Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> Thus BancList (spelling absolutely intentional, because even the K is regulated and I am absolutely not joking about that fact).

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.

View on HN

A bit of a tangent, but in Canada "financial advisers" are regulated and required to act in the customers interests. So naturally banks will connect you to "financial advisors" (unregulated) to buy products.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-watchdog-advise...

FYI financial advisers having a fiduciary duty to their clients is standard in most of the western world EXCEPT America.

Putting aside the real issue of advisors not acting in their clients' best interest, the distinction between 'advisers' and 'advisors' seems to be a myth based on an assumption by the Small Investors Protection Association that the spelling of the word in a certain law is somehow decisive, which would make no sense in the context of consumer protection.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/financial-advisor-vs-advis...

That seems like it ought to be illegal. It's an obvious skirting of the law. I doubt this is true, and if it is I can't even begin to imagine the number of things this "loophole" would affect.

I'm guessing font size regs are to prevent "RISK FREE INVESTMENT, (investment not risk free)" type things? That seems sensible. I can see there being rules for italics etc for similar reasons.

Wouldn't it be much less game-able to forbid LYING in a document, as understood by the elusive man-in-the-street?

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.

Most of time it isn't about lying, its about small print hidden in the document.

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.

>...the lawyerese is the source code...

Inasmuch as that's even possible, yes. The problem is that even this "language" is open to interpretation by courts.

Would you mind going into more detail? What about the K is regulated? By whom?

"...in the United States, the commerce departments of state governments generally prohibit or restrict the use of certain words in the names of corporations unless those corporations are legitimate chartered banks. For example, words prohibited by the state of Louisiana include bank, banker, banking, savings, safe deposit, trust, trustee, and credit union" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banq_(term)

Thanks for the info! Seems like a bit of a silly regulation given that major banks themselves are able to circumvent it in order to shed liability.

But at least unregistered banks can’t name their company “Trust Bank” or something.

This is worth stressing: such regulations often exist to prevent fraud from outright scammers. If such a regulation did not exist, I am confident there would be institutions that called themselves a "bank" but met none of the basic consumer protections we expect from a bank.

Generally, it's a good idea to force labeling of businesses and products to match their potential customers' expectations of what they mean. It's one of those places where fostering a well-functioning free market (by decreasing information asymmetry, to put it succinctly, even if we're not talking outright scammers) is at odds with some strict notions of liberty (to call your business or product whatever you please).

There are similar requirements in some jurisdictions for lawyers. For instance if you work for a law firm, but are NOT a lawyer, you’re business card must indicate that.

Given the crisis of 2008, I would say that this failed utterly, wouldn't you? It's just another few millions lost in regulation compliance to add to the billions lost to the "outright scammers" that are the regulated banks.

When I worked on a site for mutual funds years ago, we couldn't use green-color text because it could be considered as implying that the person reading it would make money.

Commodity trading platforms are forced by the CFTC(commodity trading regulating body) to represent bids with a blue color, for exactly the same reason. If the bids are green, someone might make the argument that you would profit from bidding more than selling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com