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Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

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Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#151
post #36

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…

I wonder if all these small banks have to re-invent the SaaS wheel, or if there is a company out there providing a banking platform to them...

There are a healthy assortment of fintech offerings for banking clustered in Austin and on the West Coast, maybe more.

Check out Q2 and Malauzai in Austin (there are are several, these are just the two I have evaluated) for a stack that is agnostic of the core system and provides almost all banking functions across channels.

This kind of thing isn't cheap though, and bank boards are notoriously conservative when it comes to innovation, especially for small banks.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#152

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…

I had the exact same experience. Customer for years from the early public beta and watched their service get progressively worse post-acquisition. Eventually when they made the switch to BBVA my account was unable to be moved over despite months of back and forth with their support team. Eventually I switched to Schwab and I’ve been a happy customer ever since. It’s more work to manage, but I get so much more utility out of my money today.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try capital one 360 account. It allows you to create virtual accounts for different categories. It doesn’t have all the features you desire, but is better than most other banks in this respect.

Capitol One has one of the largest advertising budgets at > $1.5B. Seems a bit insane to support an organization that is willing to send so much revenue out the door when a good chunk of it could be recaptured by its customers.

Warning: anecdotal.

My friend is a recent employee of Capital One via the Paribus acquisition, and he has quoted his CTO as saying "We're not a bank, we're a technology company."

I don't bank with them so I can't comment on their offerings, but his insider perspective indicates that they're taking technology seriously (hence acquisitions like Paribus).

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#154
post #5

Where does the fine go? Does it get divvied up amongst the people affected by WF's wrongdoing?

Yes. Dodd-Frank, the act that created the CFPB, mandates that the fines are deposited into what's called the Consumer Financial Civil Penalty Fund[1]. Money in that fund can be used for only two purposes by law: 1) Compensating victims of the wrongdoing 2) General consumer education & financial literacy programs The key here is that #1 takes priority by law; #2 only kicks in if the victims are unknown or in a few oth…

>I agree with the others in this thread who have serious problems with regulatory agencies that "self-fund" by using fines to keep the lights on. CFPB doesn't do this

So one of the agencies most likely to go after major corporations don't do this. But the police that go after the little people can? Seems... rigged.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi-related: If you have any entities (power company, cell phone provider, etc..) setup to directly pull their payments from your account, these can cause the account to re-open, and then overdraft. Be careful.

That sounds very unethical.

We are still talking about Wells Fargo, right? In my experience with them, I would say the adjective 'unethical' is hilariously redundant.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#157
post #2

It's hard for me think of wellsfargo as an "evil" company, because every time I had to go into the branch, they have some of the nicest tellers and it's always a pleasant experience.

I don't know how to say this without sounding condescending, but you basically just need to think harder or perhaps more critically. This is like saying you can't wrap your head around global warming because it's cold un your backyard or that you can't believe the earth is round because the ground in front of you seems so flat. We must open our minds to larger concepts. This sort of small-mindedness is responsible fo…

They didn't write that they couldn't form the thought; just that it was hard.

You could try reading harder, or perhaps more carefully (and critically).

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#158
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitol One has one of the largest advertising budgets at > $1.5B. Seems a bit insane to support an organization that is willing to send so much revenue out the door when a good chunk of it could be recaptured by its customers.

If it matters, Capital One 360 is, or at least was, the old ING Direct USA. The whole division was acquired by Capital One.

more like a wanna be tech company.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#160
post #38

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…

I manage most of this with Ally.com. Each bill has its own savings account (most with automatic payment set up on the account side). My direct deposit is automatically transferred on a recurring basis into that pay period’s portion of each bill.

You can open multiple checking accounts (and we have multiples for those services that don’t draft from savings accounts), but we only have one debit card. All weekly expenses come from that account (which is funded every week by auto transfers).

We aren’t the type that care about “entertainment” vs “food.” Some weeks we eat out more; other weeks we play. If there’s cash in the spend account, buy what you want.

Savings and investments are automatically transferred as well. When we have a specific thing to save for, we open a new savings account and modify the transfer rules.

Not perfect, but works very well for us.

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