231–240 of 427 posts
Founder here :) Feel free to ask me any questions
Separately, looking to make this a platform for other vendors to issue cards? E.g., so another company can add logic for say, a teenager's card that the parents manage, and use your platform for this?
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I really like all of this. In particular I wish there was a way of setting your own fraud prevention constraints instead of having the bank try and figure out what your patterns are. I assume they don't because they're afraid of Average Joe disabling everything because they're annoyed and know the card company will reimburse it all anyway.
I had someone buy $200 worth of jeans 800 miles away from my home a few months ago... for some reason Visa did not find that suspicious. I was smart enough to thoroughly read my statement that month and dispute that charge.
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China is cashless. Stores don't accept your cash much. And you have to show a government id to buy anything. And they track you. But it gets worse than that. If the government wants to punish you, they can just cut you off. Can't buy food, can't pay rent. Oh you think your friends can help you? China has that covered too, with its shiny new credit system. Being associated with - let alone helping - people cut off fro…
Thankfully, there is a good amount of space between money under mattresses and a government controlled economy. Your comment is a giant straw man. Canadian and EU systems are private ones and the government has little or no power to directly intervene, short of law enforcement. The idea that eliminating paper is some sort of boogeyman from Revelations is about as silly as the idea that holding on to your Glock allows…
Try buying Cuban cigars without cash anywhere. Your VISA or MasterCard will mysteriously fail to allow this purchase – because, due to the embargo, these companies just refuse to allow transactions containing the words "cuba", "iran", etc.
VISA and MasterCard also have additional rules of their own, and if you have a society that is cashless, they can just cut you off, too.
This is giving a for-profit entity (which, by its own nature, does not care about you, just about taking your money) far too much power.
Sweden is having that problem: You can’t do anything without a debit card anymore, banks have high fees just to get cash from your account, but the only debit cards you can get are from VISA or MasterCard.
This wouldn’t be an issue if there were many competitors, or even local competitors, or if the systems were open.
I think you can compare it to going back to 1993, and wanting to build Yelp, but having to invent, and sell the phone to go along with it.
This could be huge.
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Do you know of the sorts of benefits it has brought in those places?
Absolutely -- the police can be very corrupt in Zimbabwe so you don't want hard cash hanging around or it will be taken. The actually official Zimbabwe currency can't really be taken seriously because of insane inflation rates. US Dollars vary greatly in price. Small transaction fees are nothing to operate cashlessly for some of these people compare to the risk of trying to store cash. Even India recently banned high…
> Absolutely -- the police can be very corrupt in Zimbabwe so you don't want hard cash hanging around or it will be taken.
Yes, the police are corrupt but they won't rob you[1], they might try and coerce a bribe.
> The actually official Zimbabwe currency can't really be taken seriously because of insane inflation rates.
This is wrong. It has been wrong for close to a decade because Zimbabwe "demonetized" its currency (Zimbabwean dollar) in 2008 after an infamous bout of hyperinflation - you might have seen/heard of the 100 Trillion dollar note.
1. Unless you have been incapacitated by a traffic accident. A worrying trend has emerged in recent years where passers-by or attending police go through the car and belongings of dead/dying accident victims. See http://www.chronicle.co.zw/chiriseri-corpse-robber-cop-dies-...
When can I have direct control of recurring payments? I want to be able to "push" money instead of having it "pulled" from my account. This is a totally reasonable feature. If a merchant wants assurance that they will be paid, they should charge a deposit. The closest I've had is Entropay, but I don't really trust them for large payments. Recurring payments are so abused, I can't count how many times I have been misl…
Exactly. I always imagined a future where there would be an oAuth scopes like gateway for banks. Something like - This website requires the following permission: [x] Monthly recurring payments of $20 [o] Automatically get the payments [ ] Send me the link to deposit every month > Proceed > Cancel Life would have been so simpler then (Obviously I haven't thought this through completely, but something similar to this w…
You usually pay via SEPA recurring transfers, and just authorize a company to take $n money monthly (and can easily revoke).
Or you set up an automated recurring transaction to transmit that much money.
Or you allow a company to take just any amount, at any time, but you can revoke each transfer.
This last is how you usually connect debit cards, credit cards, Amazon, PayPal, to your account.
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I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". But bigger inventions don't solve a small, narrowly-defined problem: they totally change the game. You can't sum up the impact of the automobile, antiseptic or the internet in a sentence, because these inv…
> It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classifi…
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"ahead of the West" Ahem, ahead of the US, really. Canada and the EU can be cashless already, with chip cards and direct bank withdrawal at the POS a reality for 99.99% of merchants.
China is cashless. Stores don't accept your cash much. And you have to show a government id to buy anything. And they track you. But it gets worse than that. If the government wants to punish you, they can just cut you off. Can't buy food, can't pay rent. Oh you think your friends can help you? China has that covered too, with its shiny new credit system. Being associated with - let alone helping - people cut off fro…
At first I was wondering what I could possibly use this for, but as I sat and thought about it, I realized the possibilities are enormous. I'd like to know if the following are possible: 1. Forcing me to stay on budget, unless there's an emergency (perhaps allow purchases over budget after the third attempt). 2. Automatically distribute paychecks or other income into different accounts (some to retirement, some to sa…
People asking about what problem this solves haven't been to South Africa or Zimbabwe which in some ways are ahead of the West in creating cashless societies. The biggest bank is a phone operator and people can send each other money over the phone and from what I understand this is very common. Also interestingly most phones aren't smart phones. It's mostly analog. Banks have a serious incentive to create and encoura…