zbruhnke

We do link to our site on the top and I can talk about this ad nauseam but suffice it to say we have a plan to build an (actual) bank from the ground up and we're trying align our incentives with the customers by doing things like paying customers higher interest rates for saving more instead of spending more etc.

tbh I'm not trying to use this as a platform for advertising but I'm happy to chat if you want to email me. zach [at] hmbradley.com

It's mostly cards they changed TOS on but I'd have to advise you to check your emails to see if it applies to you

Again, I wish we did not have to do this but this is what Chase is forcing customers to do.

We also give customers a way to just download the form without giving us the info but then of course we can't mail it for them ... we were just trying to make this easier for customers to opt out with the shitty options we were given

We also give you the ability to just download the form and mail it yourself!

Unfortunately Chase forces customers to mail a letter with this information on it so there's not much we can do

Hey there,

Maker of the site here! Our servers don't touch any of this data, it goes straight to Very Good Security and lives in a PCI compliant vault ... We ourselves are building a new kind of bank so we take security very seriously and are not phishing.

Happy to talk through in more details but the FAQs do a pretty good job of that too!

Halleman Bradley | Los Angeles, CA | Onsite | https://www.hmbradley.com At Halleman Bradley we're building a Full-Stack bank for the next 100 years (Yes, I said 100) and we're going about it in a very different way than most of what you've seen from the other US "Challenger Banks".

We're excited about helping customers save more money, not just encouraging them to spend it all and we're on a truly egalitarian mission. We believe that our users should earn status not by how much money is in their account but by how much of their income they are saving every month.

On the engineering side we're working on a great Stack. Go for the Backend, React for the Front-end and React-Native on Mobile. We're incredibly excited about the progress we've made as a team of 4 but we're already growing (Number 5 agreed last night!).

If you've ever wondered why banking has to be the way it is (hint: It's tradition mostly) then come help us build it the way we think it should be.

We've got an ambitious plan that will take time to iterate on but with the right people and the right drive we believe we can achieve the impossible.

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you want to chat and I'm happy to tell you more: zach [at] hmbradley [dot] com

Congrats on getting this launched Zach! I really enjoyed our talk and the vision. Still hope we can find a way to work together at some point!

Wow Cloudflare just continues to do big things over and over, I'm continually impressed by the amount of stuff they churn out.

Sort of shocking Amazon or Microsoft have not yet acquired them given where the markets seem to be going

Every time I see these things I just sit in relative disbelief trying to figure out how PWAs have somehow not taken off yet.

Perhaps this year when they finally come to Mac too (they already work on Windows and Linux) it will finally happen. then again with the Mac App store I'm not sure that fits the Apple "vision" (if you can call it that anymore) either.

Either way its sort of maddening to see this as I think PWAs are the right answer for these questions and yet people keep bringing new and unnecessary solutions to the table

We have built directly into the APIs of a core ledger provider than runs billions of dollars worth of banking cores. These were originally private APIs they were only using for their own apps and we're the first third party to ever access them.

That's been a really fascincating experience in and of itself actually

It's a mix, We're building all of our own customer facing software and many things behind the scenes as well.

For instance we integrate with providers for KYC/AML requirements and do not build that in house but for Billpay we are using a combination of APIs that connect directly to billers' sites and building our own tools to discover how to send ACH's or mail paper check when necessary

Hi All,

Co-Founder of Halleman Bradley here, Calvin came on as our design intern originally and we've talked him into staying with us for even longer, he made this write up about how we've iterated in building this product over the last year.

I'd be happy to answer questions about our process, the details behind how we're doing this or anything else you all might be interested in.

We realize the write-up is long but I think it is quite a good read.

I hope you'll find this interesting

I wish I had as much faith in the government as you ... then again as a resident of the netherlands I suppose you might have reason to have more faith than I do in the US?

In principle I completely agree that things being in the open should help to harden them, but especially in the US where funding is often used as a bargaining chip and bureaucracy is rampant I get a bit nervous

Agreed that it does not necessarily mean less secure ... see my comment below

I agree with this in principle (in fact I had a long argument with the former CTO of Citi about this during the heartbleed fiasco) but I also worry that if noone is willing to put in the effort to fix flaws or they are not reported properly then fixing them could go un-funded while flaws were easier to discover.

Maybe the answer is very good logging of anyone who has cloned the repos etc. but right now when we have a government that uses whether or not they're going to fund important parts of our infrastructure (like Air Traffic Controllers) as a bargaining chip I have some skepticism around them being willing to fund ongoing maintenance of some of these products.

Despite the fact that things being in the open SHOULD curb this from happening I've read enough legislation (yes, I actually do like to read legislation) to know that that probably is not true when it comes to the government

Man it would be pretty amazing to be able to submit a Pull Request to the IRS.

Matt Cutts if you're reading this please help!

On another note, I'm not sure I agree on the electrical grid or traffic controls being open sourced ... could imagine some nefarious things happening as a result of that

droplr & Cloudapp both come to mind ... essentially branded filesharing/url shorteners but I'd love to see either of them support adding custom favicons or otherwise completely removing their branding

I really wish DDG would build a Google Apps competitor ... as long as gmail dominates email and business email the privacy argument is largely irrelevant because people will spend hours per day logged in and locked in to the Google ecosystem

Wow these are awesome questions.

tbh I just did not think people would find these kinds of things as interesting as I do. I would love to start an AMA for this and go through it if people want me to do that I'm happy to try to make it happen, not sure if there's usually a formal process for setting them up on HN?

I'll do my best to address those brief questions here though. You're right that at the outset it looks like we're doing things that are better for the customer but the overall goal is to actually properly align ourselves with the customer, for instance one of the things we plan to do is pay a higher interest rate if you save a higher percentage of your income. Thus incentivizing users to have better financial habits and as a result become the exact type of borrower we would like to lend to.

The no credit apps thing is actually very simple, it just means we're using a soft pull rather than a hard pull and we still know your credit history so we're not doing anything blind.

The assets and pre-investment question is another good one. We've actually entered into an agreement to become a minority shareholder in a bank that has been in existence since 1921, as they grow (as a result of the things we're building) we intend to keep buying more shares of the underlying Bank Holding Company and to eventually become a BHC ourselves. This means the bank has the capital requirements in the short term and we are just a minority shareholder that happens to build software for the bank!

It's a structure we arrived at after looking at a ton of options and deciding this was the best possible way to test buying a bank without outlaying all the capital on the frontend.

as for the insurance etc. That is relatively explainable as a result of the above. This is an established bank that has been in existence for a very long time, we're just building software we believe will help it grow while being able to share in the upside as an actual shareholder rather than the mis-aligned incentives you see with most of the challenger "banks" in the US since they only make money from interchange.

We are in no way incentivized for our customers to spend money since our number 1 task is to grow overall assets at the bank level.

We're basically ready to start opening accounts, we should have the core ready to go for friends and family around Jan 15 and then from there we will start onboarding the ~9k signups we have as well.

The main hold up has been that Mastercard has a moratorium on new products over the holiday season so we have not been able to issue cards just yet, but we've also been building the app, getting the core provider setup etc. (We actually got a new routing number issued for the bank and a brand new core provider)

Again, if there's a sanctioned way to do an AMA or something similar I'm happy to set it up with @dang or whoever is necessary and walk through this in more detail if its interesting to folks?

EDIT: One other important piece ... we think we may actually have some paid features eventually, things like Metal cards, Free international ATMs etc. that would mean people using us more like a subscription service in some ways. For instance I would gladly pay a monthly fee to be able to have my bank become my financial conduit meaning that they would handle finding the best prices on loans, cars, houses etc. without me having to fill out an application (because they already know the answers) and I think others might be willing to pay for that as well

YES ... I completely plan on having a read only/API account login and more explicit permissions where you see exactly what you're giving access to but that's again a story for another day, can talk about this for hours!

haha we are using the Harry's rails app :)

We don't have a ton out there because we're still mostly pre-investment, but we have about 9k people signed up for the landing page we built - https://launch.trycrux.com and we should be able to start opening real accounts in the next few weeks

haha boy is it a long story ... but yes both banking software and buying part of an actual bank so we can build a full-stack bank for the next 100 years

It's worth noting here (though many people have in different ways already) that the reason you should not put credentials in any git repo (private or public) is that inevitably when you share repos with third party services (A CI for instance) you are also giving them credentials as a result and exposing one more vulnerability in the case that they get hacked or otherwise don't store things in an encrypted manner.

Because Github makes it so easy to give developers read access to repos this happens more often that you would realize, and having your most sensitive credentials (banking username and password) exposed in a repo to several different vendors is NEVER a good practice.

It's fine if you're going to use this but at least properly encrypt the secrets, or add your creds in a different file and gitignore it at the least if you're too lazy to use something like vault, credstash etc.

The reality is you're only as strong as your weakest link and there is just no use in having your weakest link be a relative unknown

Source: I built a Plaid competitor once upon a time (that obviously did not work out as well for me as it did for them) and I am currently building a bank, so I know a few things about security and vulnerabilities

1. Save lots of money, more than you think you will need. This will take longer than you think.

2. If you truly want something, you can probably accomplish it. The human will is stronger than almost anything else

3. It will be harder than it looks, so if you feel like quitting or giving up, just know you're not the only one and that when you do not, if you do ever "make it" then people (including you) will not fully appreciate some of what you put yourself through.

4. Be honest with yourself and those around you. If you're not careful you can fall into a reality distortion field and that can be very dangerous. Be honest about where you are in the business vs where you want to be.

5. Have three sets of goals, The ones you tell investors should be goals you know that you can hit and hopefully blow past. The ones you tell yourself should be goals you think are achievable and the ones you tell your team should be goals that you know are a stretch but can keep everyone motivated for a stretch goal and keep rallying the troops as time goes on.

6. No one owes you anything. Some people tend to feel like they are owed something from employees, investors, etc. when starting a company and this is just not true.

7. It's going to be much harder than you thought, I used to tell people that starting a company is willfully becoming manic. Some days you'll wake up and feel like you can float out of the room, other days you'll wonder if you jumped off your balcony if you could feel it, it's a crazy ride.

For users asking questions about how this will tell you a lot.

Users of Robinhood Checking and Savings earn 3% interest annually on each of their Checking and Savings balances. Robinhood does not charge account maintenance, account minimum, overdraft, ATM, transaction, foreign transaction, transfer, or card replacement fees for Robinhood Checking and Savings. Robinhood Checking and Savings is offered through Robinhood Financial LLC. Robinhood Checking and Savings is an added feature to existing Robinhood accounts and is not a separate account or a bank account. The Robinhood Debit Card is issued by Sutton Bank pursuant to a license from Mastercard International, Inc. Neither Sutton Bank nor Mastercard International, Inc. are members of FINRA or SIPC.

Here, I’ll be the first to provide a perspective from the other “other” side of this argument. I am a founder who once had a vesting schedule with a cliff (one year). I built the first version of a venture backed company as the CTO, we had backing from investors you’ve heard of.

The product went live and was even used by some people. Eventually I ended up in a place where it was clear to me I disagreed with the direction of the business and the CEO leading it. I for one am glad there was a cliff.

Because I left and when I did my co-founders continued to work on that business. As far as I know they’re still at it.

That was over six years ago. The code I wrote is likely of VERY little value in the grand scheme of things.

The value I added in thoughts, ideas, advice etc. is probably about as valuable as people my co-founders have had several dinners with over the years at this point. If I had walked away with 1/3 of the equity that would have put the other two co-founders in a horrible situation and would have been completely unfair of me to do.

The cliff did its job. You vest to protect all parties and because it’s just the right thing to do. Take it from someone who walked off the “cliff”.

I’ve started multiple companies since then. Each has had a vesting schedule and a cliff for all founders.

SendGrid did IPO, its traded under SEND on the NASDAQ

This ... so many things about configuration decisions that make sense at a point in time but can change with versions of a library, OS, server etc.

In past lives I have had to hack around so many different things to make something work they way I intended that I knew there would likely be a better solution to at some point.

As we get closer to things like infrastructure as code and configuration as code being the norm I would like to take this comment to remind people there is no such thing as self commenting code!

Even if this configuration should be “obvious” given constraints today when someone comes back to this months or years from now it’s likely some of those constraints could have changed or been removed completely - ignoring this is how you end up not changing things out of fear that something will break without real understanding.

Comments are almost never a problem unless they’re not updated when significant changes are made

Hey Zach, if you want to open bank accounts with an API and be able to provide real time balances to your users ping me ... I can help make that a reality