61–68 of 68 posts
"'Bank of America spent $40,000,000 dollars on airplanes last year. We spent $40,000 to develop an iPhone application so you can check your balance from anywhere.' (Hmm, the iPhone app should cost like $2.99.)" I think he's misunderstanding something...the iPhone app may cost $2.99, but it doesn't cost $2.99 to develop.
The 3-6-3 model of banking has been thrown off to the wayside in pursuit of faster, quicker gains; but the original model still holds: savings at 3%, loans at 6%, golf course by 3pm.
"We take your money and put it in a vault" That's not actually the job of a bank, is it? The job is to mediate lending and borrowing of money. By identifying the right people to lend money to, banks can offer the people whose money the take an interest rate. I still agree that there is a market for a better bank. I remember an example from the book "Why not?" where a bank (or something like that) offered to automatic…
Yeah we live in interesting times in which the historical role of banks and what banks actually are used for are diverging. There's two kinds of things here (and I'd lump them separately): (1) there's "putting money in vaults" and handling long-distance transactions (eg: debit cards, check-clearing, and so on) (2) there's banks as "so you've got money you want to lend but no time? give your money to us and we'll loan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"That's not actually the job of a bank, is it?" (re: money -> vault) Well, from a customer point of view, it is, more or less. Most people are not picking a bank because of the interest rate it offers, they're picking it because they need to be able to write checks, use a debit card, make payments, etc. Anyone that's serious about growing their money is not opening a Bank of America savings account, they're using a r…
There are many "internet-only" bank accounts in the US that reimburse you for ATM fees. I use http://www.salemfivedirect.com/ , which reimburses up to $15 of ATM fees per month, and Etrade bank does something similar. Being free to totally ignore ATM fees is really nice, and because internet banks are competing for customers that are likely more mobile and savvy than local branch banks, odds are the customer service…
SafeBank couldn’t raise VC or anything like that... It also couldn't be a public corporation because share holders could make a very good case that management is failing its fiduciary duty by being hyper conservative. And that's what I find most interesting about that article. It opens the discussion about public vs privately owned enterprise. Privately owned business can forgo addition revenue by as much as the owne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah we live in interesting times in which the historical role of banks and what banks actually are used for are diverging. There's two kinds of things here (and I'd lump them separately): (1) there's "putting money in vaults" and handling long-distance transactions (eg: debit cards, check-clearing, and so on) (2) there's banks as "so you've got money you want to lend but no time? give your money to us and we'll loan…
You can find Postbanken in at least Germany and Switzerland. By the way, as far as I know the German Postbank is treated like any other bank and not subsidised. Deutsche Bank recently bought a large chunk of Postbank from Deutsche Post.
http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/_pdf/PostalSavingsSystem.p...
...we had this but it got phased out in the 60s. Who knew?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can find Postbanken in at least Germany and Switzerland. By the way, as far as I know the German Postbank is treated like any other bank and not subsidised. Deutsche Bank recently bought a large chunk of Postbank from Deutsche Post.
And in fact I'm ignorant a bit: http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/_pdf/PostalSavingsSystem.p... ...we had this but it got phased out in the 60s. Who knew?