The Big Banks | Hacker News Reader

The Big Banks

simple.com

19 pointsjoeyespo6 comments

I like how I got to the site, get a 1/2 second flash of the article which is then covered up by a full screen popup telling me to enable javascript (I use noscript). I just wanted to read the goddamn article!

I came to the comments just to bemoan this as well.

I see this pretty often and I have a tip for developers who really want to insist on JS without infuriating their visitors: Don't let me see the site work before intentionally breaking it to try and force me to be tracked by your marketing code.

Is anyone sort of thinking that Bank Simple is sort of like Diaspora in some essence? They certainly have a presence and are vocal about their plans, but seeing any actual product from them seems to get pushed out further and further?

I was one of the first to request an invite. I needed/wanted to switch banks. It has been a really long time and nothing with Bank Simple saying "coming soon".

I think these delays are narrowing their potential customer base. People dont wait forever to switch banks because one bank is saying they will be better. They switch immediately because usually it is urgent, feed up, etc. They dont tend to switch on a whim, IMO. They decide that their bank is good enough and avoid the headache of switching institutions, changing direct deposit, auto payments, etc.

Reading these periodic blog posts seems a way to keep up hype in the absence of really letting people see the product and be eager to switch.

failures of large banks can be most devastating in small communities where all other banks have been subsumed

Citation needed. Isn't the FDIC's insurance enough to cover most of these people? The risk is not in the bank failing; it's in the bank succeeding. If a bank is the only bank in the market, customers have no recourse when the bank lowers their interest rates on savings accounts or adds random $5 debit card use fees. That's the risk in one bank becoming too big.

Between 1980-1998, almost 8,000 small banks were acquired by larger institutions in the US.

Incredible.

How is ~420 acquisitions a year in a large industry amazing? Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Cisco probably average over 100 a year between them and they are unlikely to be 25% of the tech industry total. Simple's blog post, at least, doesn't say how many small banks existed in 1980 or 1998 so we have no idea how this changed the small bank landscape. Oddly it does say that the number of large banks declined by 50% but I bet a lot of that was taking over failing banks.

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