“Banclist.com is probably the most lucrative direct messaging platform”
twitter.com
twitter.com
“Overview
Non-publicly held banks are facing increasing risks when they maintain a private list of their shareholders. Sharing unpublished information about the bank’s stock with a few shareholders exposes the bank, its management and directors to potentially serious liability. Simply answering one shareholder’s question without notifying every shareholder with the same information puts the bank at risk. The threat and penalty of litigation can affect the bank’s reputation and financial performance. In some cases banks can face civil and criminal penalties.
One of the fastest growing bank services companies today, BancList (BL) provides privately held financial institutions and their shareholders (and other authorized users) with an easy-to-use web-based posting service that replaces the list. BL lets shareholders post notices of their intent to buy or sell their bank stock and keeps the bank out of the negotiation process – the way transactions are supposed to occur.
Not only does BL provide a risk mitigation service for banks by replacing the list, it helps banks enhance shareholder value and provides banks with even more information about what is happening with their shares. BL bank clients receive automatic email alerts every time someone posts a notice, which keeps them aware of active negotiations.
BL is not a broker dealer and does not ask for a list of your shareholders. BL never interferes with the relationship between bank clients and their shareholders. BL does not collect broker fees for its services. BL clients pay an annual subscription fee based on the asset size of the financial institution.”
Very cool something of this scope operates with only a handful of employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markit
Being a trusted third party is frequently an amazing business, if you can earn or negotiate your way there.
No, he's not joking. Even the font size is regulated. I ran into that as an employee of a commodities trader. I'm not sure if the choice of font is regulated but it wouldn't be surprising.
Seriously: to judge a contract in case of a conflict, pick 12 people from the street and ask them to summarize it. Go with what they wrote. Going to "experts" when deciding language is what created the current mess, sticking to them is not going to solve it.
Legal text is often opaque to laymen because it has specific legal meaning, plain commonly understood language doesn't have specific meanings so you get into situations where even the lawyers aren't sure how it should be interpreted.
To use a tech analogy, the lawyerese is the source code, if you want the ultimate truth, go there, you should be pairing it with adequate documentation though.
Inasmuch as that's even possible, yes. The problem is that even this "language" is open to interpretation by courts.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-watchdog-advise...
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/financial-advisor-vs-advis...
That's some hyperbole from Patrick. The website is not a direct messaging platform by any stretch. It's a listing website with a very specific audience. Lots of that stuff happen over email, regular DM, phone calls or regular in-persons meetups.
> BancList.com does not participate in any way in the execution of trades. Any trades that may occur must take place offline independent of BancList.com or any of its affiliates.
They only risk getting their data compromised but no money is at risk. Trades happen discretely and they might not be aware of them or not care.
Eek! I wouldn't trust them with my data if I was a bank. They haven't updated their server since 2013. All of the versions listed in that header have major vulns. This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Directly from their website:
"Patrick Brown - Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Brown is the co-founder of Eye Candy Creative, a highly successful technology and marketing company."
So their CTO is a marketing guy. No wonder they suck.
Ah, another company I could never ever have founded because its success explicitly depends on who you know.
Seems like accredited investors and private company stock owners should be able to make deals directly. Someone get on it!
Does anyone know of any such services that are reputable and worth using? Even if it's expensive. Kind of to be expected in that field.
Taking a job in an industry to get access to its seedy underbelly isn't super appealing to most founders, but for some ossified industries there's really no other way to find those golden opportunities.
Oh, and be patient. Practice being a mouthless set of ears.
From the outside? Probably not.
Fixed it for you.
it also doesn't matter when a user engagement ponzi scheme isn't how you plan to cash out of your company
You have these obtuse solutions working around a problem that is only hard because of lawyers and 500 regulations to "protect investors".
People were able to hack together exchanges for crypto-coins. The only thing that stands in the way of doing this for private stock/tiny companies is excessive regulation. I'm not saying we want the whole crypto experience of exchanges blowing up overnight, but what we have now is clearly not right either.
Personally, it sounds like a rather good idea to have regulation over who's allowed to use the word "bank", given the assumptions that the general public will make about anything with "bank" in the name.
In the other system, a company that is not a bank was forced to avoid the word "bank" in their name.
This sounds like two reasons the second system is better, to me at least?
People were able to hack together exchanges for crypto-coins. The only thing that stands in the way of doing this for private stock/tiny companies is excessive regulation.
Crypto exchanges are examples of how to create a financial system that lacks security (both the technical and financial kinds) and trust. It's an example of how NOT to do things. Crypto exchanges act as broker, exchange, clearinghouse, depository and trustee. And do none of these very well.
In the regulated world, exchanges do not hold your assets. There is nothing "on deposit". Your broker (who holds your cash assets instead) is insured. Brokers don't even typically hold your securities, they just track your positions. The security assets themselves are held at depository institutions. Etc, etc. This system is not by accident. It was developed through a long history of trial and error to minimize the impact of fraud, abuse, bankruptcies, etc.
I'll be the first to recognize that most financial regulators have been very slow to adopt to the crypto world. That's because so many crypto tokens are either not securities or quasi securities and thus defy easy classification. Thus some old rules don't really apply well. They're also paranoid about money laundering, which doesn't help.
The software aspects of setting up exchanges are challenging but ultimately not the hard part. I guess my point is that just because something is easy to do doesn't mean it should be done.
Come on now, crypto exchanges are absolutely now a good example to use here - how many millions has been lost through exchanges getting hacked?!