This was probably the first one of these you saw, because their original concept website came out I believe 2 years ago. They haven't launched (still) although a few others have. They've now added some things and it looks interesting, but has been a long time coming.
Am I missing something - I mean it's annoying having to update recurring payments with a new card# but it doesn't happen that often and the issuer has the liability, so what do I care?
This literally just happened to me today, and it was a bit of a pain, but it only took half an hour with last month's statement and a web browser to update all my regular payments.
The one thing I would recommend is having a secondary card with a different provider kept as a backup, just to deal with the couple of days between cancellation and receiving the new card. Even better is if it's a different card type (Visa if you have a MC or whatever) for that once in a blue moon situation when a merchant doesn't accept that card. Finally, if you do this, put some regular, low value monthly payment on the backup card so it doesn't get cancelled for inactivity. Netflix is good.
> We are PCI-DSS v3.1 compliant and apply PCI standards when dealing any cardholder information
I don't think this was some kind of wordplay attempt around dealing a deck of cards. Hopefully they're just "dealing with" the information instead. Typos in statements proclaiming how safe and secure they are...
The concept seems fine, I think some of this is already possible with other card issuers. I doubt I would pay a $49 annual fee for the service when there are free cards available.
Yes, I immediately thought of Citi's Virtual Account Numbers.
Citi also offers a card with no annual fee and 2% cash back, so if you use Final you're effectively paying $49 plus 1% of your spending each year for a trivial increase in piece of mind that you didn't need to begin with (because you're not liable for fraud).
Will have team take a look tomorrow and adjust it to the intent is clearer, this reads weirdly. Honestly, don't think the wordplay was intentional, we just went through our second PCI level 1 audit & take cardholder security & privacy very seriously.
I like privacy.com ... Chrome add-in and you can generate card numbers at anytime for online-only stuff. I've put all my subscriptions (i.e. Netflix, Hulu, etc.) through privacy.com.
I applied/heard about Final long, long time ago and they've done nothing since. So yeah...
The biggest distinction I saw without actually using Final was that their card appears to require a relatively good credit score and has an annual fee but also has a 1% cash back rewards program.
I haven't used either service so I can't compare anything else.
Prepaid vs Credit is one main one, which drives towards a lot of acceptance issues. Many other pieces two around a holistic credit card product, happy to provide invites to anyone who pings me (info in profile). Disclaimer: CEO @ Final
I have a hard time with Privacy on more than a few vendors. This is usually because their system doesn't account for the authorization and charge being from two different company names. In NYC, for example, all cabs and related cab apps will charge like this.
This is something we've been working to improve over the past few months. If this happens again can you shoot us a note support@privacy.com with the details?
I don't think I need temporary numbers to protect me from fraud. The fraud protection with my current credit card has been working fine so far. Another reason not use this card is that I don't want to miss out on reward points. I don't see how this business model is going to survive.
The security and control benefits of Final go well beyond grocery points and miles, but we understand rewards are important.
So while it might not be the highest cash back rate available, our goal is to provide rewards that actually get used by our cardholders - and that means making it easy to redeem - two clicks easy."
So if you have a decent rewards card, you would be sacrificing quite a bit in rewards with this.
Rewards are hoops CC card companies make you jump though to get some of your money back. Money you pay when vendors increase their prices to cover CC card fees.
I don't know what credit card you have experienced this with, but with mine I just indicate that I want cash back in the form of statement credit and it's good to go. There are no hoops to jump through.
Pedant rant/ That's not quite how pricing works. Firms will generally charge the highest price the market will bear. If the firm is already charging that price, demand decreases if the raise the price. Depending upon the price elasticity of demand, it may be a precipitous drop. The firm is more likely to just have diminished margins.
This was my thought. I would love to use it, but I am not going to give up my SPG card from American Express. It gives me 1 point per purchase, but by saving those points for first class tickets, I have been netting out at 25 cents per point.
For instance, I just took a first class, round trip flight to Tokyo with my wife. The cost for each one way flight was a bit over $15k. So thats almost $60,000 in flights that I booked for 240k SPG points (transferred to AA with bonus, which then booked with Japan Airlines and Singapore Air). If I had used Final's 1% cashback program, I would have only received $2400.
Seems like a no brainer to skip out on the cooler features to get 25% more value from my purchases.
Virtual card numbers are not a new thing. For example, some Citibank cards allow you to create separate virtual numbers for different merchants. However, it looks like Final makes the process much easier.
That flash interface has not changed in 16 years, except that a few years ago they added a requirement to enter the three digit code from the back if card.
So that's pretty impressive that they can still support and maintain code that old.
Just because the user interface or functionality didn't change doesn't imply the internals didn't change to keep it maintained and running though, right?
Virtual cards are just about 20 years old, we're starting there, but already working on a lot more pieces to what it takes to be a truly digital credit card.
Hm, I've been doing this for years. My bank lets me create virtual MasterCard credit cards that can either be one-time use only (they "auto destroy" after one payment is authorized) or can be set to expire after a certain month or a certain amount of money is spent.
They're linked to a physical card and/or bank account that you never disclose, and you get an SMS notification for every transaction.
If there's an annual fee, most customers expect either excellent rewards or top-tier customer service (e.g. amex). Hard to justify $50/yr for neither of these.
All companies start somewhere, and when we look at the rewards games being played it becomes beyond a loss leader (been meaning to write up a blog post explaining issuer side economics on interchange). Deals like this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/costco-see... (<0.40% interchange) make it overly painful to compete at top tier rewards today without having perverse consumer incentives, but we have ideas of where loyalty should go and are driving towards that.
As for customer service, we believe you can't tout that as differentiator, you just have to do a great job and your customers will speak for you. Amex did a great job over last 50 years, but is struggling to be relevant in this day and age (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/)
We agree there's nothing better than exceptional customer service and experience. We've built Final from the ground up as a new credit card issuer so that we can continue to enhance the technology, service, and experience. We need to make money somehow, and we think an annual fee is the best way to align with our customers.
We've spent 3 years to get to this point. We're now live and actively inviting people from our waitlist to apply for a card.
We talk to our customers often and ask them what they think about us. We will continue building and making it better. Here's what we've heard:
"The few people I’ve showed your service to so far have said “this is what we should have had all along” and I agree."
"Final just solved my XM radio problem. I've been trying to cancel XM for a year. Each month I dispute their charges, Amex credits my money back.. but Amex would never just BAN them from charging me. Generated new final number, added to XM, then froze account. Boom."
"Final is one of the best banking products I've ever used. You guys could have sat back on your haunches and only delivered the cool feature of generating cards, but the well-designed phone app, the card, and your great customer service make every other card I have in my wallet pale in comparison. I reach for the final card to make daily payments not because of rewards points, but because I see the receipt immediately and I'm able to instantly dispute the charge if necessary. I don't know if there's such thing as 'credit card anxiety', but something about that gives me so much peace-of-mind.
Thank you for creating a great product!"
And our favorite:
"You guys fking killed the UX experience. The site is a pleasure to use."
Nav bar at the top reorders, or shifts width, or something - so I clicked something else instead 'FAQ' a couple of times; each time I had to wait several seconds while the navigation faded in...
My feedback: The virtual card numbers and the ease of generating them are tempting. But I'm already protected from fraud by my existing Citi DoubleCash (2% cash back, no annual fee). I'm not going to lose 1% cash back and the fee to get a Final card.
What type of support do you offer for your card members? Is it email only? When I clicked on "contact us" on your site there was no phone number not even an 800 number.
Both email and phone, but for full transparency we actually prefer email since it keeps a full log of conversations with consumers for both parties to have. Our card has a number on the back of it and a few other in-app spots have our number on it.
Thanks this is good to know. I think many people prefer the immediacy of phone support when they are having a payment issue. I looked through your FAQ and didn't see any mention of support which is why I asked. Congrats on the launch!
Appreciate the thorough response. I definitely think you guys have a unique value proposition. I still wonder if it's enough to justify switching costs for a large enough # of customers (e.g. re-setup bill pays, stored cards on accts, etc) for one truly differentiating feature, but wish you guys best of luck with your launch!
A lot of funny stories about how that piece of consumer software exists in the world today. About 5 different parties involved, some who are 100% competitors (V vs. MC). 16 or so years ago, MC bought a company called Orbiscom that provides what Citi & BoA use for vCards. Its a layer at the network to provide these mappings and so when BoA issues a Visa card, and you request a virtual card, you're making a call out to a MC service to generate them on a Visa BIN.
None of this even addresses or ties who BoA uses as their core processor for CC, which is now TSYS, and typically have little knowledge a vCard was used.
The good thing for what we're doing at Final is that this goes beyond many credit card numbers, its rethinking what is a piece of plastic in hundreds of millions consumers pockets for how we shop and interact w/ merchants in this day and age.
Bank of America's interface sort of sucks. It takes:
1. logging in
2. clicking on your credit card's account
3. scrolling way down on the right hand side
4. knowing that "ShopSafe" is thing to click on
5. waiting for the little ShopSafe interface to load (it typically takes 10+ seconds)
6. clicking on either "Create a new number" or "Create a new number for recurring payment"
7. entering the security code from the actual physical card (probably a reasonable step)
8. actually filling out the details of the virtual number
That's just to create a number. And if you want to generate a number for something like Netflix or Github (fixed-cost, recurring) and not have to change it every 12 months, too bad -- BofA won't let you generate a recurring payment number that is valid for more than 12 months.
It may have been done before, but that doesn't mean it was done well. I think there's plenty of room for improvement in this area, whether it's done by BofA (who has apparently had 16 years to make something useful), or a new entrant like Final.
We do it from the core infrastructure we run ourselves. Built the full stack to have flexibility and innovate in industry where 90+% of CC transactions still run on mainframes & COBOL
Fair point, problem is that theres no short answer here. We partners with a bank to get our own BIN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number), that when loaded onto the networks, gets routed to our core infrastructure. There are many ways to segment this BIN, randomly, PRIN(?), few other industry standards, and so when you want to issue a new consumer a new card # you use whatever your algorithm is, and assign it to that customers account (or whatever exactly your data model is).
So its 2/3rds BD to get setup, 1/3 enterprise engineering and a lot of integration work to get fully setup and running. Payments is the only trillion dollar industry where nothing is written down, we're working on changing that since we find a lot of the stories fascinating and so do most people we retell them to.
If anyone is in Oakland area and wants a primer, always happy to share, we spent 3 years learning industry and now its our time to start giving back.
People in this thread are just obscuring the details of this announcement, which is that this is wonderful and that I will be looking to acquire one of these cards.
People in this thread are just obscuring the details of this announcement, which is that this is wonderful and that I will be looking to acquire one of these cards.
In all honesty, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. When you put a battery into that form factor battery life is a big issue and keeping in sync with your phone really harms it. Add recharging and you have other tradeoffs, so EMV gets us 95%+ of the way there and we're happy not having to solve really hard esoteric challenges related to things like the Bluetooth stack for BLE use.
Working on native Android full steam now, but yep started with iPhone for now. Web is full responsive and have a ton of Android users using it and happy w/ experience. But point taken.
Re folks saying it's been done before, it makes me think of the William Gibson quote "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Even if it has been done before (I have no idea) -- if something makes a new tech available to many more people, it's effectively new to them.
In terms of using the card, my wife and I have found it useful. It feels empowering to give the card to a service/person and know you remain in control. Yes, all cards let you do chargebacks, or recover from fraudulent charges, but I don't want to have to fight to recover my money.
I love the feeling of using a number and knowing no other charges can come - that number can never be used again.
> Even if it has been done before (I have no idea)
I had this idea myself, I Googled it and found nothing. Visa has 3D Secure (which is really just a text-delivered OTP), but implementing the standard is completely optional. I've only come across it on a handful of websites.
The quality of the service varies between banks though, I remember my previous bank who forced me to go over a sketchy-looking website and use a Flash applet to generate the card...
AFAIK it's not possible to create a card with a monthly chargeable maximum amount, only to set the total amount for the card's lifetime, which limits the interest of the use for recurring payments.
I signed up 2/28/15. That day there were 40090 people ahead of me Jimmy. Now there are 40091 people ahead of me. So not only has one single person managed to cut in front of me, but the line hasnt moved since prior to February 2015.
That rant/inquiry aside, http://privacy.com/ gave me an account and I have been very happy with it. Seems like a good product.
Bank Of America has been doing this for a while, but the interface is terrible, so I welcome competition in this space. Integration with a password manager (like 1password) would be really convenient!
Other cards might do chargebacks and fraudulent charge recovery, but I look at online services like Playstation Network. If your account is compromised, and you do a chargeback, they will ban your account and you lose access to all your digital content. On top of this, they often will not even provide a refund for content purchased by someone who has compromised your account.
Having the ability to give them a completely different card # with a monthly limit for just them really provides an additional layer of protection without the threat of losing access to goods you legally acquired.
More likely they would lock your account until you pay up, which is different from the digital equivalent of confiscating all your stuff ie, getting banned.
Your account is charged when purchases happen. So your account would not be locked. You just couldn't make any additional purchases until you updated your account.
Chargebacks are the big problem for companies that operate like this.
> On top of this, they often will not even provide a refund for content purchased by someone who has compromised your account.
That would be the CC company's job, not? IIRC, at least in US law, if you dispute a charge they can't make you pay for it and they can't also add interest to it. And in practice, no signature dispute is almost always decided for the consumer. That's why merchants are so drastic with compromised accounts - otherwise people would just buy stuff, use it and then claim fraud, and merchants would lose tons of money. They have to create disincentive to cheat.
"disputing a charge" is the chargeback mentioned by OP. Yes, you can dispute the charge, but only if you are willing to risk losing your account entirely.
> Tired of your monthly yoga pants subscription? Or a two-week "free" trial that lasted four months? Just deactivate that card number. It's that easy.
This is a pretty useful feature. But does it run afoul of some mysterious rules that allow recurring charges to continue[1], when you have a tradtional card cancelled and reissued under a new number?
From[2]:
> Thanks to some under-the-radar rules that work out in favor of vendors who charge recurring card fees, most credit card carriers allow a "recurring indicator" to be included in vendor/customer credit card transactions. In layman's terms, that means there are data bytes in your credit card payment DNA that allows companies to bypass credit card expiration dates and keep charging you anyway, even if your card has expired.
> Worse, there are loopholes in credit card regulations that enable vendors to get new credit card information if the old card was closed due to fraud, or even if you switched cards for a better rate. In either case, the recurring charges continue.
I'm a merchant of semi-high priced recurring memberships ($100-250/mo) and I wish our payment processor had this feature. We routinely have upwards of $4k a month in failed charges for some combination of {expired, cancelled, deleted from the system without the underlying membership being cancelled}.
Curious, what prevents you from switching to stripe? No idea how $4k/month fits in with your revenue or the opportunity costs in doing so, but $4k/month seems enough to justify spending a week to redo the integration.
Most importantly Stripe is quite a bit more expensive the payment processors I've used in the past. Less importantly but still a show stopper is that all the full-featured pieces of management software for this industry (fitness facilities) are tied to a very small number of payment processors. Some of the large ones have one processor and you literally cannot accept credit cards without using them. They're still cheaper than Stripe so it's not that big of a deal but the UX leaves quite a bit to be desired.
Unauthorized recurring charges shouldn't hit your real credit card since Final is the credit card issuer in this case, which means they're the ones that ultimately decide if a credit card charge is allowed to go through.
Think of them as a bank that has issued you a new credit card, except they're not actually giving you any credit, just a CC number/PAN.
You wouldn't expect the lease on your apartment to terminate if you used a credit card for payment and it expired.
Similarly, the lifespan of most other recurring contracts is independent of the lifespan of your credit card. The reality is that most merchants won't chase you for payments when the card expires because it is expensive and generates bad will, but they can.
What I don't understand with Final is how they can guarantee you won't have to make another payment after you cancel a number. They don't control your agreements with third parties.
Edit: though I'm in the UK so my understanding of the law is biased in that direction.
People bring this up on every discussion of virtual card numbers. You should keep in mind that your contract with the vendor is independent of the payment method. Just because you stop paying them, doesn't mean your liability goes away. The vendor could pursue you in court, or could make a black mark on your credit report. Of course, this all depends on the terms of your contract -- if it's with Bally's gym, for example, you can be pretty sure that they will come after you. If it's with some SaaS company, they're more likely to just delete your account.
This wouldn't work in the UK because you can almost never pay a "subscription" with a credit card - it would usually be a direct debit, or they might accept a debit card.
So I was going to comment along the lines of "surely it's actually a debit card, and I'm not sure I trust a company with such inaccurate copy with my money" - but comments here seem to suggest it's correct.
Anything can be put on a CC in the USA then? Do you also have DD? Why would you use DD if you can use your CC for such things?
The Wikipedia section on DD in the UK is very much longer than that for the USA. Funny, I never doubted that it was universal.
Why would you use a debit card, which directly takes money out of your banking account, when you can use a credit card which increases a number owed against you? The former can cause lots of money in overdrawn bank accounts, while the latter will only cause the transaction to be declined. Also debit causes you to have to pay the fee, while credit forces that on the merchant.
Almost everything in the US is done with a credit card (through VISA et al networks). Most people's debit cards go through the same networks. If by DD you mean direct debit through the banks, that's called ACH here and is pretty awful with respect to fraud since you have to give your bank account number, and transactions take several days to go through.
Debit cards don't work like that in the UK --- they have similar levels of protection to credit cards (although this varies a bit from vendor to vendor). Credit card fees are not forced to the merchant and frequently you have to pay them yourself, and they're considerably more than the fee for a debit card. You can't become overdrawn using one (subject to propagation delays, of course).
Direct Debit is very common, and is covered under legal guarantees --- companies using it must stand indemnity. There's frequently a discount for paying by direct debit.
Also, I'm not clear on why is giving your bank account number a problem with regard to fraud? At least here, you can't use it to do anything other than make deposits (and you still need a sort code number for that as well).
And while he was inconvenienced by this, he was entitled to an immediate refund (which he opted not to claim given the relatively small amount involved and the beneficiary being a charity)
> Also debit causes you to have to pay the fee, while credit forces that on the merchant.
Usually in Europe it's the contrary; there is no separate fee for using a debit card, whereas the credit card fees are inflated and passed-on to the customer.
For example FlyBE, a UK airline charges, 3% of the transaction total for credit card but zero for debit. Ryanair and Easyjet charge 2% for credit cards.
Even worse, British Airways charges a fixed-fee per passenger.
Wait, what? It's the exact opposite of what you described! If you don't have money in your account, a debit card will just get declined. No fee to pay, no penalty, nothing - transaction just gets declined and that's it. Debit cards are also free to use in most places, while using a Credit Card has a 2-4% extra fee. Debit cards are free to issue, while Credit Cards usually have a yearly fee.
Is it just completely the other way around in the US?
Which bank are you with? Most UK banks will gladly allow transactions on debit cards to go through, resulting in your account being hit with overdraft fees, the size of which vary depending on whether the overdraft was pre-agreed, exceeded, or entirely unarranged.
Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude in most UK banks that I've seen is one to look to profit from transactions rather than protect their clients. Unarranged overdrafts are fantastic money makers in that regard.
But parent commenter's point was that if you do this with a credit card you could be completely unable to pay - if, for example, you have a single bank account with:
(balance + overdraft) < minimum payment for credit card
This can't happen with a debit card, since it will decline the payment, in the same way it would if you tried to use it to pay off a credit card bill of the same amount per above.
I'm with Barclays, and I don't have any overdraft. The only way I can go into an unarranged overdraft is if I run out of funds in between the transaction being approved and actually clearing - if I don't have enough funds at the moment when I use the card, the card just gets declined.
After US banks were hit with restrictions on unwanted overdrafts, I believe they started charging fees to reject transactions due to insufficient funds too.
If you have $1020 in your bank account, and have a $1000 rent check about to clear, and your card gets stolen and $100 is charged to your debit card, then your mortgage payment is going to get declined even though you knew you had enough money in your bank account.
> This wouldn't work in the UK because you can almost never pay a "subscription" with a credit card - it would usually be a direct debit, or they might accept a debit card.
This isn't quite true. A lot of American companies in the UK (e.g. Netflix) now use recurring card payments rather than Direct Debits. I think Final would still be useful here.
Does anyone know of anything like Final in the UK?
I have been using something like this for years (a French service from my banking group called Virtualis). I have no idea why it's not more frequent.
The main thing to be careful about is not to use this to pay for things where you will be required to provide physical proof of card ownership later. For instance, some French railroad tickets can be withdrawn from machines where you must insert the card that has been used to purchase them.
for credit cards? well within normal, although most cards have more than one APR. For instance, AmEx Blue Cash Everyday currently says 13.24% to 23.24%, depending on your creditworthiness when you apply.
I am Spanish and I got lost in translation, from the rest of the comments and a quick search this is when borrowing money; I thought it was a different kind of fee (:
Edit: I misunderstood it since "Annual Percentage Rate" seems like just a group of English words together when it actually has a special meaning in economy
It's the interest rate you pay if you do not pay off your credit card in full every month, but you should always pay off your credit card in full every month, so it doesn't actually matter.
It matters b/c if some unseen event(they do happen) or emergecy happens and you can't make the payment, you are paying almost 20 cents on the dollar in interest. So yes if you use credit for convenience and pay your balance in full every month it doesn't matter much but like I mentioned if you have some serious event that happens which results in your not being able to pay, yo you would be better off with a card at 12% APR.
"Doing it wrong" does't really account for unseen or unplanned events in ones life.
18% usary is somewhat normal'ish in the US. It is a lot sure compares to not paying any at all. But there are also plenty of cards that are 24% or 30%. Often times the APR starts with a "teaser" rate of 12% and then it resets to a higher rate triggered by a late payment or sometimes just that the teaser rate expires after year.
It's not the card built for 21st century, it's just a slightly better 20th century card. 21st is not anymore US-centric, therefore anything in 21st century should be world-wide; focusing on US only shows how you are going to lose bit opportunities.
Setting up a financial operation globally simply isn't a matter of spinning up some AWS instances and hiring a firm to do internationalization of your site.
^ This right here. Setting up a financial operation that's compliant and secure in the US is a bear. Adding intl is a great way to kill a thing before it's even alive.
Of course it is difficult. But claiming that you created the "credit card for the new century" is a pretty bold statement. Especially if you aren't ;-)
On the other hand I understand that saying "We slightly improved a 40-years old tool that is being replaced by totally different ideas and we are releasing it in what 10 years ago was the main market in the world, but today is only a part of the bigger picture and will be even less in the near future" sounds slightly less sexy.
Please don't comment like this here. Especially in response to new work, which is always a fragile thing regardless of how valuable it turns out to be in the end, comments here must be civil and substantive. Yours was neither.
Let me rephrase then - how can something that is "built for the 21st century" be treated seriously, if the one of the main ways to interact with it seems to be mobile, and the mobile support does not include the biggest mobile ecosystem on the planet? It's not "built for the 21st century" - it's "built for iOS users".
Old stat, but in 2012 Apple made 75% of the profit in the mobile market, with 9% of the share of sales.
It is the mobile ecosystem with the most affluent customers and the most cachet. This is a luxury product for luxury people; why would they not build for that ecosystem first, and then work downwards?
They probably have limited resources like many startups, and have to prioritize. Like how the stock trading app Robinhood was Android only at first, then they went to iOS. No web version yet as far as I know.
Ideally I think if your building a product, you should have Web version, native iOS and Android versions as that would cover pretty much all of the market in the long run. But maybe it's best to focus on just one version, get it right and then make it for other platforms
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadThe one thing I would recommend is having a secondary card with a different provider kept as a backup, just to deal with the couple of days between cancellation and receiving the new card. Even better is if it's a different card type (Visa if you have a MC or whatever) for that once in a blue moon situation when a merchant doesn't accept that card. Finally, if you do this, put some regular, low value monthly payment on the backup card so it doesn't get cancelled for inactivity. Netflix is good.
I don't think this was some kind of wordplay attempt around dealing a deck of cards. Hopefully they're just "dealing with" the information instead. Typos in statements proclaiming how safe and secure they are...
The concept seems fine, I think some of this is already possible with other card issuers. I doubt I would pay a $49 annual fee for the service when there are free cards available.
Citi also offers a card with no annual fee and 2% cash back, so if you use Final you're effectively paying $49 plus 1% of your spending each year for a trivial increase in piece of mind that you didn't need to begin with (because you're not liable for fraud).
I applied/heard about Final long, long time ago and they've done nothing since. So yeah...
I haven't used either service so I can't compare anything else.
This is something we've been working to improve over the past few months. If this happens again can you shoot us a note support@privacy.com with the details?
" Do you have rewards?
Yes - unlimited 1% cash back on every purchase.
The security and control benefits of Final go well beyond grocery points and miles, but we understand rewards are important.
So while it might not be the highest cash back rate available, our goal is to provide rewards that actually get used by our cardholders - and that means making it easy to redeem - two clicks easy."
So if you have a decent rewards card, you would be sacrificing quite a bit in rewards with this.
For instance, I just took a first class, round trip flight to Tokyo with my wife. The cost for each one way flight was a bit over $15k. So thats almost $60,000 in flights that I booked for 240k SPG points (transferred to AA with bonus, which then booked with Japan Airlines and Singapore Air). If I had used Final's 1% cashback program, I would have only received $2400.
Seems like a no brainer to skip out on the cooler features to get 25% more value from my purchases.
[1] https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf...
So that's pretty impressive that they can still support and maintain code that old.
They're linked to a physical card and/or bank account that you never disclose, and you get an SMS notification for every transaction.
Not sure what's the novelty here?
As for customer service, we believe you can't tout that as differentiator, you just have to do a great job and your customers will speak for you. Amex did a great job over last 50 years, but is struggling to be relevant in this day and age (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/)
We agree there's nothing better than exceptional customer service and experience. We've built Final from the ground up as a new credit card issuer so that we can continue to enhance the technology, service, and experience. We need to make money somehow, and we think an annual fee is the best way to align with our customers.
We've spent 3 years to get to this point. We're now live and actively inviting people from our waitlist to apply for a card.
We talk to our customers often and ask them what they think about us. We will continue building and making it better. Here's what we've heard:
"The few people I’ve showed your service to so far have said “this is what we should have had all along” and I agree."
"Final just solved my XM radio problem. I've been trying to cancel XM for a year. Each month I dispute their charges, Amex credits my money back.. but Amex would never just BAN them from charging me. Generated new final number, added to XM, then froze account. Boom."
"Final is one of the best banking products I've ever used. You guys could have sat back on your haunches and only delivered the cool feature of generating cards, but the well-designed phone app, the card, and your great customer service make every other card I have in my wallet pale in comparison. I reach for the final card to make daily payments not because of rewards points, but because I see the receipt immediately and I'm able to instantly dispute the charge if necessary. I don't know if there's such thing as 'credit card anxiety', but something about that gives me so much peace-of-mind. Thank you for creating a great product!"
And our favorite: "You guys fking killed the UX experience. The site is a pleasure to use."
Nav bar at the top reorders, or shifts width, or something - so I clicked something else instead 'FAQ' a couple of times; each time I had to wait several seconds while the navigation faded in...
Appreciate the thorough response. I definitely think you guys have a unique value proposition. I still wonder if it's enough to justify switching costs for a large enough # of customers (e.g. re-setup bill pays, stored cards on accts, etc) for one truly differentiating feature, but wish you guys best of luck with your launch!
[1]http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mbna-introduces-the-...
None of this even addresses or ties who BoA uses as their core processor for CC, which is now TSYS, and typically have little knowledge a vCard was used.
The good thing for what we're doing at Final is that this goes beyond many credit card numbers, its rethinking what is a piece of plastic in hundreds of millions consumers pockets for how we shop and interact w/ merchants in this day and age.
1. logging in
2. clicking on your credit card's account
3. scrolling way down on the right hand side
4. knowing that "ShopSafe" is thing to click on
5. waiting for the little ShopSafe interface to load (it typically takes 10+ seconds)
6. clicking on either "Create a new number" or "Create a new number for recurring payment"
7. entering the security code from the actual physical card (probably a reasonable step)
8. actually filling out the details of the virtual number
That's just to create a number. And if you want to generate a number for something like Netflix or Github (fixed-cost, recurring) and not have to change it every 12 months, too bad -- BofA won't let you generate a recurring payment number that is valid for more than 12 months.
It may have been done before, but that doesn't mean it was done well. I think there's plenty of room for improvement in this area, whether it's done by BofA (who has apparently had 16 years to make something useful), or a new entrant like Final.
So its 2/3rds BD to get setup, 1/3 enterprise engineering and a lot of integration work to get fully setup and running. Payments is the only trillion dollar industry where nothing is written down, we're working on changing that since we find a lot of the stories fascinating and so do most people we retell them to.
If anyone is in Oakland area and wants a primer, always happy to share, we spent 3 years learning industry and now its our time to start giving back.
Traditionally, we do it this way too, these piece of the payments ecosystem are all whitelisted IPs for access and MPLC circuits for connections.
https://getfinal.com/security/
Work well done.
And not sure why someone reposted our website, but always happy to discuss the intricacies of human behavior and how it relates to payments.
Work well done.
[1]https://onlycoin.com
(It's impossible to reload a Revolut account from a US one now.)
As revolut uses a traditional bank their bank probably doesn't want to deal with it.
Re folks saying it's been done before, it makes me think of the William Gibson quote "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Even if it has been done before (I have no idea) -- if something makes a new tech available to many more people, it's effectively new to them.
In terms of using the card, my wife and I have found it useful. It feels empowering to give the card to a service/person and know you remain in control. Yes, all cards let you do chargebacks, or recover from fraudulent charges, but I don't want to have to fight to recover my money.
I love the feeling of using a number and knowing no other charges can come - that number can never be used again.
This card is empowering.
I had this idea myself, I Googled it and found nothing. Visa has 3D Secure (which is really just a text-delivered OTP), but implementing the standard is completely optional. I've only come across it on a handful of websites.
Pity it's US only for now.
You generate a fake card number, this number is linked with an expiration date AND a maximal amount that can be charged.
AFAIK it's not possible to create a card with a monthly chargeable maximum amount, only to set the total amount for the card's lifetime, which limits the interest of the use for recurring payments.
I signed up 2/28/15. That day there were 40090 people ahead of me Jimmy. Now there are 40091 people ahead of me. So not only has one single person managed to cut in front of me, but the line hasnt moved since prior to February 2015.
That rant/inquiry aside, http://privacy.com/ gave me an account and I have been very happy with it. Seems like a good product.
sounds to me like the signup was fake and only people who share get invited in.
https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf...
Having the ability to give them a completely different card # with a monthly limit for just them really provides an additional layer of protection without the threat of losing access to goods you legally acquired.
Chargebacks are the big problem for companies that operate like this.
That would be the CC company's job, not? IIRC, at least in US law, if you dispute a charge they can't make you pay for it and they can't also add interest to it. And in practice, no signature dispute is almost always decided for the consumer. That's why merchants are so drastic with compromised accounts - otherwise people would just buy stuff, use it and then claim fraud, and merchants would lose tons of money. They have to create disincentive to cheat.
This is a pretty useful feature. But does it run afoul of some mysterious rules that allow recurring charges to continue[1], when you have a tradtional card cancelled and reissued under a new number?
From[2]:
> Thanks to some under-the-radar rules that work out in favor of vendors who charge recurring card fees, most credit card carriers allow a "recurring indicator" to be included in vendor/customer credit card transactions. In layman's terms, that means there are data bytes in your credit card payment DNA that allows companies to bypass credit card expiration dates and keep charging you anyway, even if your card has expired.
> Worse, there are loopholes in credit card regulations that enable vendors to get new credit card information if the old card was closed due to fraud, or even if you switched cards for a better rate. In either case, the recurring charges continue.
[1] https://uncrunched.com/2012/08/01/recurring-credit-card-char...
[2] http://www.nasdaq.com/personal-finance/pull-the-plug-on-recu...
https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards
Think of them as a bank that has issued you a new credit card, except they're not actually giving you any credit, just a CC number/PAN.
Similarly, the lifespan of most other recurring contracts is independent of the lifespan of your credit card. The reality is that most merchants won't chase you for payments when the card expires because it is expensive and generates bad will, but they can.
What I don't understand with Final is how they can guarantee you won't have to make another payment after you cancel a number. They don't control your agreements with third parties.
Edit: though I'm in the UK so my understanding of the law is biased in that direction.
So I was going to comment along the lines of "surely it's actually a debit card, and I'm not sure I trust a company with such inaccurate copy with my money" - but comments here seem to suggest it's correct.
Anything can be put on a CC in the USA then? Do you also have DD? Why would you use DD if you can use your CC for such things?
The Wikipedia section on DD in the UK is very much longer than that for the USA. Funny, I never doubted that it was universal.
Almost everything in the US is done with a credit card (through VISA et al networks). Most people's debit cards go through the same networks. If by DD you mean direct debit through the banks, that's called ACH here and is pretty awful with respect to fraud since you have to give your bank account number, and transactions take several days to go through.
Direct Debit is very common, and is covered under legal guarantees --- companies using it must stand indemnity. There's frequently a discount for paying by direct debit.
Also, I'm not clear on why is giving your bank account number a problem with regard to fraud? At least here, you can't use it to do anything other than make deposits (and you still need a sort code number for that as well).
https://www.directdebit.co.uk/DirectDebitExplained/Pages/Org...
> Whilst the copy is being obtained you are entitled to an immediate refund of the amount debited from your bank under the Direct Debit Guarantee.
Usually in Europe it's the contrary; there is no separate fee for using a debit card, whereas the credit card fees are inflated and passed-on to the customer.
For example FlyBE, a UK airline charges, 3% of the transaction total for credit card but zero for debit. Ryanair and Easyjet charge 2% for credit cards.
Even worse, British Airways charges a fixed-fee per passenger.
Is it just completely the other way around in the US?
Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude in most UK banks that I've seen is one to look to profit from transactions rather than protect their clients. Unarranged overdrafts are fantastic money makers in that regard.
But parent commenter's point was that if you do this with a credit card you could be completely unable to pay - if, for example, you have a single bank account with:
This can't happen with a debit card, since it will decline the payment, in the same way it would if you tried to use it to pay off a credit card bill of the same amount per above.This isn't quite true. A lot of American companies in the UK (e.g. Netflix) now use recurring card payments rather than Direct Debits. I think Final would still be useful here.
Does anyone know of anything like Final in the UK?
Not quite the same, but depending on what attracts you to Final, might solve the same problem.
The main thing to be careful about is not to use this to pay for things where you will be required to provide physical proof of card ownership later. For instance, some French railroad tickets can be withdrawn from machines where you must insert the card that has been used to purchase them.
https://www.mbnet.pt/ https://www.mbway.pt/
Is this normal? It seems like a LOT to me
Edit: I misunderstood it since "Annual Percentage Rate" seems like just a group of English words together when it actually has a special meaning in economy
"Doing it wrong" does't really account for unseen or unplanned events in ones life.
On the other hand I understand that saying "We slightly improved a 40-years old tool that is being replaced by totally different ideas and we are releasing it in what 10 years ago was the main market in the world, but today is only a part of the bigger picture and will be even less in the near future" sounds slightly less sexy.
It is the mobile ecosystem with the most affluent customers and the most cachet. This is a luxury product for luxury people; why would they not build for that ecosystem first, and then work downwards?
Your conclusion is supposition, not ordained.
Ideally I think if your building a product, you should have Web version, native iOS and Android versions as that would cover pretty much all of the market in the long run. But maybe it's best to focus on just one version, get it right and then make it for other platforms