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Square Banking

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131–140 of 174 posts

Re: Square Banking

#131
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we can also start moving away from feature-limited Saas offerings that are so damn proud that they focus on One Thing And One Thing Only when customers want just one affordable app to handle all their work and not fifty-eleven ones that become crazy expensive.

> One Thing And One Thing Only I mean, that's just fashion that evolved in response to the previous fashion, which was bloated software that did a million things badly. Fair enough that the pendulum should swing back the other way, but there certainly is a place for software that only does one thing and does it well.

The history of tech companies can be viewed as a constant bundling and unbundling of products, depending on where the inefficiency is.

Re: Square Banking

#132

It's amazing to me how much of a better product can be created when everything is in one place. It's obvious that when you're charging customers and paying invoices through the same interface, that you'll have more visibility on your cash flow and it'll generally be easier to use, but this goes so much further. The reason those loans are easy is because Square know your history of charging customers. The reason they…

Maybe we can also start moving away from feature-limited Saas offerings that are so damn proud that they focus on One Thing And One Thing Only when customers want just one affordable app to handle all their work and not fifty-eleven ones that become crazy expensive.

Customers want those things but the companies you are referring to haven’t been around long enough to build all of them. Believe me, it’s on their slide decks.

In 2013 I joined a company named ZenPayroll, which focused entirely on…well, payroll. That company is now called Gusto and does payroll, health insurance, workers comp, HR, etc.

That didn’t come out of no where, but you have to start someplace.

Re: Square Banking

#133
post #27

0 overdraft fees. Yay. More like it. It will force major banks to rethink their overdraft fees as a revenue center. As someone who was not so well financially just a decade ago, overdraft fees seemed like penalty for being poor. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, you never know when your account will get overdrawn. And most evil thing was - bank will deny the charge because you didn’t have enough funds but wil…

https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/overdraft/ Overdrafts have been opt-in by regulation since 2010. What banks have done is try to trick people into opting into "overdraft protection," which is really just the old system that allows a customer's checking balance to drop below 0: https://www.wellsfargo.com/credit-cards/features/overdraft-p... As long as a customer takes no action or just says "no," they won't be allowed o…

Yes, but if you do not opt into overdraft, you will still be charged a “non-sufficient funds” (NSF) fee when the bank declines your transaction. And the NSF fee is usually higher than the overdraft fee.

This doesn't make any sense and is just a money grab on the poor and desperate, because there is absolutely no technical reason why declining a checking or debit card transaction should cost $35+ to process.

Re: Square Banking

#135
In case anyone was thinking this .5% APY savings account would be great for their company, this launch is just for sole proprietors.

> Your business entity type is a sole proprietorship, meaning you pay taxes for your business as an individual as opposed to another entity type (often the case for self-employed individuals or independent contractors)

They are apparently looking to add other entity types in the future.

Re: Square Banking

#136
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/overdraft/ Overdrafts have been opt-in by regulation since 2010. What banks have done is try to trick people into opting into "overdraft protection," which is really just the old system that allows a customer's checking balance to drop below 0: https://www.wellsfargo.com/credit-cards/features/overdraft-p... As long as a customer takes no action or just says "no," they won't be allowed o…

Yes, but if you do not opt into overdraft, you will still be charged a “non-sufficient funds” (NSF) fee when the bank declines your transaction. And the NSF fee is usually higher than the overdraft fee. This doesn't make any sense and is just a money grab on the poor and desperate, because there is absolutely no technical reason why declining a checking or debit card transaction should cost $35+ to process.

Depends on the bank, I would imagine. Anecdotally, I've never been charged a fee for having a transaction declined because of insufficient funds, nor has my wife, and collectively that's ~5 different banks.

Re: Square Banking

#137
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you do not opt into overdraft, you will still be charged a “non-sufficient funds” (NSF) fee when the bank declines your transaction. And the NSF fee is usually higher than the overdraft fee. This doesn't make any sense and is just a money grab on the poor and desperate, because there is absolutely no technical reason why declining a checking or debit card transaction should cost $35+ to process.

Depends on the bank, I would imagine. Anecdotally, I've never been charged a fee for having a transaction declined because of insufficient funds, nor has my wife, and collectively that's ~5 different banks.

Based on my personal experience, all the big banks in Canada do it. The fee is 45-48 CAD for each declined transaction, no matter the amount.

Re: Square Banking

#138
post #62

While Square makes (more) sense to get into the banking game, I've noticed a lot of companies only tangentially related to finance doing similar things, and I wonder what it's indicative of: - T-Mobile offers an exclusive checking account for their customers - Credit Karma promoting their own debit card - Robin hood doing "Cash Management" - Coinbase offering a debit card with crypto rewards Has something changed wit…

Everyone wants in on the game. There's this really big piece of the pie where fees and interest come into play. Every transaction has fees and some people carry balances that generate a lot of money in interest. It's how credit card providers can offer rewards. At some point in our future we'll probably see the end of these rewards cards because the government will likely regulate it. Which I think is actually a good…

There's also money in selling the transaction data, isn't there?

That's one of the attractive things about the Apple Pay + Apple Card isn't it? I thought I read some time ago that Apple Pay anonymizes the card somehow so that transaction processors can't sell the data. It was for that reason that J.C. Penny stopped allowing Apple Pay as a payment method.

Ah, here's an article from April 2019: https://www.mytotalretail.com/article/j-c-penney-stops-accep...

Re: Square Banking

#139

While Square makes (more) sense to get into the banking game, I've noticed a lot of companies only tangentially related to finance doing similar things, and I wonder what it's indicative of: - T-Mobile offers an exclusive checking account for their customers - Credit Karma promoting their own debit card - Robin hood doing "Cash Management" - Coinbase offering a debit card with crypto rewards Has something changed wit…

T-Mobile: helping the underbanked. The others: profiting from interchange fees. If you can get your card to be “top of wallet” you can get a cut of every purchase a consumer makes. If you are a store, like Target, you can also drastically reduce the processing fees you pay to card issuers by redirecting those funds to yourself.

I self identify as middle class. It was pretty exciting when my wife and I both opened T-Mobile Money accounts and capped out their $3,000 balance for access to 4% APR. Even the 1% APR for additional funds is attractive, as far as a savings account goes, no?

We also use the Target Red Card to save 5% at Target and the Amazon Chase card to save 5% at Amazon.

Re: Square Banking

#140
post #27

0 overdraft fees. Yay. More like it. It will force major banks to rethink their overdraft fees as a revenue center. As someone who was not so well financially just a decade ago, overdraft fees seemed like penalty for being poor. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, you never know when your account will get overdrawn. And most evil thing was - bank will deny the charge because you didn’t have enough funds but wil…

I remember over a decade ago or so my bank offered this new overdraft "protection" where you could setup an amount of money to use from your saving account to make up the difference in the event of overdraft. One day I cut a check that was $5 over what was in my checking account and found out there was a $75 fee for overdraft. It was not at all obvious in their advertising that fees would still apply. Never made that mistake again.
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