261–270 of 305 posts
Thanks @op! Increase employee here: We're early days and not quite ready for open sign-ups yet (sorry, known bug). We'll be more public over the coming weeks and months. We're banking for developers; you can programatically create accounts, cards, and move money. Our users are primarily financial technology companies. We're a small team from Stripe, Robinhood, and Visa building the bank we always wanted. If this soun…
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> Doesn't crypto have the same problem, with money laundering and other crimes? I don't see how that's the same problem? They are clearly separate, distinct problems. There are obviously both advantages and disadvantages to both crypto and banking. As someone who lives in a country that has been through a lot of bullshit, I highly value the fact that the bank can't just take away my money.
Hackers, on the other hand, can. As can exchanges as repeatedly happened in the last few months. The only difference is that crypto fraud is irreversible, and that the blame will be put on you.
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I don't think OP knows what he is talking about? You also need "thousands" of accounts, and unless you are opening these remotely, I don't know how you can get this many people to co-operate with your scheme. That also doesn't cover the first part: Laundering the money into the bank. (if the money is already in the banking system, there is nothing to launder). To be honest, I don't think money laundering is real, or…
Money laundering is real, but for some reason everything that I read online (e.g. in news articles or comments) about it is complete nonsense. E.g. here the nonsense is why money that you already have in a bank account needs to be sent to someone else via 1000s of random small transactions. At best that would add a layer of confusion, but you still have the money laundering problems for the sending and final receivin…
What happens is that banks are trying to cover their ass and please regulators so they don’t get fined.
Of course all regulation does is add complexity. You still have the most common way to launder money: know the top-banker and have connections inside the bank. With the right amount of money you can buy all the KYC you need.
Which means all this regulations is either malicious or plain ignorant. I think it’s malicious.
> Anything that you can achieve with PDFs, presence, and persistence in a bank branch you can do with our API. Not sure how to take this. With a small tweak like "you can eventually do" I would let it pass without criticism. I work with bank cores, imaging, BSA and related middleware on a daily basis. The scope and complexity of these systems is incomprehensible to most. Many of our clients don't even try to think ab…
Traditional banks have literally decades of legacy to deal with which drags them down. Many neobanks have shown that it's possible to provide a better and cheaper service when you start from scratch. A few examples of features neobanks i use provide that traditional banks don't have - virtual cards on the fly, for free; SEPA Instant for free; Open API; smart dynamic budgeting and expense sharing.
I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super e…
I hate to be "that guy", but this is why I hate banks and like crypto. Both the fact that crypto is obviously trivial to automate, and that banks can unilaterally ban you and steal your money.
If you don't trust "the system" as a whole then you are right, I can't argue with mistrust.
I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super e…
I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super e…
I always wondered why my bank completely blocks any kind of scraping with puppeteer or cheerios. This explains a lot :)
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> legacy to deal with which drags them down A non-zero amount of that legacy is due to regulations and compliance. Most of what a bank does is totally invisible to the end customer. A "neobank" is almost always just a shiny consumer-oriented facade in front of a grumpy old bank. Someone still has to follow all of those laws.
I should have specified that I'm talking about EU-based neobanks, which are all real banks as far as I am aware (some are entities of bigger banking groups, some are standalone startups). US banking being largely obsolete as a whole (checks? paid wire transfers that take days to arrive?) probably explains why there are no real neobanks in the US and they're all just a UI in front of a legacy bank. I doubt it has much…
Even Revolut that you cite was just a frontend until January 2021 where it became a bank, but just in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolut#History
It's notable that Monzo (UK fintech bank, but now in many countries) has a fairly complete but not really advertised API. Their mobile app uses the same API. If you need to know which emoji is most representative of the shop where you used your card 7 seconds ago, you can get sent that (and a lot of other data) in a webhook...
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I should have specified that I'm talking about EU-based neobanks, which are all real banks as far as I am aware (some are entities of bigger banking groups, some are standalone startups). US banking being largely obsolete as a whole (checks? paid wire transfers that take days to arrive?) probably explains why there are no real neobanks in the US and they're all just a UI in front of a legacy bank. I doubt it has much…
Most of EU-based neobanks are NOT real banks. 90% of them are just a frontend. Even Revolut that you cite was just a frontend until January 2021 where it became a bank, but just in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolut#History
What are you talking about? Revolut is a real bank, same as Monzo, N26, Aumax (part of a larger banking group so it hardly counts), Kard. Specifically regarding Revolut, they are a real bank in multiple countries now - UK, Lithuania, US and a bunch of other European countries.