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Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

I will never forget the situation of a friend whose father committed check fraud in her name when she was still a child meaning she was never able to have a bank account in her name her whole life (without sending her father back to jail).

I suspect the high valuation is because there are a lot of people like my friend or her dad who can't be on that list of possible banking customers because they can't have a bank account at all.

I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.

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> zero interest

this mean that you are losing anything between 1% and 10% of your money per year (aka inflation). I am not advocating for big banks (which had put food on my table for most of my life) but you only need a (zero-interest) checking account with a debit card for your spending money. Everything else (imho) is most beneficial if you keep them spread out/hidden away, and serving your other purposes (a balance of growth x availability x speed_of_withdrawing).

I remember watching this vid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ) many years (it feels like it was way before the 6y YT says its age is). I do a combination of this video and the Dave Ramsey 'envelope system' (but with different banks and with different accounts). Now, she speaks about the "US way of life" but I like the principle/discipline of this.

The federal reserve doesn't want zero risk banking where end customer is effectively 100% on their books, and will deny accounts to any bank that functions the way your service would would work ( see the denial of account to The Narrow Bank ). It's against their monetary policies as it destroys the mechanism by which credit expansion happens.

> “pose undue risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and would adversely affect the Federal Reserve’s ability to implement monetary policy"

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-san...

The US Treasury has one, though. Not sure if that satisfies the above criteria.

>I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.

This might be a great business ideas, starting a bank that caters to criminals. Of course, the fees should be pretty high to offset the risks.

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