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Square Banking

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Re: Square Banking

#151

Post by duped »

dm8 wrote: 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…

The tyranny of scale creates terrible incentives in banking. Someone whose average balance hovers around $100/month might well cost the bank more money than they can earn off the balance, while someone with $10,000 is basically free.

Normally in services you charge more from the people who are more able to pay, because they'll be willing to spend more money for the same service. Yet in financial services and banking, the more money you have to spend on the services results in the lower fees and costs across the board.

I think if there's something that needs to be systematically altered to close wealth gaps, that's a fine place to start.

Re: Square Banking

#153

Post by yuchi »

SippinLean wrote: post #48
madeofpalk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behaviour has nothing to do with scroll snapping. Scroll snapping is just "can i have a carousel without javascript", and is primarily a touch interaction. See this extremely brief demo https://codepen.io/tutsplus/pen/qpJYaK?editors=1100 I wouldn't call Square's site "scroll hijacking" - usually we use that to refer to when the actual native scroll behaviour/events are highjacked and prevented, and custom javasc…

From TFA: > For instance, it is easy for a user to land at an awkward scroll position which leaves an item partially on-screen when panning. > To this end, this module introduces scroll snap positions which enforce the scroll positions that a scroll container’s scrollport may end at after a scrolling operation has completed. Which is exactly what this page is doing. > primarily a touch interaction It's exclusively a…

Sorry to disagree. The interaction you see in the page is not scroll snapping.

With scroll snapping you the user have always control of the scrollable content. What you do not have control over is where it will stop scrolling. A similar behavior to forced guides in a movable element on rails (such as drawers).

This page doesn’t scroll at all, and uses the scroll as a time control for a “movie”. And that is scroll jacking, as it hijacks the scroll position to do something completely different.

This page, at least on mobile, is also guilty of implementing it in the worst way possible: without any alternative scroll indications and without smooth continuous transitions that make it clear that you are controlling the animation through the scroll.

Apple is somewhat better at doing this since the scrolljacking procedure usually brings you to an element which, at the end of a glamourous entrance, actually scrolls away with the page.

Re: Square Banking

#154

Post by arcticbull »

purple_ferret wrote: post #120
danpalmer wrote: post #33

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…

As a small business owner do you really want your banking to be tied to your POS system though? Why not offer Square 'housing' too. Sell with Square and live in a Square condo[0] [0] So long as you never ever leave Square for another system.

Generally speaking banks leave a lot to be desired in the US, which is Square's banking charter. They can make a better bank, and they can provide complementary financial services in one place.

For what it's worth extant banking competitors offer substantially all the major services that Square does. JPM is a bank, a broker, a merchant acquirer (Chase Paymentech), they're a credit card issuer, a debit card issuer, an unsecured lender, as secured lender (mortgage broker).

Heck, Chase even operates a private instance of VisaNet.

What Square's doing isn't any different really, it's just flashier and better executed. And also, whatever this embarrassing crypto thing is: [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/tbd54566975

Re: Square Banking

#155

Post by cercatrova »

arkitaip wrote: post #52
danpalmer wrote: post #33

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.

The history of products has always been bundling and unbundling [0]. There have been products that bundled everything but some customers decided they didn't like the bundle, so they went with a la carte options. Now we're seeing these a la carte companies bundle again to achieve more scale. And then the unbundling will happen again in due time.

It's all cyclical.

[0] https://stratechery.com/concept/business-models/bundling-and...

Re: Square Banking

#156

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

bananaportfolio wrote: post #104
dimmke wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks used to structure these charges to create overdrafts whenever possible. They made it very difficult for you to see what your actual usable balance is. They also used to be allowed to simply reject the transaction if you didn't have the money and still charge a $36 fee. It was insanity. If your checking balance never reaches close to zero, you wouldn't notice this. I was a teenager in 2010 and definitely got hit…

In 2006 PayPal tried to deduct ~$500 dozens of times in a 48 hour period due to what was obviously a software bug. This resulted in me being overdrawn by around $900. No matter who I spoke to on the phone with Bank of America, nor which branch manager I met with in person, nobody could do anything to help me. The most I accomplished was having a branch manager agree to waive 1 overdraft fee since I had never overdraf…

> This was a good reminder that I need to switch banks.

When you do, try your best to do what I've done ever since my mortgage processor screwed up and double charged me: never use anyone else's online services; do all the banking that's possible from your bank's online bill pay. At least that way the people who are pushing money out of your account via automation report up through the same people who manage the rest of your account ;)

Also, credit unions seem to be happy to let you maintain an account with a balance but no fee in a way that banks aren't. As a result, I have my main checking account that I use for everything, and a second account at a completely unrelated institution where I keep 30 days worth of cash. I spent $10 for che(que|ck)s and an hour of time getting it set up, which was well worth buying me a month of insulation against any number of risks.

Re: Square Banking

#157

Post by thebean11 »

ww520 wrote: post #34
duxup wrote: post #26

>Square Banking >Square, Inc. is a financial services company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Square’s banking affiliate, Square Financial Services, Inc. or Sutton Bank; Members FDIC. Um so they are insured by the FDIC? Am I doing business with Square, Square Financial Services, Inc., or Sutton Bank? Do I have any recurse when it comes to typical banking expectations / rules here when it comes to either…

That’s a really good question. In the event of an insolence, can you as a customer of Square get through to the real banks in the back? Would the banks treat you as their own customer and fulfill their FDIC obligation?

Yes usually the backing account is in the end user's name in these schemes.

Re: Square Banking

#158

Post by BayAreaEscapee »

angott wrote: post #133
the_snooze wrote: post #63

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.

Back in the day (when we had to go to school uphill both ways), I met a banker who told me, "whatever your bank is charging you for a bounced check, it isn't nearly enough". Then he described how the system worked: the actual physical check had to be sent back from your bank, to the Federal Reserve branch of the receiving bank, then to your branch of the Federal Reserve bank, and then to your bank. Not electronically: I'm describing the movement of the actual physical paper check. So, there was a real cost to everyone for a bounced check and of course the person who wrote the bad check should pay. That makes sense.

Of course, this makes no sense in a world of electronic transfers via ACH. The banks that are still charging $35 for a bounced transfer are engaging in something barely more legal than theft.

Re: Square Banking

#159

Post by ac29 »

gnicholas wrote: post #102
ac29 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-risk yield doesn't grow on trees. 0.5% is about what a 3 year treasury bond was paying at the beginning of the month (its lower now). Banks dont really need deposits to make loans right now either, since the reserve ratio was changed to 0% last year. So yes, safe, insured deposits in savings accounts dont pay much at the moment. This has less to do with banks being greedy and more to do with current fiscal policy…

In the past I've shopped around and found that you can find personal bank accounts that pay small amounts of interest (~1% in recent years), but business bank accounts wouldn't pay anything. It's nice to see this option, which will hopefully draw some people and simultaneously convince competitors to offer similar products.

Yeah, a lot of credit unions especially have reward checking with ~1% rates. You always need to jump through some hoops like having direct deposit and a minimum number of transactions on their debit/credit cards (which is where they make the money to pay the extra interest). Still, if you can meet these requirements, its not a bad way to lessen the effect of inflation on money kept for day to day expenses in a checking account.

Re: Square Banking

#160

Post by echelon »

clint wrote: post #100
pdpi wrote: post #84

This was the "Aha!" part for me: > Get a customized offer based on your card sales through Square, and then choose your loan size. and then a bit further down: > Repay it automatically with a percentage of your daily card sales through Square. Such an incredibly obvious idea in hindsight. While I can see why putting all your eggs in one basket like this can pose something of a problem, there's no denying this level o…

This is something PayPal has offered small businesses for probably close to a decade now.

But then you have to interact with PayPal.

PayPal burned me repeatedly as a teenager. Locked funds, some never recovered. I didn't do anything wrong.

Never. Again.

Maybe some people don't harbor this grudge, but to me PayPal is the epitome of incompetent and evil. Venmo, all of it.

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