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There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

bloomberg.com

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Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#61

Post by Maken »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #25

How viable is a bank, which offers exactly: * No physical bank branch. Only online banking * a current account with a monthly fee * a debit card that can be used at other banks' ATM - monthly fee. * Debit card can't be directly used online. But you can generate merchant specific card numbers on the website. Say, your monthly fee is $20. Then 4000 customers brings in a million dollars an year. How much is spent on fra…

It feels like you are describing something like N26 and other German microbanks, except they offer real debit cards and the only fee is for sending you the physical card.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#63

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

SoftTalker wrote: post #15
blakesterz wrote: post #4

Sammons, the fourth generation of his family to run the 100-plus-year-old S&L and its only full-time employee, confides that he’s a bit tech-averse. “Computers are great when they work,” says the 55-year-old, laughing. “I don’t have the patience for them.” Most days I bet most of us would agree with that statement!

Yep. I was just trying to fill out a PDF form for my taxes. A complete nightmare. Tried three different PDF viewers that had different bugs or incompatibilities with the form. Finally had to start a Windows VM to run Acrobat, that was the only way to get it done, other than print the blank form and fill it out by hand which in retrospect would have saved me about 40 minutes. I have been in software and IT for my whol…

You're the victim of Adobe's poison pill to make PDF only usable by their tooling with the inclusion of JS and ensuring that the traditional PDF form authoring isn't readily generated by Acrobat anymore.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#64

Post by bob1029 »

adrr wrote: post #8

With an aversion to technology, i really wonder how this bank supports electronic transfers like ATM, ACH, wires etc. Is there a core banking system running?

I can't comprehend how this bank would be able to afford any variety of digital core banking system.

Compliance & management over the IT stack alone would probably be cost prohibitive. You can outsource just about everything, but at some point you still need a physical person to come in and manage the computer your part-time teller uses.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#65

Post by bradeeoh »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #49
smelendez wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an interesting article about church-based credit unions. It looks like they exist to offer better options to underbanked populations and are often limited to church members: https://religionnews.com/2018/10/30/church-run-credit-unions...

Credit unions, by law, must have restrictions on who can join. Often times they're gated by where you live, what city you worship in, where you work. I'm a member of a large California based credit union and while the low/no fees are nice, their general incompetence is awful.

> I'm a member of a large California based credit union and while the low/no fees are nice, their general incompetence is awful.

Some banks have general incompetence, as well.

I'm a member of a mid-sized California based credit union, and their customer service and competence are fabulous.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#66

Post by willcipriano »

piperswe wrote: post #16

This may be America's smallest bank, but there are smaller credit unions! From what I can tell, Holy Trinity Baptist Federal Credit Union is the smallest, operating since 1966 with about $16k in deposits according to their EOY 2022 financial report: https://ncuso.org/credit-union/17269/financials/

One man's modest used automobile purchase is another man's bank run.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#67

Post by dimitrios1 »

adrr wrote: post #34
dimitrios1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as ACH goes, the same way they did it 30+ years ago. You don't need to be technology inclined to perform ACH transactions. NACHA was around in 1974. The ACH network has existed for most of its history without any notion of the modern internet or our current digital world, and most of it still works "offline"

NACHA requires you to upload a formatted file and it's a character offset format that you can't do by hand. There's a computer in the mix. There is also ACH pulls that you need have error handling around for invalid account numbers and insufficient funds. I guess you could just do it by hand.

Theres 100s of services that will do it all for you (you meaning bank). In fact if you join NACHA itself, I am sure they offer some or at least have affiliates.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#68

Post by lsaferite »

rendx wrote: post #46
LoganDark wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have bank accounts in 3 different countries How is this even possible? Do you have citizenship in all three countries?

If you reside in the European Union, you can easily have bank accounts in any other EU country. Apart from that, plenty of banks in many countries allow you to open an account even without residency or citizenship.

Getting an account as a US citizen in the EU used to be easier, but the US put in place onerous reporting requirements that made US citizens mostly unwelcome unless you have a lot of money. Very frustrating to have a bank close your accounts because dealing with the US reporting is too much of a hassle.

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#69

Post by [deleted] »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #25

How viable is a bank, which offers exactly: * No physical bank branch. Only online banking * a current account with a monthly fee * a debit card that can be used at other banks' ATM - monthly fee. * Debit card can't be directly used online. But you can generate merchant specific card numbers on the website. Say, your monthly fee is $20. Then 4000 customers brings in a million dollars an year. How much is spent on fra…

[deleted]

Re: There are no fees at America’s smallest bank

#70

Post by boring_twenties »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #27
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #25

How viable is a bank, which offers exactly: * No physical bank branch. Only online banking * a current account with a monthly fee * a debit card that can be used at other banks' ATM - monthly fee. * Debit card can't be directly used online. But you can generate merchant specific card numbers on the website. Say, your monthly fee is $20. Then 4000 customers brings in a million dollars an year. How much is spent on fra…

This is kind of how I'm set up. I use Ally for their checking and savings and privacy for their merchant specific card numbers. It works reasonably well for me. It would be cool to have a real FDIC insured, licensed bank with this built in some how. I'd be willing to pay $25/mo for something that is first-party.

Citi has had "virtual account numbers" since at least 2005. (Back then, you needed the Flash player to use them, or was it Java...)
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