Choosing a Bank for Your Startup | Hacker News Reader

Choosing a Bank for Your Startup

dm.app

23 pointsstatico16 comments

I’m of the opinion most startups are best served by either their local bank or credit union (where they can go talk to someone - but usually have antiquated tech ) or just the basic business checking from a large money center bank (BofA, Chase, etc) don’t overthink it unless there is some API/Technology stack you need to use.

Yes, although our experience in going through the painful PPP process with one bank caused our firm to switch to another bank. When sudden changes like the PPP loan process happen you can tell which banks are prepared and which aren't. On that note, I recommend Chase and can't recommend our local bank. The CUs also weren't well equipped to deal with the PPP loan.

Certainly you don't need to bank at Silicon Valley Bank or whatever is favorite of VCs or investors these days. The article talks about SVB Go, but it's basically your run of the mill mobile banking app (which doesn't get good reviews on Android, btw). Chase's mobile app has been high quality for a long while. I don't see the reason to go with any of the banks mentioned in this article.

SVB Go is a shit app, with a shit product manager, and the whole process of them forcing users onto is was shit. Shit = bad.

Other than the laxative industry I can't imagine a situation where shit is good. That being said it's a crying shame that a bank in the middle of the tech ecosystem with the very name of the tech ecosystem as their whole branding can't make tech work. Maybe it's just a mirror of the whole industry - lots of smoke and mirrors and not much real substance.

Mercury has been an amazing service for our bootstrapped startup. The virtual debit cards have been extremely useful, the website and app are fast and just work, and the founder is very accessible on Twitter. Highly recommend if you just want a simple bank that works

+1 for Mercury for biz banking

(no affiliation other than as a satisfied customer)

Ive been using for awhile now for basic banking and can also say that I appreciate the UI as a customer. Have used a couple of the partnerships deals as well. One thing that I really like as of recently is that there are no international or domestic wire fees which is a nice offering that sets them apart from BigBanks.

One thing I did find annoying was that it took quite awhile for them to set our account up even though we were setting up an incredibly simple company with no gotchas.

The only thing I wish they did was line of credit but it doesn’t seem like they are terribly interested in being into lending at the moment.

Thanks for sharing! Its so frustrating that modern banks are split into two distinct categories: the classical banks and the neo-banks.

The first ones are slow, ugly and borderline unusable.

The latter ones are sleek and fast, but completely deceiving and unreliable. Those Neo Banks are best examples of modern FinTech - no Finance and no Technology whatsoever. Almost none of those unicorn Neo-Banks has a credit license, the most essential feature of a bank! And their technology boils down to having a mobile app. Hardly impressive in 2022. Is a barbershop with a mobile app suddenly a tech business?

Reviews like this really help - will be hoping for more

I'm glad you found it useful!

Banking in the US is still so archaic.

I once had reason to use ANZ while in the area and it was a revelation. You could send money quickly and pay bills on schedule or directly with few to no fees, from modern, intuitive interfaces. >$1000 or 25 cents, didn't matter. Next, next, done.

It's how I've envisioned banking since the birth of the web, but it never happened in the US that I'm aware of. Unless you use a potentially malicious rent-seeking third party to paper over the obstacles. Not a reasonable trade-off IMHO.

It's good to hear that SVB had improved. I ditched them after getting one of their accounts through Stripe Atlas and couldn't have been more displeased with how _absolutely everything_ was a struggle to do.

Exactly the reason we started with First Republic! But yes, the new SVB experience (SVB Go) has been fantastic relative to when we used them a decade ago.

I've been using a wise.com Business Bank Account for my corporation and I'm pretty happy with it. It's basically free, really simple to use, and comes with a pre-paid Visa card.

What about credit unions?

We didn't consider any. There are some local ones that we've used personally, like First Tech, but we were unimpressed by either their customer service for business clients or by their tech offerings.

Yeah well the tech offerings weren't going to be that good no matter what. It's too small-scale. Maybe Swiss banks have better tech, could be.

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