With both having happened over time.
They also at least somewhat try to compete with Paypal on online payment on EU specific shops (not they they have much success, not just because of network effect but because a combination of their products being sub-par and them realizing that various other even less competitive/ux friendly competitors would make them more money if anyone would just be using it..., so they are in the process to "get innovated" again by forcing impl. of certain ideas related to person-to-person money transfer which have proven to work/being useful in a few countries where they/their banks did adapt them years ago.)
Paypal is needed in USA due to archaic systems. In Europe many banks allow instant transactions without the risk of blocking your money for 180 days - what paypal seems to do
When I sayed "competing with PayPal" I meant for paying online, i.e. alternatives to both PayPal and Credit Cards. Not p2p money sending.
Also you never replied about paypal not being a real bank, ao it can block money for months. Are you connected to them in any way?
why should I reply on things which have nothing to do with the discussion?
This never had been about weather PayPal is good or bad or anything, but that it's is very dominant in huge parts of the (western) world _for online shopping_ (not for sending money between people). Something which is a fact weather I like it or not.
> Are you connected to them in any way?
no
through the way you jump from a normal discussion to conspiracy theories is not normal, are you trolling?
Pretty much every single online shop/website ever allows paying with PayPal (and Credit Card). And you pretty much have to use it as not allowing paying with PayPal will reduce your sales noticeable, especially for international orders. This is something people funnily frequently rediscover, again and again.
Also I don't thing many people do use PayPal to send money between each other tbh. when I mean competing I mean for paying online not for p2p money transfer. Like sending other private people money always had been trivial, through slightly annoying, in the EU, even before smartphones where a thing.
And yes it is thanks to a byzantine system of history, regulations and very few Americans travelling abroad to experience radically better systems.
Crypto is the last offshore banking for the middle class. It essentially took over right when FATF eliminated banking privacy and bearer shares -- which IMO is no mere coincidence.
I opened my first account in Canada while I was still a US resident. FATCA compliance was a matter of a single extra form, and providing my US SSN. It was about the same for my Caribbean accounts with international banks.
If what you are trying to do is open an account that is not visible to the US government, that is much harder.
Your pizza order needs no clarifications and if you get it wrong, it's just a pizza. If you misunderstand your mortgage you're looking at far more costly consequences.
Although you could well be right about the nature of the transaction, it's definitely a bad idea to be doing that with the bank!
If it's not the bank, and it's not you, it has to be someone else. You can ask over email for all the information available on the products from the bank and take it to an independent advisor. Eventually you'll run into the need to have a live chat with that trusted advisor or risk moving one mail per day in each direction trying to explain what you want and what you could get.
Maybe I'm in graduate school and my salary is called a 'stipend' and I don't get any payslips, plus I have a part-time job in sales where my base salary is very low and about 75% of my income is commission, and also my girlfriend will be helping with the mortgage, but not the deposit, and she's a Ukrainian refugee and self-employed content creator.
An expert who's seen it all before would know how to navigate my situation properly.
> That doesn't make any sense.
Tell me about it. They still won't give you a mortgage, though.
Why? I’d much rather have anything said in writing.
There is a reason why "face to face communication" is a phrase.
The incoming market volatility will likely have winners and losers... but historically it was mostly losers (>6.4 million families and counting.) =3
> worker 401k vulnerability to dubious ETFs
Can you explain this part in my detail? Do you mean money market funds that "broke the buck"?Met a lot of bums in suits trying to sell me on several flavors of BS over the years. lol =3
They seem to be posting a lot of word-salad comments, but assuming good faith, they're saying these are separate downsides of mutual funds over ETFs.
Mutual funds trade on your behalf, like an ETF, but they pass through the gains and losses. That can be painful if they realise those gains when you'd rather not have them, or crystallise losses when you don't have offsets. In this, they're correct. On risk, they're wrong--you can stuff nonsense into ETFs as comfortably as mutual funds. What they're indirectly criticising here is active versus passive management, which is its own can of worms.
The only advantage of a mutual fund over an ETF is it provides friction to trading. Otherwise, they're a vestige from the cusp of computerised portfolio management. (If you have more than ~$1 to 10mm, you should be rolling your own portfolio in most cases.)
My issue with bank-fool recommend mutual funds is primarily they are often a self-serving structured product. i.e. the odds a sucker never sees a consistent behavior is far greater than random chance, and a unconstrained arbitrary guess of a chicken would likely perform better in the markets.
Best of luck, =3
Again, you’re criticising active management in general. (And seem to be mixing up alpha and tracking error. Passively-managed funds aren’t aiming to outperform the market.)
There is no evidence actively-managed ETFs (or hedge funds, for that matter) outperform actively-managed mutual funds. There is also not a material difference in tracking error between their passive products.
ETFs are a retail product. Like mutual funds. Make financial decisions based on the product, not the wrapper. (Also, where in the fuck does one go to get mutual funds in 2025 anyway?!)
You have exceeded my off-topic straw-man limit for the day.
Best of luck, =3
> This account posts a lot of off-topic straw-man arguments, and wild context guesses like regular bot slop.
"This account" -- Do you mean account "JumpCrisscross"? No, I disagree. This person posts lots of intelligent things about securities markets and trading. You can review their history. I assume they work in securities trading on Wall Street (or something nearly adjacent).A broken clock is still right twice a day...
Thread hijacking is not necessarily intelligence, but rather an attempt to cow people with off-topic rhetoric. However, I do respect your opinions =3
> Regular mutual funds usually have higher risk ... than the ETFs.
Can you provide some specific examples? If anything, the transaction friction around mutual funds prevents most regular investors from unnecessary trading that exchange-listed ETFs allow. TL;DR: For most people, more trading means more losses or worse returns.In general, most amateur holds permute well below 3 to 4 months on average. Note the old joke: "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered"... was never funny for those providing cash capital to gamblers.
Most people assume they are luckier than average... and most of Las Vegas was also built on losers money.
Have a great day, =3
Personally, I prefer retaining the option to sue people that pull stunts. But to each their own... =3
If that's an option for you, sure. I work in finance and retain FINRA arbitration as a customer. When I'm signing with clients, I do not like to include it--I have a strong advantage in court and don't want a venue that's biased against me as a professional.
All of this is totally irrelevant to ETFs, mutual funds and CMOs because those are distributed funds whose terms aren't negotiable after offering. (If you're worrying about suing the guy selling you ETFs, you're doing something wrong. Probably overtrading.)
A fintech with 1M users screwing up loan rate timings being unable to finance savings accounts and facing a run, would not have much runway and the government would simply slowly try to make people get 50c on the dollar and tell them to go back to a big bank if they want better...
Any financial institution that makes the act of investing money simple and legible will win some market share. I have some savings accounts in RBC Canada, and the UX seems to be designed by monkeys throwing around crayons.
It is indeed quite interesting that its innovation and competitive pricing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838063) in the last couple years has happened under old, established Power Corp.
Any educating theories about why this is happening now?
But I think the point still stands. WealthSimple is probably not perceived by the median customer as a traditional bank. So people using it is a counter-example to GGP's point that people won't use "startup" banks.
Vanguard asset allocation ETFs are at like $1.3T [2]. 4 Of Canada's Big banks appear to add up to just over 2T Assets under management based on what Google just gave me as summary. So while I think this is a great outcome for a startup (even with Power backing them), to me it seems in a similar space as the above article that we're still talking a relatively small market share, and likely still closer to early adopter status.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthsimple#:~:text=As%20of%2... [2] - https://www.vanguard.ca/en/product/investment-capabilities/a...
Well in fairness Wealthsimple is an investment management platform providing some bank-like features through their partnership with other Schedule 1 banks (previously was Equitable Bank, don't know if they are still with them).
Wealthsimple calls themselves a non-bank [0]. My understanding is that when Wealthsimple says that funds are CDIC ensured, they mean that they are held in a bank account from a third party bank whose funds are CDIC ensured.
I am not a lawyer or a banker, but Wealthsimple always scared me a bit after seeing what happened to (albeit far sketchier) Yotta when a fintech company they relied on (Synapse) folded. While funds are insured, if your funds are not "lost" but simply inaccessible, the insurance isn't really worth anything. Likewise, my understanding is that if WS goes belly-up (unlikely) there's a possibility where funds are still made inaccessible and the CDIC insurance doesn't kick in since the third-party bank is still alive and well.
The account management interfaces of Canadian banks are pretty universally terrible. Even the neo-banks like Tangerine.
Security is a clown show at Tangerine, I no longer use it and can't suggest other folks do.
> I no longer use it and can't suggest other folks do.
Same. I was lured in by their interest rate bonuses a couple years ago, but they're no longer offering anything that isn't beat by WealthSimple and others.
Most if not all the big banks have a high yield savings account or an equivalent under different names.
And yes, it's just a savings account with an actually noteworthy interest rate. It's usually a bit below the interest rate of money market funds.
Disrupting a heavily regulated market is usually called ‘racketeering’ or ‘organized crime’.
I use Fi[1] - it is a service layer on top of an existing savings account from a traditional bank, which offers things like automatic budget/expense tracking with UPI (standardized cashfree payments platform that everybody uses), quick access to debt and equity funds, credit-profiling and networth-tracking, rewards etc. It's pretty good for now at least: https://fi.money/
As a random example, I had $3,600 stolen from one of my accounts by transactions labelled "Microsoft Online Services" or something like that. The bank reversed most, but not all of the transactions, and then had the nerve to lecture me -- an IT professional more than a bit knowledgeable about security -- about how somehow this was all my fault.
Turns out that banking security and reliability from a customer's perspective is absolutely insane. It's totally ass-backwards. It's the opposite of the Apple experience that made that particular company the biggest in the world.
1) Every field in a credit card transaction is attacker-controlled. They can put down whatever business name they want, whatever text they want, etc...
2) Every field in a transaction history is either an alias ("operating as xyz pty ltd"), an abbreviation, or just outright confusing.
3) Transaction histories and "you paid $ to X" notifications often turn up hours or days later. There's no geo-location or any other strong identifier linking these to the actual business because of (1) and (2).
4) There's no receipt details in the transaction history. "XYZ pulled $123 from your account... for reasons. It's a mystery!"
5) You can't see who's got recurring subscriptions on your account. You can't trivially cancel or block someone from pulling money from your account.
6) Some banks now show categorised graphs of what you're spending your money on, but they're guessing. They don't actually have the info of where the money went, so this is useless. You can't figure this out yourself either because of the tiny amount of info available to you.
7) You can't use your transaction history for warranty purposes, or any similar thing. You have to keep tiny pieces of paper that fade rapidly... which is I'm suuuure is just a coincidence, right? Right?
8) My bank claims I get notified if a transaction occurs on my account. This is a lie, they only notify me of some types of transactions, and not reliably either.
9) Trivial impossible-travel protections are not put in place. If my phone is used for a payment in a "physical store" while the GPS says it's in a different continent, pop up an "Approve Y/N?" prompt at a minimum!
10) You can't generally limit a vendor's access to your account if they have your credit card details. You can't restrict them to a single transaction, a fixed amount, or no-sneaky-subscriptions.
11) With shared accounts, you can't generally tell who made a transaction, even if they have individual cards and/or mobile devices. (You can sometimes, depending on the bank and the type of account, but it's not consistent. This is what happened to us: Both of us assumed the other partner set up a valid subscription.)
Etc, etc, etc....
I could go on for hours.
Unfortunately, like many people of said, the inertia of the incumbents and their moat of regulation makes this kind of thing nigh impossible with backwards compatibility.
Some org like Apple or Meta with very wide reach might be able to force vendors to jump through their hoops, which then will drag the traditional banks kicking and screaming into the future.
I'm not holding my breath.
This is because any company that has the potential for creating recurring subscriptions can do so to anyone at any time with nothing but an account number.
There is no pre-verification of authorization whatsoever. The only thing you can do is continuously monitor your bank statements and dispute the charges when you see something turn up, then hope for the best.
This system is croocked by design. Most people can't even believe it is this way , but presentations by budding fintech to small companies tout this 'feature' as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
There actually is a way they can sync up to say this is an authorized regular transaction and they get the ability to keep charging even when the old number expires and a new card gets issued.
I forget what it's called, and I don't believe it's supported everywhere.
Personally though in a lifestyle with like a dozen regular recurring credit transactions I'm not likely to cancel on a whim or forget (electricity, gas, daycare, insurance, internet, etc.) I'm fine most of these entities getting a more stable identifier for billing but I do agree it would be better to be opt-in on the cardholder side.
Indeed, the entrenched investment industry has become less fair (or an outright liability) to customers, but casinos are at least honest with their customers. Gambling with other peoples money was not a real financial service until relatively recently.
There is a market for a fiscally sustainable savings/investment industry, but most people with under $2m in cash can't afford the bonded fiduciary services.
Good luck, I kind of admire their ill fated ambition. =3
> bonded fiduciary services
I never saw this term before. Google shows me nothing. Can you explain what you mean, please?This detail becomes important when various cons come around to bleed off your assets. Could be as simple as a "friend" hyping worthless pump-and-dump stocks, or a fund manager with ballooning fees.
In general, the lack of impulse control shown on YC seems to indicate this information is not that useful for many readers. Some people like being poor apparently lol =3
They’re mixing up a securities term (irrelevant to banking per se and cash management totally).
What they mean is getting an adviser who is bound to act as your fiduciary versus as a counterparty [1]. If you’re trusting your portfolio management entirely to a third party, they should be a fiduciary.
That said, people outside finance seem to make a bigger deal out of this than it is—in America if you’re a retail investor and you have a problem with a FINRA-member broker, FINRA arbitration will almost always side with the retail investor. Fiduciaries will tend to cost more (it’s riskier) and say no to you more; after all, you’re asking them to take decisions for you. I work in finance and couldn’t tell you which of my managers and advisers are fiduciaries because I double check what they say and limit what they can do. And this, again, has to do entirely with investments. Not banking.
More pointedly, this part is nonsense: "most people with under $2m in cash can't afford the bonded fiduciary services." What you want for cash management is yield (reward) and sweep (risk management).
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/5-misconcep...
I think you are feigning ignorance for some reason or posting AI slop,
Best of luck =3
No. A "bonded fiduciary service" is not a thing. That's why there are literally zero hits on Google for that string.
You're thinking about an adviser--who must be a registered professional in the U.S., but that's a separate topic--who agrees to be bound as a fiduciary. (Bonding is a surety concept [1]. If someone is arguing their fiduciary duties are stronger because they're bonded, please report them to your regulators because that's nonsense.)
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/what-does-bonded-mean-definitio...
I already donated to the Yellow Feather Fund friend, as I recognized some people are very special in this world =3
Buy gold bullion, rent a bank safe deposit box, store it there. I suspect this is what comes closest to that, as of now. (Sigh.)
This is the worst of all worlds. You have a high-transaction cost volatile asset in a box which provides you with less legal protection than crap stored in a home with renter’s or homeowner’s insurance [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
You're already paying a double-digit round-trip spread on retail gold. The point is out of all the places you could put physical gold, safe-deposit boxes max out the worst attributes.
While it is currently legal for US citizens to own gold bars since 1974, if the tax man gets hungry... the old rules may come back into popularity.
Best of luck, =3