Amazon Cash

Many of the major banks charge fees if your bank account is below a certain threshold [0], often in the range [$1000,1500] for the required minimum balance. Any balance below that, you typically need direct deposit to avoid the fees.

And banks have a (in the US) deservedly poor reputation amongst the poor.

Less common now (maybe barred now?), banks would take the day's transactions and apply them in an order which deliberately fucked the customers. Let's say your balance is $100, and you get paid $1500 today. But you're living paycheck to paycheck so you delayed bill payments until today. You pay 5 bills, total value of $1000 (you have enough, technically). The banks would order the execution of those transactions to hit you with overage fees for as many of the payments as possible. If you noticed it right away, they'd refund the money with a phone call (and a few hours of your time on hold). Otherwise, you're just out a couple hundred dollars. All your bills will have been paid, but you would have been hit with up to five $25-75 overdraft fees before your deposit was finally processed.

Or how Wells Fargo was creating accounts for people without their consent, resulting in people who had enough money in their accounts suddenly not and being hit with fees and penalties for their trouble.

[0] They'll also change these in the fine print periodically. My free checking was a $1000 minimum with Bank of America. I'd switched to USAA for most things, but they have no physical branches. Occasionally needing a real bank, I left the $1000 in my BoA account, then one month I got hit with a fee. Turned out they'd bumped the minimum to $1500, found the letter and it was indeed small print indicating the change to the small print, buried in 10 or so pages of material about my account.

I'm from a similar background and this doesn't make any sense, but since I know it's going to devolve into an argument of "Well, they don't speak the primary language in the area, so they can't communicate with the tellers", "they're too old so they can't drive anymore", or "they're illiterate [either literally or financially] and their caretaker doesn't like taking them to the bank", I'm not going to go there.

I'm not saying people with unique issues shouldn't be accommodated, but their problems are more basic than something that a change in bank policy/regulation will adequately improve. The issue is not about being "underbanked", it's about improving accessibility to the environment.

It is true that at a time in the past, checking accounts were guarded more carefully, as the bank was fronting that money on your behalf and would have to be reasonably confident that it'd be in your checking account when they went to get reimbursed. That's not unreasonable, but checking accounts weren't the only type of account offered at the bank, and they absolutely were in wide use, even among unfortunate people, at least until they bounced too many checks.

This has mostly gone away with debit cards, because the bank can now tell whether you have the money in the account or not before they approve the transaction. Last time I got a checking account, the process was a formality, and there were no eligibility requirements in excess of the documentation legally required to open an account and the (small) minimum deposit.

The other thing is there's an implication here that banking is a human necessity. There's another commenter who laments that people in Nepal don't have a Mastercard.

People do not have a right to banking. It's a private service, and in many ways (described above), it's not a desirable one. Banks no longer pay an appreciable amount of interest, which was most of their value proposition to the consumer before they were able to shoehorn in as the keepers of electronic payment systems.

I'm just going to call a spade a spade here, and say that the reason there's a sudden interest in the "unbanked" is that they have a harder time participating in online commerce, and the government is anxious to hop on board that train because money in banks is money under their control.

Some founder of an irrelevant SaaS app is lamenting that a Nepalese person may not find it convenient to pay him $10 / mo to email the local air pollution index or something. That's a pretty silly thing to try to cause a moral panic over.

If we want to talk about how it's cool that Amazon has devised an electronic payment system that circumvents banking, that's great, I think it's awesome. But I'm not on board with the terms "un[der]banked" in the first place, as they imply that banking is a default, and then if we accept that, I'm still not on board with acting as if they are signals of some meaningful social malignancy.

Get it tattooed on your body. Or smart watch.

I wonder though if a paper copy is a vulnerability. Do they ask to verify your ownership of the bar code for example "What is your pin?"

Then you buy computers that keep their value like Apple and sell them for cash

- sorry I just realized you would have gone in a circle -

but that's a pain/lose money. I agree though that sucks, being stuck there. Not a huge Amazon shopper myself. Still they do have nearly everything so inevitably I will more than likely return.

From a technical viewpoint, Amazon Cash is a private currency, pegged to the USD. The currency is spendable across multiple companies (Amazon, CVS Pharmacy®, Speedway, Sheetz, Kum & Go, D&W Fresh Market, Family Fare Supermarkets, and VG's Grocery). Amazon can "issue" it by crediting Amazon Cash accounts. Etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_currency