SIlicon Valley Bank is clunky but it is reliable. Coming from the UK and having lived in San Francisco for the past decade I was irritated to see a firm use borrowed interest (BREXIT) to build their brand. Especially when the implications of the referendum were never clearly spelled out to UK voters. As far as Brexit the company goes, it must be tough being a start-up credit card firm with no market understanding and no sense of what will be profitable strategies in the future. Cutting small customer accounts is a great way of managing their risk profile overnight...it is a clear announcement of impending deep recession, small businesses beware!
Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
221–230 of 350 posts
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#222So customers have less than 2 months to find new banking partners, migrate their data, inform their partners about banking changes, etc... This is one reason why I'm avoiding all fintech/startup/neo banks in the future. My most solid experience was with a top 5 US bank. They have a shitty customer service and a plethora of offers; but my direct deposits go faster, I don't get pestered over 5 figures amount going in/o…
Fully agree about the neo bank stuff. When I picked a bank for my current company people were recommending me Tinkoff (local neo-bank that's entirely online, but has fancy apps etc.). It was tempting due to how shiny all their stuff is, but I ended up going with Alfabank (traditional "brick&mortar" bank).
A couple months down the line I had a bureaucratic hiccup with some tax office documents and it was SO MUCH nicer to be able to walk into a bank office and speak to a person and get it all sorted out on the spot, instead of arguing with some online live chat agent to be escalated to the right place.
When I lived in the UK I used Monzo there (another online-only, app-only (!) neo bank). This seemed like a good idea at the time - until I started needing to do things that traditional banks are much better at (such as international transfers). What really hit me here is that I at some point considered doing a smartphone detox, and realised that my smartphone was the only way to fully access my personal account there. Bad idea, never again ...
(There's some symmetry between this and ordering products online for me, btw. If I can go to a physical store and look at a thing before buying I will prefer this over ordering online and potentially dealing with returns, delivery issues etc. almost 100% of the time)
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lmao. That's some bikeshedding. Let me name other SMS 2FA "travesties" (regardless of TOTP support): Paypal, Box, Amazon, Citizen, Google, Zoom, Samsung, Signal, Lyft, (my bank), Coinbase, Discord, Ring, Twitter, ...
He said “(ONLY!) use SMS-based 2FA”. Some of those sites support webauthn. TOTP is secure enough for the rest. SMS 2FA is only a problem when it’s the only option.
Why does offering an insecure authentication method stop being a problem when there are alternatives? It should not be offered.
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it a bank, though? I don't know Brex but looking around their website they seem to be a fintech company but not a bank (they don't seem to have a licence)
Brex cash is functionally a bank account. Department-specific Brex cards are useful and it integrated well. Our “real” bank has such a clunky interface that we started using Brex cash because it was a little easier, and over time drifted more to that account.
There is a world of regulatory difference between a prepaid plastic reseller and a proper bank, no matter how similar it might look on the surface.
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s deliberate. The choices are 1) say something true that will make you look bad, 2) say something untrue that might bite you in the ass later, and 3) write ambiguous waffle that explains nothing and commits you to nothing. PR and legal will tell you to choose 3 every time.
for those that didn't click, pasting verbatim > Brex is constantly evolving our business, and after changes to our strategy, we are less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers. The following sections will provide you with more context for your next steps. terrible communication. it's we need ______ so you should deal with _____. that is not empathy
Clearly they have little reason to care about the feelings of people they want to be ex-customers.
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#226Brex founder here. We've made the difficult decision to no longer offer services to the small business market. Back in April we launched Empower, and we decided to put the full weight of Brex towards building the best global payments platform for tech startups and larger companies. With that, we realized we couldn't do a great job serving the small business community at the same time. This has been an incredibly diff…
AKA they lose money on smaller customers to customer support requests and most likely wire transfer fees since they offer wire tranfers for free. They almost definitely lost money on my LLC I bet they only made $5 in interest after a year and probably spent $100s investigating my various customer support requests. Plus I made several thousand off of their rewards program. So yeah, bummer, but it makes sense. It's too…
> It's too bad I'd be willing to pay like $100/month to keep my account going.
they probably would still lose money off you even if you paid $100 a month, given what you've described.
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#227Brex founder here. We've made the difficult decision to no longer offer services to the small business market. Back in April we launched Empower, and we decided to put the full weight of Brex towards building the best global payments platform for tech startups and larger companies. With that, we realized we couldn't do a great job serving the small business community at the same time. This has been an incredibly diff…
What were your reasons for attempting to sell your services to smaller businesses in the first place? You have made decisions capable of inflicting tremendous pain on entirely innocent people eg employees. How are you to be believed that you will not randomly hurt more people? Buddy this isn't PR this is proving you're not a dangerous child entirely before you defend your job.
> What were your reasons for attempting to sell your services to smaller businesses in the first place?
People don't change banks very often - a lot of banks offer child and student accounts because they know a decent % of people who bank with them at age 15 will bank with them at age 35.
Perhaps their intention was to get in early at 3-person companies that were on their way to becoming 300-employee companies; but they actually found a bunch of 3-person businesses like barber shops and food trucks signed up.
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There has got to be a better way for us to accomplish this. One path forward is Oauth, which several major institutions use on Plaid (Capital One, Wells, Chase are ones I know of). This definitely solves “entering login information into random forms”. I’m pretty sure I have seen these institutions offer you some control over what data you share when you link, but it was minimal control, and didn’t work well. Ideall…
There should be a law for this. The EU as an open banking API law, that requires banks to make this data available electronically over an API. The US needs an open banking law. This should not be an optional feature for banks to offer. It should be an absolute requirement. I think it's insane to enter your credentials into Plaid. Almost every banking agreement I've ever seen disclaims liability if your account is bre…
> if you share your password with Plaid, and Plaid is breached, and someone uses your banking credentials to drain your account, I think a bank could wash their hands of it and walk away in that situation.
is "Plaid is breached" necessary? Or is it enough for bank to be aware that you used Plaid?
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#229The title of this page says “why” but there is exactly zero on this page which explains why. There’s half of one sentence that introduces what (“we are less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers”) but even that is dressed up to the max. This is a poster child in what everyone hates about corporate communication: entirely opaque, misleading word salad. Do better.
I think "we are less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers" can be read as "smaller customers cost too much/aren't profitable enough/take up too much resources, so we're concentrating on larger ones".
Due to the anti money laundering, sanctions etc. customers are also a risk for financial institutions. Small companies won't bring much revenue so banks are sometimes not very eager to onboard them.
Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used SVB at my previous startup. Somewhat ironically, their UX is SUPER dated and a bit kludgy (been a year since I've checked, though) and their fees are high, BUT they're high touch and good to be in with strategically (especially when it comes to debt financing). I don't know if I'd suggest them early on when bootstrapped, but definitely worth a gander once larger or VC-backed. Mercury's UX is sexy AF and enjoy…
SVB site UX has been "dated" since at least 2014. Good service tho.
You mean it's not optimised for a phone screen even when I'm using a pc so I can see a useful amount of information on one screen. And has actual options I need rather than looking good?