it's not limited to the student community (i.e. parents, etc) then it's likely to get scrutinized a lot more before being accepted for sponsorship, but plays, sports, etc are all generally open to the public and are sponsored by the school.
Most schools will also happily rent their space(s) after hours for a generally modest to small fee (say compared to going rate for rent from a business), since public schools can't make money at it.
That's not at all correct (though, frankly, it's about the level of wrong if expect from someone who focuses on who can sign a contract rather than who can form one); I would summarize the usual legal rule, but I already did that in the post you responded to.
> plays, sports, etc are all generally open to the public and are sponsored by the school.
Not generally by getting a single faculty advisor for a student-led endeavor, those have a lot more administrative and faculty involvement, with frameworks (if not specific programs) often set up at the school board level.
> Most schools will also happily rent their space(s) after hours for a generally modest to small fee (say compared to going rate for rent from a business)
Sure, if you are covering all the liability, etc.
> since public schools can't make money at it.
Public schools absolutely can make money at it, unless the particular state law or board policy prohibits them from deriving revenue beyond recovering associated costs from rentals, which isn't, AFAIK, the norm.
Worth noting it's opened up to regulated AISPs now too, so it's no longer only available for consumers to use to access their own information.
There's a waitlist over at https://monzo.com/business/ but you're unfortunately too late for the initial test of 100 users.
A partial list of banks that support OFX is here: https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settin....
For your own bank, look to see if they support import into Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money. If they do, you can probably access the API directly yourself.
Note, you may have to pay a service fee to access the API. This will vary depending on the bank.
It’s an api service that integrates with most major banks.
Because what else can they do? They have the same access you do. Unless you don't give them it, which you shouldn't.
Then I finally saw a disclaimer at the bottom of one of the pages: "Hack Club does not directly provide banking services. Banking services provided by Silicon Valley Bank, an FDIC-certified institution."
Seems a little sleazy to me, but still, a neat service.