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Comment by pandemicsoul | Hacker News Reader

Postal banking would be a good solution. It would allow the post office to offer basic banking services for folks like this that can't access it at commercial institutions.

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You need to allow everyone to do banking via this resource and they should also want to use it as a bank. Otherwise you'll run into a situation where that bank is associated with risky customers and is thus treated based on that reputation.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good/better.

If USPS banking helps the unbanked by only 50 units of help instead of a maximum of 100, it’s still a 50 point improvement. If Morgan Stanley or JPMorgan can offer me a better banking deal than the post office could, that’s no reason to not have the post office offer banking.

I agree it should be open to everyone, but don’t agree that there can be a maximum of zero-point-zero difference in customer base vs other banks.

Easy, give every SSN a corresponding USPS/public bank account

Yeah, I did not mean to imply that postal banking would just be for high-risk customers. There are no postal banking plans where that's a restriction – everyone would have access to it, including many who are too far from a bank to have regular access. The post office is the government's widest reaching physical presence in this country with more locations than any other part of government, so it makes sense that this would be an inroad into banking for lots of people.

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