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Square Banking

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71–80 of 174 posts

Re: Square Banking

#71
post #15

2021 is a great time to own a small regional / community bank. All the mature FinTech companies are trying to buy a bank to expedite the cumbersome bank chartering process (+ mortgage origination and servicing companies are too)

sure, they are, but the bank holding company act (BHCA) restrictions on ownership/source of strength requirements are a kick in the head. You can go the Greendot route (just up and convert yourself to a bank holding company), Varo route (same but get a fresh OCC charter), or take your chances with an ILC application.

Re: Square Banking

#72

"Square, Inc. is a financial services company, not a bank. "

Yeah but the banking products are provided by a wholly owned subsidiary (savings accounts and loans) and a partner company (checking accounts and debit cards), both of which are banks. The products are indeed offered by banks owned or partnered with Square, but not directly by Square, Inc. itself.

Re: Square Banking

#75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always struggled with this concept, why not stop at 0 when the account is overstretched? Here in Europe, for most people I would say, it's quite rare that the account goes to 0, and if it does, the transactions simply don't go through (unless it's a credit card). Isn't that asking for borrowing money at no fee? Don't get me wrong, I absolutely despise predatory bank charges, but wonder if that's a bit much to ask a…

Being able to go below 0 is not tied to having a credit card. Nearly all debit cards issued in Europe can do this to. The only ones that don’t are things like Electron (systematic authorization), but they don’t play well with “fast” systems like motorway tollgates

So what happens here in the UK with my visa debit card, is that if I somehow go below 0 using it(very difficult, but it has happened before) then my bank sends me a text saying "hey, you have gone into unarranged overdraft, please pay in some money before tomorrow 3pm or we'll charge you a fee".

But of course, that implies that the bank isn't greedy.

Re: Square Banking

#76
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…

> you never know when your account will get overdrawn How? It’s not that hard to keep track of money in vs money out. I bet most of it is people that don’t understand it takes time for a cheque to clear or people that know an auto payment will overdraw their account but can’t do anything about it (ie: no money). Overdraft fees should be illegal, especially for electronic transactions that get rejected.

maybe you have never lived through a period of sustained financial stress. Yes, people in that situation understand that it takes a few days for a check to clear. One of those checks is your paycheck, which you need to clear to cover your other costs. The other is the check you wrote to the grocery store so you could eat, or your rent check. Which clears first? Did you time it right? What if your paycheck was delayed by a day?

Money in vs money out is very hard to keep track of when you don't have a buffer and you are always balancing empty.

I want to make an analogy to a seemingly simple buy known hard computer science problem, like resolving bugs caused by race conditions. Stuff which is simple if you can assume a single processing thread can become a nightmare when this assumption does not hold.

Re: Square Banking

#77
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often derided as "scroll jacking" or more politely referred to as "scroll snapping" it's being added to the CSS spec so likely not going anywhere. https://drafts.csswg.org/css-scroll-snap-1/ Here I want to learn about the features of Square Banking but I can't do so at a glance, on the landing page for Square Banking. The best solution is to just give up and search Google News for a summary: https://finance.yahoo.com…

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…

I tried scrolling that demo with my mouse wheel and it "snapped" quite spastically down to 4. Even once I realized what the intended behavior was, it was still difficult to control: https://youtu.be/1A1c51GFGoc

Seems to work as intended with the touchpad, to the point where it was hard to even tell that the browser was doing something different.

Re: Square Banking

#78

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.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that an integrated product will necessarily be cheaper, as opposed to simply more convenient.

That's definitely not a necessary result of a combined product offering, but it's interesting to think about.

Re: Square Banking

#79

> 0.5% APY on savings accounts How insulting, and yet still better than the competition

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.

Re: Square Banking

#80

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…

This is where fintech has been headed for some time -- a bundle of complimentary products all in a single app (payment provider + bank + loan company + crypto + etc.).

Square are demonstrating this here for business, some Chinese finance apps went down this road years ago, Revolut are billing themselves as a "financial super app".

There's tremendous advantage in having everything in one place. Each individual product can be 70% as good as best in market, but the value-add by having everything bundled in one place is huge.

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