Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines • Hacker News Board

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#271

Post by greenyouse » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

heurist wrote: post #38

aphextron wrote: post #4

Something has happened to big banks along the way, where they no longer actually provide banking services to their customers. When I walk into a Wells Fargo branch now and sit down with a "banker" to take care of my accounts, it consists of sitting next to them while they call 1-800-WELLSFARGO for me and talk to a call center. There simply is no service anymore. I walked into my local branch to open up an IRA last we…

It's definitely an industry ripe for rebirth. For instance, I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc - and automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part. I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with…

Hey, just playing devil's advocate here. Some banks come pretty close to what you're asking for. I go to a small, community bank in flyover country that uses Jack Henry as a SAAS for its online services. Most of the things you asked for are already being offered.

> I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc

You can open multiple checking accounts at most banks. I've made partitioned checking accounts like this before.

> automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part.

Money transfers can be scheduled but they're usually by set amounts instead of fractions (e.g. add $100 on the first of the month). I use this myself.

> I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with online card management (request/terminate cards, track per-card spending)

Should be able to open debit cards for each account but you'll probably need to be in person to request/terminate them. Maybe you could do it over the phone by authenticating yourself, not sure. I haven't heard of per-card tracking but at least you know what you spent on your card.

> multiple cards per account so I can give my wife full use of "grocery" card

You can tie multiple debit cards to the same account for a husband and wife. Try explaining what you're doing and a banker should set that up for you.

> alerts/notifications when I am spending too much in an account/not efficiently allocating the full amount/potentially using a card improperly

There are account alerts that can be set up for exactly this. I have it shoot me an email with the alert message when something gets triggered.

> financial projections

Account history can be downloaded in common formats like csv. There are already tools you could use to create the projection and do fancy data visualization things for yourself. You could scrape your account data periodically using your online banking credentials. Might be dangerous to automate though.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#272

Post by robocat » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

013a wrote: post #145

aphextron wrote: post #4

Something has happened to big banks along the way, where they no longer actually provide banking services to their customers. When I walk into a Wells Fargo branch now and sit down with a "banker" to take care of my accounts, it consists of sitting next to them while they call 1-800-WELLSFARGO for me and talk to a call center. There simply is no service anymore. I walked into my local branch to open up an IRA last we…

One piece of it is actually regulation. When you're dealing with huge amounts of yellow tape and you have millions of customers, the overhead cost of providing services is absolutely sky high. Many of their clients don't even make them money; think of the Starbucks barista that has $1000 in checking and no savings. Sure they can turn some of that money around into interest, but the cost-per-customer of lawyers, compl…

> the overhead cost of providing services is absolutely sky high

That is an advantage for big banks.

Insane setup/maintenance costs and low marginal costs disadvantages small banks or startups.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#273

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #244

narag wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely an industry ripe for rebirth. Or simply for death. Not my idea, I first thought it was a joke when they told me, but it makes perfect sense. I get exactly zero interest for my savings, not even to compensate inflation. It's stock options or bs funds. Only useful service I get is cards and avoiding keeping cash in a physical safe. Credit comes from cards or specialized loan companies. There are two ser…

Banks don't do anything useful that cannot be provided by other means. They are completely useless. The only thing that banks do is to provide credit against things you already currently own, like mortgages and commercial loans. But these things could very easily be provided by an official agency. For example, if you don't pay your monthly mortgage you just lose the house and an official agency will deal with the sal…

So... Your alternative to banks is banks, but public sector, and you expect this to improve the bureaucracy level?

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#274

Post by sesqu » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

existencebox wrote: post #203

mbritton72 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't direct people to bullshit bureaucratic snakeholes.

Even as someone who had abysmal interactions with mainstream banks when getting my mortgage, I don't think your response is charitable to the parent commentor, even if you don't think it's worth your time to provide feedback to a business entity, which is well within your rights. If I as a dev for a large company see people online complaining about my product, I'd _probably_ tell them, in good faith, that if I had no…

> as a dev

I've had a number of devs, when receiving feedback, tell me that I should instead seek out their bug tracker, register with their feedback system, open a support ticket, give detailed instructions about how to identify and fix my problem, and then wait for a decision about how I'm wrong.

I've done that maybe twice.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#275

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

ianamartin wrote: post #116

ericcholis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple[1] is pretty close. Create "Goals" for any amount and time period, Save $X by Y Date . Simple automatically allocates money to your Goals from your Available Balance daily, every friday, or any other schedule. They show you a "Safe to Spend" balance which is your Available Balance minus your total Goals. You can associate a Goal with a spending category, say Groceries, and have all transactions marked Grocerie…

I was a Simple customer from when they were still in beta, and I really loved them and talked a fair number of people into opening accounts with them over the years. Things went really downhill after a while. Moving physical addresses was a total shitshow. It involved them snail-mailing two verification codes. One to the current address and one to the new address. And you had to be able to collect them both and get t…

> Eventually, they told me I would just have to find a different bank, and they were closing my account in 7 days, and they were going to keep any money left in the account at that point.

Is that even legal? If so it sounds like an extraordinary loophole.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#276

Post by swsieber » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

charleyma wrote: post #261

swsieber wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at plaid? I'm not sure what their rates are like, but if you're doing just a personal project, you might be able to get away with their developer evaluation (though that only lets you interface with big banks, not the small ones - the developer evaluation that is). Edit: plaid is a nice abstraction bank api: https://plaid.com/

Hi there - full disclosure, I work at Plaid . Anyone can signup for API keys and access all the thousands of banks that we currently support on Plaid for free in our dev environment. Once you want to add more than 100 accounts, we recommend reaching out to learn more about pricing at scale; it depends on what APIs are being used, how much data is being pulled, how often, etc. Feel free to shoot me an email directly i…

Ah, I had used it couple of years ago. At that point, I could get to my bank account with it at a major bank, authentication with smaller credit unions was restricted until I graduated from the dev environment.

I'm glad to hear that's not the case anymore.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#277

Post by bunderbunder » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

manishsharan wrote: post #135

heurist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely an industry ripe for rebirth. For instance, I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc - and automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part. I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with…

I work for a large bank and can offer a tip. When you find yourself in this situation -- please create an incident report by lodging a complaint with the branch manager or online . Tweet if you must : your goal is to make sure that an incident shows up in the CRM. Branch managers bonus is tied to customer satisfaction parameters. This will not make you situation more bearable but it will force the branch to be more r…

Throw me on the pile of people who don't love that tip. I'll go a step further and say, if that's the best remediation policy a large bank can offer, they're in a really bad spot.

As a consumer, I like my financial services to come in one of two flavors: Completely automated and self-service, or very personal.

Because I want to either never have to pick up the phone, or I want to know that, when I pick up the phone, ring straight through to a knowledgeable and empowered professional, instead of waiting on hold for 30m before getting some call center drone.

Any company where keeping a handle on customer service involves a signal having to filter through a CRM system and multiple layers of whatever-else-is-going-on-in-there is in neither of those camps: They aren't sufficiently automated and streamlined to give the hands-off experience, but they are also too bureaucratic to allow their customer-facing staff to offer a good hands-on experience.

And I just ain't got time for wallowing in some Goodhart's Law quagmire like that.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#278

Post by bluGill » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #137

bluGill wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is so difficult to write good regulations. It is [nearly?] impossible to predict all the consequences of your regulation ahead of time. After the regulation is written there are many more people who have an incentive to figure out how to twist it to their advantage, and they get as long as they need to dream it up. Then they get a as long as they need to try various forms in small areas that you don't noti…

>It is [nearly?] impossible to predict all the consequences of your regulation ahead of time. Yes but why is the burden asymmetric? It is similarly impossible to predict the consequences of deregulation ahead of time yet proponents of deregulation are never held to the total unpredictability of the outcomes of their position.

That is a fair point.

I will partially counter that a much simpler class of regulations can cover more things in deregulation.

For example, if I just make fraud illegal, if you misrepresent what your evil I don't care what it is under deregulation I can get you. If you are honest about your evil it will be harder (but not impossible!) to sell it.

Deregulation also allows the "small guy" a better chance because to compete, and so with more choice the customer is likely to be more aware of choice.

Again, the above is not complete. There are big holes in this as well. Fundamentally there are always a subset of people who are willing to do evil to get ahead, if they can do their evil while being in the letter of the law they will. Society needs a way to deal with it, and nothing is perfect.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#279

Post by eldavido » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

rmk wrote: post #247

aphextron wrote: post #4

Something has happened to big banks along the way, where they no longer actually provide banking services to their customers. When I walk into a Wells Fargo branch now and sit down with a "banker" to take care of my accounts, it consists of sitting next to them while they call 1-800-WELLSFARGO for me and talk to a call center. There simply is no service anymore. I walked into my local branch to open up an IRA last we…

You just compared Apples and Oranges. First Republic is typically for the higher-earning, higher net-worth individual, whereas Wells Fargo caters to a much broader set. Not to say that Wells Fargo should not provide better service, but I just want to point out that these are two different types of banks. I had a similar experience with Bank of America. The person who was supposed to help me was rude, untrained, and a…

First Republic really isn't any different than Wells Fargo. They talk a big game about personal service but it's the same bullshit. (Speaking from firsthand experience of moving from WF to FRB.) You'll talk to a different person every time you go in, their website isn't great (though the recent upgrade has helped), and their mortgage products require absurdly high down payments (20-30%) to be rate competitive with WF/Citi/Chase (as of 2017/Q4). They also have absurdly high minimums for many accounts (3-4k), though they do have nice features like fee-free out-of-network ATM use.

I really want to believe there's something better. But I think the real choice is between "local bank" -- shitty website, hard-to-use ATMs that require putting checks in envelopes, bad hours OR a big national bank, where you're a number, but the software is good, there are branches everywhere, they have a good mobile app/good ATMs, etc.

My personal philosophy has become, "I'm ok being a number because I'm pretty average personally, but I want a local bank for business banking." It's worked so far.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#280

Post by lobster_johnson » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

bradstewart wrote: post #73

heurist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely an industry ripe for rebirth. For instance, I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc - and automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part. I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with…

I do almost exactly what you described with Charles Schwab. I have multiple "full" accounts, but there's no maintenence fees or anything. Their online tools are great. You can open a new checking account with the click of a button.

As I understand it, you need a brokerage account to get this; it's called the "High Yield Investor checking and savings account". It's not intended for most people, though apparently they don't care if you get the brokerage account and don't use it. On the other hand, Schwab has effectively zero physical branches, and apparently don't accept most ways of depositing money to your account, which makes it awkward to deal with cash and checks that end up in your hands for whatever reason.