221–230 of 258 posts
McDonalds is a real estate company that happens to make burgers.
The traditional car manufacturers are banks that happen to build cars.
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Uber is succeeding? Its finances don't think so.
It's really amazing how a company can run for so long on so much loss. IIRC Twitter has never turned a profit either, and yet there it stands
It’s hard to visualize how much money these big tech cos are actually taking in investment. If you have a $B you can lose $10mm a year for one hundred years.
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Luckily we have regulations for that. Google is not a bank. If they start to offer banking services it will be through a partnership with an actual bank. Your money will not be “with Google”, unless they enter the multi year, very expensive process of applying for a banking license which they’re not doing. Not that I don’t disagree with your point, in general. But google can’t just take your money like that. At least…
> the multi year, very expensive process of applying for a banking license If the upside is taking a chunk of Mastercard/Visa's 600bn market-cap, the $0.01bn effort of a "very expensive" banking licence is peanuts.
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This 100%. I work at a fintech that's not a bank. Instead, we integrate with people who integrate with banks--we've basically got one middleman per continent (except a few). It's awful. Rather than having to figure out the regulatory details of each jurisdiction so that we can be compliant, we instead have to figure out the regulatory details of each jurisdiction so that we can trick whichever middleman into being co…
I don’t know if it is specific to banks but there is a common pattern I have seen among internal developers: not only a complete lack of curiosity to understand finance, the underlying business, but an active resistance to any attempt to explain them. They want the numbers to be data, and don’t want to have to know anything about this data, and be told exactly what to do with it and they will code it up. I am sure th…
There are lots of things wrong with technology in large banks but the business knowledge of developers is pretty low on the list.
I left banking a few months ago, so I am no apologist for the sector.
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This 100%. I work at a fintech that's not a bank. Instead, we integrate with people who integrate with banks--we've basically got one middleman per continent (except a few). It's awful. Rather than having to figure out the regulatory details of each jurisdiction so that we can be compliant, we instead have to figure out the regulatory details of each jurisdiction so that we can trick whichever middleman into being co…
Exactly. I talk to several Fintech startups a month complaining about this sort of thing. Forgive me if I can't quite gin up any sympathy. It's a business with centuries of baggage, massive inertia, vast resources, but what I typically hear is "I'm gonna Uber/Tesla/Bird this financial industry thing in 6/12/18/24 months, ignore the rules because 'disruption' and find someone else to push all the risk, compliance and…
I work in finanance and a huge chunk of my work is generating reports for regulators. Specifically in derivatives (swaps and such), which was fairly wild west before the financial crisis.
There's a lot of catching up and a lot of interest into the trades by regulators, which were basically off-exchange and which are a big part of structured products. Those are financial products, which Warren Buffet deigned "Financial Products of Mass Destruction"
And you know what? I agree with those regulations despite the fact that it can be a real pain.
And if anybody really believes such regulation is crap and just there to support entrenched market players. Well; essentially banks self regulated before the financial crisis.
And what could ever go wrong with that?
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> Another answer: because regular banks are awful to deal with. They don't have nice APIs to just move money around. They apply velocity limits at surprising times. They can terminate your account suddenly for opaque reasons. Do you think Google is going to do any better at this? They already have no customer support, close accounts without notice....etc... The article is right, this is about engagement.
The traditional banking system is about 150 years old by now. Increasingly, it seems to serve a smaller segment of society, regardless of its half-hearted attempts at innovation. I have a number of friends working in finance. Lovely people. Absolutely arrogant, though, when it comes to the question of whether their industry will face non-trivial disuption. Maybe Google and other current tech giants will not be the on…
I am not certain that it serves a smaller segment of society than ever, I suspect it's always served a small segment of society. Would want to see some data.
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The traditional banking system is about 150 years old by now. Increasingly, it seems to serve a smaller segment of society, regardless of its half-hearted attempts at innovation. I have a number of friends working in finance. Lovely people. Absolutely arrogant, though, when it comes to the question of whether their industry will face non-trivial disuption. Maybe Google and other current tech giants will not be the on…
I'm pretty sure that whoever disrupts banking will do it the Uber way, by disregarding all the laws that they are required to follow and trying to claim not to be what they actually are, with the same eventual success this route has had for Uber.
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> Another answer: because regular banks are awful to deal with. They don't have nice APIs to just move money around. They apply velocity limits at surprising times. They can terminate your account suddenly for opaque reasons. Do you think Google is going to do any better at this? They already have no customer support, close accounts without notice....etc... The article is right, this is about engagement.
> Do you think Google is going to do any better at this? Google's new checking account isn't really Google. They don't currently have the licenses needed to act as a bank. It's basically a Google branded checking account from Stanford Federal Credit Union. From what I've read, Google's checking account will be similar to Uber's credit card in that you will sign up and get some benefits through Google/Uber, but pretty…
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> They can terminate your account suddenly for opaque reasons. I generally am 'ok' with modern (US) banks and global, partly because I know their rules and set my expectations accordingly, but unlike what one of the sub-commenters said: "Chase" completely fucked up my world with no recompense for a while. No rhyme. No reason. Ultimately it was because I had connections to executives of the bank at the CEO level that…
Same thing happened to my wife earlier this year. She deposited a check (from an insurance company), Chase apparently deemed it fraudulent (it was not) and with absolutely zero notice simply closed her account. She pulled open the app one day and noticed that the account was just missing, with all the money that was in it. Hours on the phone with no resolution. They told us we had to get the insurance company to cont…
When I called to figure out what was going on I was advised the account was closed and that a check would be mailed with remaining funds within 60-90 days. I asked about the other accounts and they are all fine and open. BUT, because the fraud closure was related to an online banking transaction I would no longer have access to online banking. Pretty much rendered the remaining accounts useless at this point. So while they didn't close all my accounts themselves, they pretty much forced my hand to close my remaining accounts.