With GoBank, You Can Carry All Your Money In Your Pocket | Hacker News Reader

With GoBank, You Can Carry All Your Money In Your Pocket

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55 pointssama28 comments

I read the other GoBank story, but since it linked to the actual website, which IP-blocked me, I had no idea what they were actually about. So, thanks for this one. :-)

That said, everything they offer I get at my current bank, which has been following the same strategy for over a decade now; almost no branch offices, a stellar internet bank, an even more stellar mobile app, and no weird fees at all. I pay ~$30 a year, and only because my debit card is a VISA card as well.

To me, it's hilarious to read about all the breathless Valley startups doing "amazing products" for personal finance that will "revolutionize" whatever. I haven't yet seen anything that my boring old bank doesn't already do. In addition to everything I listed above, all my purchases are automatically categorized, all my income and deposits are automatically categorized, and my bank automatically generates pretty Web2.0 pages and diagrams where I can slice and dice my personal finance as I wish, or export everything to Excel spreadsheets or whatever.

But then again, I'm not in the US, and my bank isn't a US bank, so to those living in the Valley bubble, the bank I'm using simply doesn't exist, and only the stuff made in the Valley is exciting and awesome, despite there being superior products made long ago, elsewhere.

Of course, there are also probably a lot of products that are outside of my spheres, which blow whatever solution I'm using completely out of the water, but I'm just blissfully unaware, because it's in some country I don't have dealings with or know anything about, but I sure wish some ideas would spread faster and wider than they do. :-/

I've had a similar experience with Simple. The app is beautiful but it's really just another credit card. I love my bank and the features they provide (insurance, different types of credit cards, loans, etc.) are significantly better than what's really just a pretty iPhone app.

Same here. I have a simple account with the $100 opening deposit in it. It's a beautiful UI, but changing banks is an awful pain in the butt and I'm pretty happy, in general, with Bank of America.

My wife and I have our personal and joint accounts there. I hardly ever use my debit card (nobody should! Debit cards are, in general, awful. Credit cards give you actual protection and far more perks). What I care about in my bank is that I can easily connect everything with my wife, that I can easily do bill pay, and that I have full-service ATMs and iPhone apps that include deposit features.

But if I was 20 again and had far simpler banking needs, I think I'd use Simple.

Oh, another thing is, when it comes time for a mortgage or other installment loan, it's sometimes beneficial to have my money at the same institution. If we decided to dump BofA I can see us moving to a credit union (Alliant is great, for example), but as Simple isn't a full-service bank I'd have to pass on it.

If you want to do something interesting in financial technology, you have to get away from the existing networks. Doing that requires 47+ money transmission licenses. Green Dot is an incumbent that has them. Generally speaking, startups do not and will not.

https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html

The big incumbents are all 100+ years old, but Green Dot was founded in 1999, so it's clearly possible to get from point A to point B.

Green Dot bought a failing commercial bank to sidestep all the hurdles.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111208006460/en/Gree...

Both Simple and Google Wallet use The Bancorp Bank for their integration; perhaps its time for a bigger stake in the organization for Google.

I'm serious. Google's data mining ability is unparalleled. Buy a bank, become Google Bank, and start lending. I believe Google's investment/risk analysis would be far superior to any existing bank out there.

It's more of an issue that startups can not get those licenses - at least not early on. It's simply too expensive and too time-consuming - we're talking multiple millions of dollars over probably at least two years. Unsurprisingly, the people that hand them out (state governments) are a bit inflexible when it comes to presenting them with any business model less than fifty years old, although it's slowly improving in at least a few states.

Yeah, in the US Charles Schwab provides most of this stuff (they refund all ATM fees so you effectively can use whatever ATM you want, they have an app w/ check depositing, etc) and has for a long time. Don't really get it.

I'm also with Schwab. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to cash in on the anti-bank sentiment of the Reddit crowd the way Ally has. Their difference is branding, not substance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Financial Ally is all about branding...

But that is kind of the point. These startups scale from the get-go. They will want to reach outside of their initial markets soon. It is not just feature set, but forward scaling vision with that feature set.

Most multi-national banks have a hard time with 'world-wide' scale and prefer to cordon off geo-markets behind local corps, going so far as to have separate C-level management. Imagine how hard it is to get financial level integration?

In this day and age those layers, that lack of true inner-corp transparency, and integration is what will kill these 'traditional' enterprises.

It took forever to get Square or Stripe outside of the U.S., and they don't even store your money for long. I think you far underestimate difficulty of "scaling" banks across jurisdictional borders.

US here, and my bank does all this too. Though, most of it has only been recent. Picture of a check to deposit, finance works thingies to make pretty graphs and sort my finances, atm refunds, etc. I get a bit excited that these folk have a MUCH more attractive website, but beyond that and maybe a pretty looking card, i just see no need to switch.

USAA has been doing most of this stuff for long time too (ATM fee refunds, mobile deposit, etc)

Agreed, though they are notably not open to all US citizens...

Their banking is, just not the insurance.

Many banking features are not. For example, USAA's mobile deposit requires that you either have or be eligible for their insurance.

What on earth bank is this?

http://skandiabanken.se

Most of the article is merely breathless praise of features that other banks and credit unions have had for years, but one paragraph caught my eye:

  > Altman said GoBank was also designed to save customers
  > time and that Green Dot looked for lots of ways to
  > accomplish that. One, he explained, is that customers
  > can check their account balance, without logging in, in
  > just two seconds -- far faster than the 80 seconds or so
  > it takes people on many banks' mobile apps, he said.

So anyone who borrows my phone can see my account balance? If my phone gets stolen while it's unlocked, the thief knows who I am and how much liquid cash I have available?

I have no idea how it works in the GoBank app, but in my bank's app I can mark one account as the "quick-check" account, and on the start-screen of the app there is then a pull-down which reveals the balance of that specific account when you activate it. No account numbers or any other info, just the balance.

I love the feature, it literally takes two seconds to find out my balance, but yes, if someone borrows my phone or steals it, they can know how much money I have on one of my accounts. If you're the type of person who worries about that, simply don't activate the feature. :-)

(Oh, and you have to re-authorize the "quick-check" account once a month or something while being fully logged in to the bank app, so it automatically expires if you forget about it, which is a nice feature. Still, that's my boring old bank, and not cool and hip and revolutionizing GoBank... :-) )

The Mint app supports an additional passcode lock, as do many other banking apps with a semi-persistent login. I haven't tried GoBank's app but they probably have something similar.

I wish more apps support multi-level authentication to support this at-a-glance information. I'm perfectly fine with my balance being only behind a 4-digit passcode, but transfers should require a recent full password auth. That being said, designing and implementing such a system securely is easier said than done.

As cool as GoBank and Simple are, financially speaking, how do they improve upon simply switching to credit unions or community banks?

Based on the title, I was really hoping this would be a parody.

> You Can Carry All Your Money In Your Pocket

With that headline, this looks like an anti-GoBank article. The though "carry all my money in my pocket" suggests to me that a mugger could grab my 401(K).

Sure, there are security features, but this is NOT a good pitch-line.

As I am involved in implementing a banking style system (from scratch) at the moment, I would really like to know what features people are interested in (not) seeing at their bank. Please.

Applying "the Radiohead model" to a faceless bank seems odd. I feel like people would be more willing to choose to pay more in the case of artists.

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