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This is the myopia of the affluent. Many people, not just 23 year olds, do live paycheck to paycheck, and need to know on any given day how much they can spend without overdrawing. The answer to this question is hard to find from most banks, who make money from fees and have an interest in their poorer customers overdrawing their accounts by a few bucks so they can charge an overdraft fee. This is a problem that, for instance, Elizabeth Warren has talked about a lot.

Banksimple is trying to build a bank that doesn't suck, and banks suck for a lot of reasons. These features will be helpful to anyone who is living on a low income, either due to misfortune or choice.

That's a reasonable response and I'm very sympathetic to Elizabeth Warren's mission. I hold the greatest innovation the financial industry could come up with, over the long run, is a better educated consumer.

But is this a product that is aimed at low income customers? I struggle to see, from what's presented here, how that particular demographic will benefit from on online bank, iphone mobile banking app, or whatever else BankSimple has to offer.

Has BankSimple cast away deceptive or exploitative fees and the diabolical legalese of the small print? Have consumer advocates endorsed BankSimple as an example of a new more consumer-friendly bank? That would be great, if so, for that strikes me as a core part of Warren's crusade.

I think a bank aimed at providing a good service to consumers, with a great user interface and features that are beneficial to low income customers, has the potential to be truly useful to that demographic.

The two things that could get in the way are marketing and access. I agree that, so far at least, it does appear to be marketing to... well, a hacker news croud. This may change as they open to the general public. Certainly, HNers probably make better beta customers for just about any business. Let's hope they start making themselves known outside the tech field, for their sake and ours.

As far as access, obviously the poorest of the poor probably don't have access to an online bank, and if you make the bank unusable to people without a smart phone, you're limiting it even further. On top of that, it's not clear yet whether they will have stringent credit rating requirements that could shut a lot of people out who need a service like this.

My hope is that BankSimple will keep in mind how important they could be to people who really do need a less malevolent bank. They certainly could end up appealing only to an affluent crowd, but I get the feeling that they have a certain amount of zealous righteousness that could translate good user experience into a truly new type of bank. I do think they are that ambitious, and I think they have the opportunity to fulfill that ambition. But it's still up to them to prove that their heart is in the right place.

> Has BankSimple cast away deceptive or exploitative fees

According everything they yes, they charge any fees or having any penalties for things like overdrafting your account.

To add to your point - This feature is very much required not only for people living paycheck to paycheck but also for people holding multiple accounts. I've had many instances in which my BOFA account was overdrawn simply because I didn't know how much money was there when I swiped the debit card. Banks thrive on these overdraft fees. I even talked to the BOFA branch manager telling them not to honor a transaction if I don't have the required balance and they simply wouldn't agree to that.

They're not building a bank that doesn't suck. They're building a nice web interface.

They don't appear to be addressing any other service-related issues at all. Rather, they're just outsourcing that.

>Can I initiate a wire transfer from an internet cafe in Laos?

This reminds me of the time in 2000, when I left the US for a 6-month backpacking trip in SE Asia. While in Thailand, I "lost" my wallet sleeping in a hammock at this bar...

I had maybe $20 USD in Baht in my wallet - but I had my cards as well.

I got hold of Washington Mutual and after some time got to some executive explaining my issue. My family had been banking with Washington Mutual since ~1940. My home branch, which was the branch I was talking to was the same physical branch my family had been visiting since 1959. They new my family name and I had ~$25K in the account at the time.

They REFUSED to help me in any way shape or form. When I stated that I only had $10 left their exact words were "Well, I suggest you use your $10 for something more productive than calling me"

I emailed every newspaper I could think of - after some time the San Jose Mercury News picked up the story and they went and interviewed the manager who had said that to me on the phone.

I had to get my mother to wire me money and it was a hassle - but it was infuriating that they refused to help me in any way.

I immediately closed my account the day I was back in the states.

(Aside: I left in October of 2000 with a three jobs "waiting" for my return - the market tanked while I was away and I was then out of work for 18 months. We had a BBQ one day and 45 people attended, all tech, of the 45 - 3 had jobs. Fun times.)

There are plenty of explanations that don't involve living paycheck-to-paycheck.

1. You keep money in several accounts (checking, savings, money market, paypal, etc.)

2. You are a contract worker being paid in large installments and you need to know whether your deposit has cleared before paying bills.

3. You have difficulty with fiscal discipline and only leave money for essentials in your account to prevent over-spending.

and so forth.

My general plan is to put everything I'm not going to spend in the current month in my savings and then gradually draw my checking account down to 0. (I have ING Direct and a credit line attached to my checking account in case of overdraft, so overshooting isn't a problem.) I usually keep track of my balance less my bills for the month and divide it by the number of days left in the pay period. Once that balance goes above a certain level I save more. I've been doing this since college, where I would stash away my student loans into savings and transfer monthly installments into my checking.

The video wasn't working for me when I went to the page, but if that's how the feature works, it might be neat to have that kind of thing better automated.

4. You barely make enough to live on and have no choice but to live paycheck to paycheck.

Presumably not true of most people here, and questionably true of the likely customer demographic of BankSimple, but this is the fact of life for many people.

(I'm a co-founder of BankSimple.)

Once you tell our service about your savings goals, we're able to tell you what you can _safely_ spend. That means not dipping into the savings that you should be building, or putting yourself in a situation where you can't pay rent.

We've done a lot of early customer development. Our features and approach are built from feedback from thousands of conversations. So, yes, a bunch of people do want to know how much money they can spend right now, but we want to let them know that in a way that won't harm them financially.

Payments (wire transfers, etc.) are coming soon. If there's a banking feature you think could be done better, we're probably going to try to do it better :)

Could I get an option to opt out of seeing how much money is safe to spend? I'd rather not have a visual indicator that, in my eyes, is encouraging me that I can safely blow money.

This goes without saying that I would've liked to see the video focus on more of the capabilities of Savings Goals. Let's say, for instance, that I don't have any savings goals setup. Does this mean that you're going to tell me all of my money is safe to spend?

I'd really be interested in seeing how much extra $$ I can contribute to savings/401k/ROTH as opposed to how much extra I can spend. I'd like to be able to adjust numbers with sliders to see various outputs. Also, does this take into account having third party accounts? I have a higher yield savings account, so I would likely not use BankSimple unless it was comparable.

Hi ale3x, I think BankSimple is looking awesome.

Have you ever tried the Payday iOS app? It works just the same (without the power of having a live bank behind it with searchable transactions): what you can safely spend (in our case daily), bills & savings (goals). It's a design I've personally wanted for years and ended up creating because no-one else did. If I'd waited 18 months I'd needn't have bothered! :)

You should take a look as it might amuse you.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/payday/id351013628

p.s. will you ever launch in the UK?

> Frankly, sorting my past transactions just isn't a problem I desperately need to have solved.

That's also not a problem you need to be a bank to solve. Mint and others are already doing a lot of innovation by pulling existing transaction data and offering powerful tools/visualizations for it.

Banks are never the best place to get powerful analytics, because they are limited to the accounts you have with that bank. No one wants to be limited to one financial institution, or have to change accounting systems just because you switched banks.

Bank of America seems to have some Mint-like thing that integrates your non-Bank accounts in their web interface. Theoretically it's some piece of packaged software that banks buy.

It's http://www.yodlee.com/

> That's also not a problem you need to be a bank to solve. Mint and others are already doing a lot of innovation by pulling existing transaction data

Allowing 3rd parties access to your transaction history is a good idea?

> I like the transaction searching capabilities shown in the demo, but I was hoping to see more info on how to do actual "banking" tasks. Can I initiate a wire transfer from an internet cafe in Laos? Can people send a check to an address in the US that automatically gets deposited in my account? That sort of thing. When these guys came on the scene, I got the impression that that was the kind of thing they'd be doing better than other banks. Frankly, sorting my past transactions just isn't a problem I desperately need to have solved.

Did you watch the whole thing? They showed sending money through the website. You can deposit checks by mail or with your phone (take a picture).

https://banksimple.com/faq/

I believe that figure of how much you can spend today takes into account savings goals as well as payment commitments.

Also there is no reason you can't look and see you have some money that is available and toss it in a savings account. Basically the user gets to choose where that money goes, but either way they have a better idea of "what's left over."

Indeed, the presentation felt like the demo of a poverty-management tool.

Then again, I don't expect much from a banking website, although I don't get it today: seamless authentication, easy transfers, easy listing and canceling of pending authorizations... I don't think I need more services, I just need the usual ones to be usable. It's unfortunate that the usability concept seems beyond the reach of most bankers.