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Comment by curo | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Bank vs my local bank:

SVB:

  - SVB loses a big check of ours for a week prior to PPP
  - SVB takes 1 week to get their newly developed PPP portal active
  - SVB prioritizes new clients and bigger accounts (allegedly, see Twitter screenshots)
  - Delays and bugs once it's live

Local Bank:

  - Local bank tracks and finds lost check, makes except to deposit
  - Local bank puts out a low-tech, but reliable DocuSign PPP form the day after announcement (and 6 days before SVB's portal taking PPP apps)
  - Local bank prioritizes existing clients 
  - No bugs, you can connect with them in <10 mins to talk to a rep

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Silicon Valley Bank is the worst bank I've ever used and we deeply regret ever choosing them. The archaic tech, few physical branches, limited hours, expensive services, and little unique offering other than venture debt makes it a poor choice for the majority of startups. There is nothing "Silicon Valley" about SVB other than their staff salaries being the highest of any public bank.

I wonder why Stripe Atlas chose to partner with them for the banking part of their service. It doesn't seem like SVB aligns with Stripe's ethos.

Probably because of the same unfounded hype that other startups choose them for, but Stripe Atlas now offers better alternatives with Azlo [1] and Mercury [2], although you can still choose SVB if you want: https://stripe.com/docs/atlas/next#bank-account

1. https://www.azlo.com/

2. https://mercury.com/

I wouldn’t say Azlo is better, a I’ve had more issues with them and support than any other bank I’ve used. Everything they do goes through the larger bank, azlo is more like a shiny wrapper on bva.

Because smaller banks don't have the compliance team or technology to allow other companies to manage accounts. There's only a few banks that do this. All the challenger banks mainly use the same banks. The core bank systems don't support multi-tenant, most were designed in 90s or 80s and sometimes 70s. The bank needs to build a middle tier to control access so accounts are separated between companies. Protocols to these systems are terrible, its pretty much a terminal and you are reading columns and line positions to get data. SVB i think actually runs a pretty modern core bank system that has "modern" API, probably soap.

Why does any of that matter here? Atlas just sends an application to the bank on your behalf. It doesn’t manage anything.

Local credit union: funds appear in the account the next day.

"For security reasons, these insecure and buggy features are in fact features, for your protection"

.... but I'm on the phone with you, logged in to my account, reading everything about the account to you that you are asking me for security reasons... the same thing that a hacker would do....

What is the local bank?

First Bank of Colorado (https://www.efirstbank.com/) - I've moved away from CO over a decade ago but kept all my personal banking there. (No affiliation.)

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