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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

That's wild, reading that article.

It wasn't mentioned there, but for point of comparison, look at FDIC turnover time. If a bank shuts down and goes into FDIC receivership, it re-opens the next day. In some complicated cases, they shutter on Friday and re-open on Monday while working over the weekend to get things in order.

Yes, that's a completely separate ball game, and is less complicated by the fact that they prioritize re-opening the brick and mortar banks themselves not a purely online bank. But - it feels like it should be handled better in a software world, not worse.

Oh well :\

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> If a bank shuts down and goes into FDIC receivership, it re-opens the next day.

Have I got a story for you.

What you described normally happens.... Unless the bank fails so hard that no buyer for it is found, and then the FDIC insurance kicks in.

I know, because it happened to me back in 2012. :-) My bank failed, and they were in such bad shape that nobody wanted to buy it! I got an email on a Saturday morning stating that my bank had failed. Here's a copy of said email: https://imgur.com/a/HR42BxZ

The following Thursday, the check from the FDIC for the contents of my bank account arrived in the mail.

Now that's wild.

While going through that process was probably stressful and scary, it's honestly a bit refreshing to see that "the system" works as intended.

I think the average American takes the words "FDIC Insured" for granted, assuming that the worst (bank failure & closure) will never happen. It's nice to see some proof that things will be OK if/when that happens.

Perspective of check for 250 000$ with entire bank account being suddenly mailed is quite horrifying.

Hopefully noone was burned by that.

Friday, 2012-10-26: NOVA Bank has failed

Monday, 2012-10-29: checks will be issued and mailed no later than this date

That's just an incredible feat of bureaucracy.

Ah you're right, I forgot the absolute edge case where it takes them a couple business days due to USPS latency.

That is a pretty rare case though - almost always they find a buyer.

And yes, like you said, it's still not too much of an inconvenience because they're very fast about it.

NOTE: SIPC on the other hand - that can be very slow. FDIC=super fast. SIPC= ???? gremlins ????

Especially egregious given that, since it was voluntary on the bank's part, they could simply (haha) have transitioned different people at different times. Start with transitioning a single customer, make sure it goes well, then a few dozen, etc. Spend a little money on incentives for people to volunteer to go early, it wouldn't take that much money to get a few dozen volunteers.

It's one thing if it goes poorly in a disaster-response kind of situation, where you could not practice beforehand. But this is a self-imposed transition, with at least some control over the timeline, so they should have been able to find these kinds of issues in beta testing.

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