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Comment by i2pi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of the "affiliate" phrase. Most affiliate banking relationships are purely marketing relationships. Stick a logo on another bank's card and call it done.

While our relationship with banks is similar from a regulatory perspective, we have deep technology integrations that allows us to provide a much better end-to-end user experience.

This is why it is possible to launch an 'affiliate' card in a matter of weeks, but it is taking much longer for us. We first had to find banks that shared our vision, were willing to cede control of fees and user experience to us and had the technical chops to integrate with us. It was a tall order, but we'll be making some key announcements on this front real-soon-now.

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So you're trying to do the iPhone of the retail banking industry? Get the weaker but competent operations to cede control over fees and the user to you, to do something other than the short-term diphittery that's plagued the industry forever, and make everyone piles of money.

I do hope that you tone down the designery stuff once you launch. Google Analytics gets a pass on the front end, but I definitely don't need XSR from MixPanel and TypeKit all up in my banking experience. I know it's heresy to designerbros, but the UX problem with existing banking has nothing to do with typography and everything to do with 3270 emulation & petty bureaucracy.

Mixpanel is not something to get pissed about. It's an amazing source of insight for people who are trying to make good sites, and the data we collect with it is unreal.

My personal opinion is that Mixpanel is part of the ever-rising bar of things rich application sites should start to include. If I see a complex company site that _isn't_ using mixpanel, it will put them down a peg in my estimation. The data you can collect is just that valuable.

It doesn't matter how scrumtrelescent MixPanel is, cross-site javascript inclusion from third parties is extraordinarily unwelcome on a site that exposes full access to my banking to the DOM.

How you can not understand this and still work at a fucking bank? (even an affiliate one)

If only there were solutions or compromises in this business of building sites. Sadly, the complexity of such solutions eludes the both of us.

Does that mean you're only going to use them on the brochure side of the site?

There is no way I'm going to be your customer if you intentionally leak my financial actions to two third-parties to get analytics or grant full client-side access to my bank account to them along with a third just for fancy fonts. Sure I could block them in my browser but I'm not going to use a bank that would even try that shit.

"Does that mean you're only going to use them on the brochure side of the site?"

Congratulations. You're actually attributing a bit of reason to us. Conversations will be much more productive now. In any case, Mixpanel is easier to integrate on pages with secure data than typekit. There are ways, albeit ways that further narrow our browser compatibility profile.

But I can't get past the idea that you trust Google's scripts with your financial data. They're the single biggest target on the internet; if anyone wants a big score GA is going to be where they hit first. Even 5 minutes serving to GA pages could potentially result in millions of stolen passwords.

I'd assumed that at first but your statement about how absolutely every rich site should be using MixPanel hinted at something so unreasonable that it made me "take you down a peg in my estimation".

I don't trust Google that much, I just trust the others far less — there are degrees of infinitesimals! Besides, an untargeted score on GA would be such a hueg firehose that y'all would be way down the list of people to sift through data for much less prewrite an exploit for.

Even you writing your own code to ship specifically detuned events to MixPanel makes me somewhat uneasy.

> Even you writing your own code to ship specifically detuned events to MixPanel makes me somewhat uneasy.

Why this, specifically?

Weird, because my local bank (https://www.mechbank.com) has Google Analytics embedded on their main page.

And I'm pretty sure they would consider themselves to work at a fucking bank (an FDIC one).

Do they have it embedded anywhere past the login?

I sure as hell hope not, and I trust Google a hell of a lot more than I trust MixPanel or TypeKit.

Does BankSimple have it embedded anywhere past the login?

Hint: you don't know.

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