Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like there's a strong case for Erlang/Elixir rather than Clojure? They kinda built BEAM on the JVM, no?
Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
11–20 of 223 posts
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#12Unfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options
And in the US they got civil forfiture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
> To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity.
Some cases:
https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-2/grading-state-fe...
https://prosperityeconomics.org/stolen-savings-civil-forfeit...
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#13Unfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options
These "challenger" banks are a gimmick. Friend of mine recently tried to set up an account for his new business and all "challengers" refused a business account, they were slow to respond and disinterested in helping. Eventually he set up with a high street bank, but the whole thing took over a month, which is ridiculous.
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#14“By law, fintechs must work with a bank to do these things, and right now that means a legacy high street bank with mainframes. Griffin is the bank plus technology platform that all future fintechs would build on.” Did they write this in 2016? The market has moved on. Griffin looks neat but they’re years behind many others, a nice API for banking exists from well established players, like ClearBank. There’s room for…
> that all future fintechs would build on
This also sounds awfully like a single point of failure and embodiment of what's wrong with late stage capitalism - where competition is an illusion.
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#15“By law, fintechs must work with a bank to do these things, and right now that means a legacy high street bank with mainframes. Griffin is the bank plus technology platform that all future fintechs would build on.” Did they write this in 2016? The market has moved on. Griffin looks neat but they’re years behind many others, a nice API for banking exists from well established players, like ClearBank. There’s room for…
There still isn’t a ton of choice in market - ClearBank is one of three other banks that actually have decent offerings. And having a good API is not enough; you need a holistic operating model that is aligned with your customer base, which is much harder to build for.
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#16They tried really hard to not use a distributed SQL database.
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#17Unfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options
I wouldn’t say “given up” as much as “actively delegated”.
The UK has essentially made a (political) choice that rather than cover the cost of policing finance through taxes, they’ll just make the banks sort it out for them.
This is not great for some people for obvious reasons. But for everyone else it’s lower taxes. Where one falls on the political spectrum largely determines how one feels about this.
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#18Why are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.
Getting a new banking charter in the US is hard, but it's straightforward to be a challenger bank in the UK. Jarvis moved (back) to London from SF to start Griffin. The banks in the US that have APIs tend to focus on large fintech partnerships, so even simple APIs will be expensive compared to a regular bank account. Grasshopper Bank in the US (for example) is one of the few that will do APIs on top of regular commer…
It’s hard in the UK too! Just not “infeasible” hard. (Plus, it’s easier to finance as you don’t have those pesky Bank Holding Company Act regs dinging your investors)
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#19Why are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.
In part because of the "Regulatory Sandbox" - https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/innovation/regulatory-sandbox
Actually, no - the regulatory sandbox cannot be used by prospective banks.
Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
#20They tried really hard to not use a distributed SQL database.
Because it’s not a great fit for an event driven architecture.