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Simple Bank and Why You Shouldn't Bank in Beta

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Simple Bank and Why You Shouldn't Bank in Beta

The Story Bad day for #SimpleBank .

They sent out a message to all their account holders. Presumably the collective "WTF is wrong with my account?!" caused all account holders to try logging in, and accidentally DDoSed their login page. The result is that logins are rejected.

I try getting a password reset (because, hey, maybe the message is my account was compromised), and the email doesn't come. Try again, no email. Now I'm getting worried that something is properly wrong. I head over to the Simple bank status page and Twitter feed, and find out that their login servers toppled over and they're trying to fix it.

Once everything was ironed out, it turned out the secure message was about Simple launching their "Goals" feature.

As @nerded on Twitter[1] posted: "you emailed me a notification to log in to see a msg about a public announcement? This feels very “old bank” : ("

The Simple Bank rep responded with "Actually, I agree with you. We'll consider better ways of doing it in the future. ^RG", which is a fine mea culpa, but does not engender confidence.

Banks are people's money, they aren't just web sites During the login troubles, the Twitter account contained a tweet from Simple to an angry customer who accused them of incompetence, with Simple replying that it is "just a web site" (I can't get a citation right now due to Twitter overload). This is a really bad way of framing the discussion. Simple acts as a bank from the consumer's perspective, and when critical pieces of infrastructure go down, your response should be an immediate apology.

What makes this worse is that Simple markets itself as a company that understands the Internet, but if you know your login page is down, and have no way to push that information to users (after you asked every single one to log in) without resorting to a blog post on your status page, you are acting very much like a company that doesn't get the Internet at all. You're playing in the old bank space, and competition there is getting fiercer (Ally, for example, refunds bank fees from anywhere, which Simple doesn't [2]).

Simple seems to be running with the argument that everyone in their is beta, that betas don't go smoothly, and early adopters should be used to this. To some extent, I get that. But this is people's money, and that's important. When you're building a company on having excellent Internet know-how, being trustworthy and generally just doing better, people remember this stuff. What I find particularly galling is that Simple does not have a means of electronically moving money away from it, only to their account. It's like data lock in, where the only export means (withdrawing it all back in cash from an ATM, writing yourself a check) really sucks. I'd argue that Simple are trying to launch without their MVP (money goes in, money goes out).

Put on a suit, if only in your mind A long time ago, when Simple were first appearing, there was a team photo, and they were in the standard hacker clothing: t-shirts, hoodies, jeans. Not one of them was wearing a suit, and I found that strange and somewhat disconcerting. I want my bank to wear suits. I want them to be diligent, conservative and fearful of screwing up with my money; the loss of such fear being arguably the thing that has changed about consumer banking in the last decade.

Simple give off the impression of a company that is very much a start-up, moving fast and breaking things, and that's not what I, or I suspect, many people, want from their bank. I want you to move slow and keep things working right. Put the suit on in your mind, if not your body.

[1] http://twitter.com/nerded/status/237984492323753984 [2] https://www.simple.com/faq/#usingsimple*

Eh, don't bank with them yet if that's what you think. This industry needs pioneers and anything with the scale and complexity of a bank is going to have some bugs no matter how much testing is done in a private beta.
Yeah, it's scary to think that your money is being managed by beta software, but it was also scary for Chuck Yeager to break the sound barrier.

It is disappointing they are not launching with everything they have promised so far. As itsmequinn suggests, I am not banking with them yet, but have established my account. I think their early motto was to "not suck," or something like that. Right now, they kind of suck. I would be horrified if I'd decided to put all of my money there now, especially when my current bank (State Farm Bank) does pretty much everything Simple has promised, and they do it pretty well. Simple is just a prettier interface with a few nice technology elements. As the author says, there is a certain level of expectation for professionalism from a bank. I want a hacker feel and certain edge to the website and technology, but I don't want a hacker managing my money or a lack of certain fundamental banking tools (like withdrawing/transfering all of MY money at one time).

I've known the Simple folk for a long time. The complexity and inherent safety designed into their product makes every other bank look like a joke. They still have to rely on banking partners to store the money, but they've gone to great pains to make sure that things work in a consistent and fail-safe way, if not with 100% availability during their beta. The other thing to note is that, although it's perceived as a bank, it isn't one; it's a front-end. They realized that everything a bank is defined by when you remove the vault comes down to customer interaction. I'm willing to accept when things break (especially during a beta) in exchange for some making some headway in my banking experience. Without avoiding the pun: it's a very simple proposition.

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