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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

It is incredible how simple it would be for banks to allow you to create an unlimited number of "accounts" (they are just yet another row on their database, after all), and yet how few banks actually allow you to do that without paying ridiculous amounts of fees.

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> simple […] unlimited

I like how just explaining your concept makes it seems almost impossible in one word.

Otherwise, from a bank perspective having a set of legal obligations for each account it handles feels like a nightmare. If you split your 10 billions into an infinitiy of smaller 1000s accounts, is it supposed to guarantee all of them if it goes under ? Does it report and audit each single account etc.

If these “accounts” are just a virtual partition of your money and all follow the same rule, why wouldn’t you just deal with them as separate entities in your excel sheets and let the bank have it as it is now ? If you have a clear business use (e.g. those are “wallets” for your customers) there are already banking entities providing these services, it’s a matter of paying them enough to work with you.

For non business accounts there are already clear cases where you would create new accounts (money that effectively needs to be under a separate ownership, or bound to a specific legislation, rule or currency), so it’s not like there currently is a limit on account creation, the friction added to create one is actually protecting the system from abuse.

In legacy finance, when you pay someone with a check or wire, they get your account number and from then on can debit more from your account anytime they want, restrained only because you can dispute it after the fact. The obvious, reasonable way to fix this is to create a new ID number for each payment. We have computers now. The friction you like here is doing the opposite of protecting the customer from abuse.

(I think I've read about some banks offering this as a special feature.)

> and from then on can debit more from your account anytime they want, restrained only because you can dispute it after the fact.

They can, in the same sense that people can take stuff from your front yard if they feel like it.

You can’t do this in any country that I know of. I need to explicitly allow people to debit money from my account.

You can do this in the US. ACH only requires the numbers (account + routing) that are visible on every check we write.

Yes but if you are caught doing unauthorized ACH transfers it's not going to be good for you.

In the case of monthly bills and related things, you authorize them once. Don't know what that looks like at the backend and what controls there are but utility companies and the like can absolutely debit money on an ongoing basis.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

My bank offers this by giving you virtual accounts (called pots). They are, like you say, just partitions of the same account, but it is useful to have them in the bank as opposed to in a spreadsheet. Bills only come out of the bills pot, savings are fenced off from outgoings etc.

Salary gets automatically sorted into the pots when received.

I love how people, usually on the outside, think everything would be simple. The parent comment reminded me of the "I just learned about Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it."

The Dutch Bunq bank has described itself as a bunch of nerds with a banking license. Their plans include a large number of accounts, physical cards that can be dynamically coupled to any of them, an API, zapier integration, among many other non-traditional features. https://www.bunq.com/benefits

Their feature list certainly looks impressive, it might just be the bank I was looking for.

One thing I can't quickly glean from their pages is: can I get proper API access to my account if I'm just an individual user, with no exorbitant price hike, requirements to be a large business, or to enter into an additional business relationship with the bank?

The litmus test I have for the dream bank I'm looking for: can I have a normal account and get an API endpoint, to which I could point a script and fetch my balance and transaction history? Without being forced to go through a browser to authenticate on each request, or any other kind of interactivity?

I think that your litmus scenario should be doable with all EU banks, for PSD2 compliance.

The Bunq API allows you to do a lot more than that though. https://www.bunq.com/api

> I think that your litmus scenario should be doable with all EU banks, for PSD2 compliance.

It isn't, though.

This is my big disappointment with PSD2: it's an interoperability law for businesses, focused on enabling service providers. It doesn't help individuals directly.

PSD2 is why I can view all my accounts from different banks any one of the bank's webapp. PSD2 is why I can pay some third-party service to give me a fancy budgeting dashboard[0]. Why, were I running a nontrivial business, I could do some banking using invoicing software.

But I don't want that. They all do a shit job at this[1]. I can do better - I just need an API endpoint, preferably one that can do read-only operations and internal transfers with preauthenticated token, so I can automate most of my banking away. So my problem with PSD2 is that it didn't compel banks to give such APIs to individuals. And since it didn't, they mostly don't.

[0] - I could do that before PSD2, but back then, it usually involved giving them access in violation of the bank's TOS, and trusting the service won't just steal all my money.

[1] - That's not because they're bad technically, but because we have conflicting interest. The banks want me to do everything through their webapp and mobile app, because they want to upsell me more financial products. Budgeting services want me to use their UI, because this justifies subscription costs and also gives them further opportunities to surveil and monetize me. Meanwhile, all I want is to never see their inconvenient and bloated UIs. I want to run my own reports, my own analyses, my own stupid "account balance" widget, that requires no login, zero clicks, combines all accounts from all banks, and shows no advertising.

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

A bank account object is tied to legal and reglatory stipulations though, as well as separate insurance and other risk mitigation policies.

It's not just a matter simply of inserting rows in a table - there is overhead and other matters to consider.

Capital One actually allows you to open several checking accounts with no additional fees. I use them as separate “buckets”.

those are typically sub accounts - not full accounts.

Depending on the bank regulator there may need to be some equity behind the accounts.

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