Search and categorized transactions are cool, but does the categorization require manual tagging? I'm pressed for time in my day, and I am not going to spend more than 5 minutes to look at my bank statements, unless I'm specifically sitting down to budget. My biggest concern with a service like this is the time it's asking from you. So many services designed to "make my life simpler" actually require spending more time than just not using the service at all. For that reason, your mobile app needs to be killer.
I came to say the same thing - Wesabe had a similar concept of "safe to spend" and for me it made it a great app. I was disappointed to see them go under. Bank Simple doesn't appear to bring a whole lot new to the table.
> Bank Simple doesn't appear to bring a whole lot new to the table.
BankSimple, unlike Mint/Wesabe, is an actual bank* (*ok not techincally for regulatory reasons, but you will store money with them). You will keep/deposit your money there, and be able to spend it via BankSimple-branded debit cards. Its a whole additional level of integration over Mint/Wesabe, which are just web frontends to existing bank accounts
And this is actually very important to realize before you will begin to understand the completely different paradigm this allow for. It's a very big thing that it's not "just" a frontend. It means access to completely different kinds of data.
I think you are wrong - From their own FAQ:
So, what’s the deal...are you a bank?
No, but we replace your current banking relationship. That is, BankSimple provides a modern online banking experience, top-notch customer service, and beautiful mobile apps. Our partner banks hold our customers’ funds in FDIC-insured products and ensure regulatory compliance. BankSimple’s partner banks aren’t large banks, and have been chosen for the safety of their balance sheets and technological capabilities.
Yeah, that's why we showed what we did. While we also have the banking features you'd expect, e.g. payments and such, we were presenting in front of an industry crowd who are most likely already familiar with said core features but not search or visualization.
I don't think a bank should ever have a mobile app instead of a nicely done web interface. Would you really want to use a bank that only works on iPhone?
There have been countless situations where I've had to make transactions in an internet cafe or using a friend's computer.
Sounds like you've never experienced the joys of depositing checks by taking pictures of them on your phone. I do this now with my current bank and it's awesome. (And I don't think anyone is suggesting that the website is replaced with an app, but rather that the app would supplement the website).
You know, the only times in my life I've even seen a check have been when dealing with some US company (which is rarely). I have to admit being greatly amused with the combination of really old and really new that you have in using mobile apps to handle checks.
A Brit here, who has recently established a (B2B) company in the US. The check thing really surprised me too. The USA still loves checks: we receive them for most of the work we do, and make a lot of our payments that way.
From a personal perspective, I rarely use checks, except (and this blew my mind) I can set up a regular payment through my bank's website to a recipient. If the recipient's bank is on a similar system, the transactions are made digitally. If not, then they automatically mail a check each month. Transparent to me, but seriously.
I'm sure I'm going to feel really dumb after getting the answer to this, but what prevents someone from sending a picture of the same check to deposit in multiple banks through their respective phone apps?
The biggest deterrent is probably the criminal check fraud charge you would face. Most banks also have additional counter-measures in place to detect this type of fraud too, but you are right, it is a concern: http://www.americanbanker.com/btn/22_3/-374033-1.html
If you're going to spam the thread with USAA recommendations you could at least avoid using a throwaway account and do it openly so that we can see your motivations.
Assuming you aren't just spamming on behalf of USAA, or even if you are: can any USAA customer deposit checks by taking a picture of both sides? I thought that was only if you had some sort of connection to the US military, no?
Yes, you can deposit checks by taking pictures. (I'm not the throwaway account above, but I do have a USAA account through my father-in-law, who's retired Navy. And yes, you need a US military connection to get an account there.)
Personally, I deposit checks via my scanner, but that's just because I don't have a smartphone. But I don't vastly care, because I deposit a check about... once every three months?
(The flip side of USAA is that they have no branches, if you ever need to talk to a human in person. Phone support, yes, in spades; branches, no.)
I have no military connection, but I have a USAA account. My understanding is that the check-deposit-via-photo feature is only available to customers with US military connections, but I'm looking for confirmation of that. (The USAA website is vague about the details.)
I agree. Current banks and banking systems work well for people who are good with money. This type of system that helps you put money aside for bills and makes saving up for something really simple is fantastic for people who aren't good with money.
I am constantly frustrated when I try to find transactions more than 3 months old in both my bank accounts. The main reason I keep my Mint account is to be able to search my old transactions.
That would be a cool feature, throwaway savings accounts where you can say: put 2€ in this account every day until it has enough balance to buy an iPad
After watching the video, it reminds me of the iPad. Doesn't do anything you couldn't do before, but it does it faster and in a more attractive and pleasing way. These improvements are so great that it becomes a qualitatively different experience. This looks about as much nicer than Mint as Mint does than my bank website, and that counts for a lot to me. I'm eagerly awaiting a chance to try them out for myself.
Let's compare it to the iPod, for example. Before the iPod, I played music. After the iPod, I played music - but in a more convenient way.
After this app, I can search my statements in a convenient way. The problem is that right now I am not searching my statements at all. They seem to be solving a problem that I have not had so far.
I liken it more to a smartphone: before I had high-quality internet access in my pocket, I didn't care about it. It wasn't a problem I was looking to solve or a want I had.
Now that I can search Wikipedia or Google at a moment's whim, I find myself confused when I don't have it.
BankSimple may turn out like this: hardly anyone does this kind of searching and organizing of their bank statements because it simply hasn't been easy enough for anyone to care. Once it is, you might not want to go back.
You are missing the very important difference. Bank Simple can automatically track and categorize how you use your money and thus visualize it for you.
You didn't used to do this because it was not possible. The same thing with expense tracking. Believe me. It's a very powerful feature. I know I have created it for one bank already and seen how the customer satisfaction exploded.
Not everything is a better solution to something that existed before. Sometimes innovation is going to allow you to do things you could never really do before.
Our easily-searchable transaction list is just one feature. That feature alone wouldn't make it work switching. What we're doing is holistic: it's about taking every part of the banking experience, from technology to customer service, and making it better.
What we demoed today was just the beginning. And some of what we're doing doesn't really demo well; it's intangible.
I imagine it must be US only too, as I've had full Internet banking from my UK bank for more than 10 years. I hope Bank Simple has learnt from the experience of First Direct and the many others in the UK, covering millions of accounts.
The guy in the video sounds Australian, but for some odd reason he says 'math' instead of 'maths'. So you're probably right... boo. Looking forward to the day when people don't stay in one place and startups begin catering to us itinerants.
Not some odd reason - he's an ex-pat in the finance industry. It's like how I had modified my pronunciation of 'cache' (although I refuse to change how I say 'data').
BankSimple are based in Portland, Oregon (so yes, US).
It's also interesting to note that in the U.S., companies are thought of as a standalone entity, and referred to in the singular, rather as a group of people.
So, it'd be "BankSimple is based in...", instead of "BankSimple are based in...".
When I first started reading things from the UK, I initially thought the writers simply used poor grammar :)
Unfortunately, banking is a heavily regulated industry and the laws vary (in real and significant ways) from one country to the next. Big, multinational banks do it by opening different banks in each country, each operating according to the idiosyncratic laws of that country but all owned by a parent company that moves capital around as needed. Building a single thing for handling money that works across national boundaries without breaking laws is incredibly difficult.
"USAA's investment products, most checking and savings products, credit cards, life insurance, and shopping and discounts are available to other individuals. USAA auto and property insurance is not available due to membership eligibility requirements."
Touché sir. I had looked at their insurance in the past and very unfortunately extrapolated to the entire organization. My mistake and thank you very much for correcting that misconceived notion!
I'm a USAA account holder and it is very true: you cannot take advantage of iPhone deposits unless you are military or family. Same goes for most of their insurance products.
I had thought that BankSimple was slimming down the traditional banking model and passing the savings (in the form of interest) to customers. I still love that they're tackling Goliaths but they need to be a little clearer on their vision and value proposition.
It's a beautifully clean design. I like the simplicity of it.
What I worry about is the security behind the scenes and the sharing of sensitive information between BankSimple and the banks.
And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.
Maybe I missed it in the video, but what I would like to see from any of these types of websites is a consolidated view of multiple accounts and banks. So if I have chequing and savings accounts at 3 different banks, I would like a dashboard of my entire spending and saving. It's easy to lose sight of this when you look at individual bank statements.
> And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.
That's rather extreme. For one thing, they're not advertising and they haven't launched their website yet. It's also not a math equation: it's a name which is what trademarks are for.
What's extreme? I expressed an opinion about a selling tactic used on a website.
I realize that one trademarks a name, which is why later in the sentence I used the word "patent" for the process (of the math equation).
Everything in that video was an advertisement. That was the point of it, and good on them for doing so. The simplicity of the design, words used, and the trademarks and imagery of the product. The whole point of the video in the link is to drum up hype and future business.
What I disagreed with was their use of Safe-To-Spend without further explanation on why it was being trademarked. Otherwise it's just a waste of money. They could have called the result anything and leave the silly trademarks for later, unless they specifically had something to sell the consumer on with that name.
Safe-to-spend isn't about the math, it's about the psychology. When you see $100 as your "balance", you're much more likely to spend a little more than when you only see $60. What's unique about it is that they show it in place of your actual balance, which really hasn't been done by another bank before.
Also a trademark will protect the name, not the underlying technology. Other banks can still use this technique. They just need a different name for it.
In this economy and with global debt crises, they'd do better to show the user how much money was saved.
I've never seen a bank or financial institution advertise spending money in such a blatant way. Instead, banks typically nudge their customers into purchasing products or services for their benefits, but they never mention the word "spend" because it denotes exhausting one's supply.
We're not doing the consolidation/aggregation thing. Mint does, of course. But we can't do a lot of what we want to do with the sort of low-fidelity, read-only data access that a service like Mint has.
We're subject to the same security requirements that the rest of the financial industry is. We try to go above and beyond them. Nobody's security will ever be perfect, but we push our bank partners to be as secure as possible. We take security very, very seriously.
Looks awesome. I would love to see a clone of BankSimple in India. The bureaucracy will be a pain but if you can successfully navigate it and create a simple no-frills online only bank, it will be a great success.
As someone who have worked a lot for banks and actually already done some of this work let me offer a viewpoint.
Last year my company managed to get a large Danish bank to implement tracking into their netbank. This is no small accomplishment, which anyone knowing just a little bit about how the IT departments in the banking industry normally works, the systems they work on are arcane.
It took us 18 months from getting the bank to like the idea into actually getting it launched.
The results have been nothing but extraordinary everyone loves it.
The reason they love it is because it's automatic. They get insights into their economy that they could not previously get. There is something quite amazing about seeing your spendings categorized for the first time without you having to do anything.
The banks have a unique identifier on each transaction that can be measured up against a category list. This is something Mint and Wesabe can't do because you can't export that unique identifer from the banks.
The big advantage of BankSimple and why I think it's going to be huge is because they don't have a legacy system to deal with.
In other words BankSimple can potentially be anything you could ever dream of a bank being, because BankSimple will be able to cross reference the data in order to provide not just cost reduction but service improvement.
The banking industry are just waiting to be disrupted by someone like BS. There are thousands of ways to create a better banking experience. BS is a good first stab at it IMHO.
I've said this here before, but when I worked at a big bank all the visionaries weren't worried about other banks, they were worried about Google and Ebay. The core business of a bank is built on hardware and software. They knew that a bank built on distributed systems instead of mainframes could beat the big banks on features and cost. It'll be interesting to see if BankSimple can scale up fast enough to compete or if it'll attract the attention of someone with even deeper pockets who can catch up by simply outspending them.
Banks are in a rough spot, actually. The big ones have a HUGE installed base which makes any changes very, very difficult. My division of the bank had tens of thousands of cobol jobs that ran daily or weekly. (We also had thousands of ETL jobs, web apps, etc. that depended on those cobol jobs.) Trying to shift the core functionality away the mainframe would have been a decade-long boondoggle.
As somebody else mentioned, it's not just about money.
Here in Australia, we have four massive banks. They're some of the most profitable in the world and three of them are currently in the process of major technology renewal programmes.
The problem is that the systems are so complex, inter-linked and old (the last upgrade was apparently in the 80s) that making changes is a nightmare. Indeed, one particular bank, NAB, has had huge problems leaving people unable to access their money for several days, caused by upgrades. Downtime is completely out of the question and making radical changes (could render some obscure system inoperable) is impossible. While there is a lack of vision, I think it goes far deeper than that.
I believe there will be a big shift coming, but not that it will come from established tech companies in the developed world. Rather, I believe it is banks from third world countries that will push the envelope. This for a few reasons:
They already have a large customer base.
Their economies are growing very fast, which creates a steadily increasing pressure on old systems. Also, this creates shifting marketplaces where new players in the area can pop up a lot more easy than in old settled markets.
Less preconceptions on what can or cannot be done.
One of the reasons I'm so eagerly waiting for SEPA (Single European Payment Area) to really come into force. Now banks compete mostly on country level, but when you can easily switch banks inside EU, there is bound to be some competition and innovation.
In Finland we're kind of suffering from being pioneers. Finnish banks deployed nice (for the time) web banking interfaces more than a decade ago. But then, having made the big investments in them and seeing little competition, innovation stopped.
Nordea rolled out a slightly improved web interface a couple of years ago, and ever since then their login page has had the message "the new banking interface is coming to our business customers soon"...
Even without SEPA in full swing, your banking situation is still miles ahead of anyone in North America. A nice web interface is one thing, a $25 wire transfer or relying on external, often slow payment processors like Paypal or Certapay/e-Transfer quite another.
Banks can give these interfaces easily, like generalized ACH interfaces, like some merchants have already, but then it would expose to the general public how badly secured the entire design of the system is.
I'm quite happy with my bank's customer service, interest rates and fees. And I use Mint.com to get a view of all accounts including retirement, investments, etc.
So, from my view, BankSimple just does not provide enough value. Hopefully for BankSimple's sake, others are not satisfied like I am.
Sadly (for me) it also works just like my iPhone App "Payday" does (without the live bank ability) that was released last year and then sank without a trace (albeit partly due to a silly bug).
Being able to earmark money for bills in advance and set yourself saving goals is really cool (and was also the core feature of Payday).
If anyone would like to try these features before the release of Bank Simple you can find it here:
Just beware of a small bug that makes the calculations go off if you choose the last day of the month as Payday. (Yeah. I know. Sadly the talented programmer I worked with has had to move onto other projects. Maybe one day we can fix it. sigh)
Safe-to-spend balance is great but will it be enforced? I currently calculate my safe to spend balance but nothing stops me from over spending. I don't have the willpower. It would be great if the bank simple card will only let me spend my safe-to-spend balance. So if my safe-to-spend balance is $20 and I go to an ATM and try to withdraw $50, it will decline.
But if you don't have the money, you don't have the money. I guess you could still carry an "emergency" credit card; maybe one with a high interest rate to deter you from using it unless its really an emergency.
Safe-to-spend is about your current obligations, and other stuff that would reduce your "really available" balance; there's more money physically in the account, in a true emergency you'll rob from tomorrow to pay today's emergency room visit.
Of course, now you need a way to pay for tomorrow, but there's still options: skip a bill or two this month, borrow money (from friends, credit card, payday loan, sell your internal organs), work overtime, or whatever.
That's exactly what we're doing. If you tell us about your savings goals, you can then "lock" the goals that you really don't want to dip into if you're overspending. We'll prevent transactions from going through, in that case. We keep you honest :)
Your presentation mentioned that goals may be allocated to CD ladders and the like - if so, what happens if you 'dip into' this? Wouldn't you be hit with an unexpected CD early withdrawal fee then?
Love the design! While I think there is quite a ways to go, I will most certainly give BankSimple a shot when it is publicly released.
Upon seeing the video though, specifically when he was searching through for the bar that he went to, I started wondering how long it'll take before we can actually see precisely what we paid for at said location rather than having to dig through receipts.
I have no idea when that time will come, but when it does, I'll welcome it with open arms.
I haven't followed news about BankSimple, and the firs few minutes of the demo I watched didn't help me understand what it is. Is BankSimple an actual bank (with ATM card, routing numbers, etc.)? Or is it a PayPal competitor? Or is it just a front end that interacts with Banks? Going to BankSimple.com, it seems like it's trying to be an actual bank. But the demo on the website made it seem more like a Mint competitor. So, BankSimple is just another bank but with a potentially super-awesome website? So far, I'm not convinced.
From the customer perspective, they're a bank with an improved website and mobile app. They're actually just a front end to their partnering banks (but you don't need to know that as a customer). Essentially they're a bank with the improved interface you might expect from Mint (minus the aggregation).
Yes, it is an actual bank. With an ATM card (and no fees). You are right the demo on the website didn't hint to that too much, but perusing through the site it becomes a bit clearer.
I also emailed support a while back wondering if it acts as a layer on top of my existing bank, or whether its a replacement: their answer was "its a complete replacement".
sure, there's some cool stuff in here. but is it really enough to make anyone but a geek go through the hassle of adding yet another banking service? probably not, imo.
I totally disagree. This is a product for real people not geeks. It's the iPad of banking.
Some people are great at managing their money. Most people are not. A bank that designs its systems to suit an average human rather than to suit the bank itself will be a revolution. This is great design finally being applied to something notoriously difficult for most people.
The big hurdle will be in getting this out of the realm of the geeks and into the general public. If they can do that it will be huge and then every bank will copy them.
You don't add yet another banking service, you switch from your existing bank to BankSimple. The fact that they're not really a bank but partner with existing institutions is a behind-the-scenes thing that you never come into contact with as a BankSimple customer.
In video Josh says "you shouldn’t have to do math in front of the computer" and yet when he searches Taxi it just gives a list of the expenditure and no total amount..so.. I have to do math... in front of the computer
One of the reasons I ditched Mint was because it was 2-3 days laggy due to having to scrape and process the data from my bank. I have yet to find anything that beats simply recording all my expenditures in a spiral notebook and reconciling it with my bank's online account once a day. That, plus "When I get paid, I pay my bills first". How simpler could it be? (Frost Bank in Texas, here)
Neat. Now gear up for some honest feedback on your blurb :)
>A First Look at BankSimple
FB: Ok, though "Sneak Peek" is easier to relate to than "First Look".
>Joshua Reich, Wed September 21, 2011
FB: Ok.
>We’ve been very cautious on our blog and website about >talking about what we’ve been building.
FB: Redundant. Why are you telling me you've been "cautious"?
>Instead, we’ve focused on our vision.
FB: What vision? Mention it. Mention the key value proposition.
> Today that is changing: Below is a first public sneak peek of BankSimple. We think it’s far more powerful to show than tell.
FB: Check capitalization. Focus on what the user is getting is getting, rather than what you feel("we think it's far..")
>And now we are ready to show. We’ve been testing the product for a few months now, and it has been awesome. >The product isn’t finished. It will never be finished. We’re constantly improving. But we’ve now reached the >point where we’ve learned as much as possible from testing internally and in a few weeks we’ll be shipping >
>cards to our first real customers.
FB: Mostly redundant. Only thing that's relevant is "We’ve successfully tested the product for a few months now, and are looking forward to ship it to our first customers over the next few weeks. (Click here to request a beta invite.)"
>This is only the beginning, but it is a tremendous step forward for our company.
FB: This line might be good for boosting the morale at a company internal meeting, but it means nothing to the customer. Also it seems to reinforce the idea that you're not ready yet to grab my attention.
>We will be sharing more important updates with you soon,
FB: Maybe be a little more specific than "soon"? "over the next couple of weeks"?
> but in the meantime,
FB: OK
>we hope that you enjoy this first look at our product –
FB: Redundant. What's there to enjoy?
>we’d love to hear your feedback.
FB: This looks like a call to action, with no visible action button. What should the user do to provide feedback? Maybe turn the "feedback" word at the end of the sentence to a hyperlink that points to a feedback page? Or better yet, use something lightweight like http://webengage.com/ (disclaimer: it's made by a friend of mine).
I was surprised to see that they put so much emphasis on the searching in the demo. The real value is in the "Goals" interface - which is well designed.
Now that I'm getting a better feel of what BankSimple is about, I don't think it's that revolutionary an idea. I'm not even sure I will use it. Most of what they showed, and more can be accomplished using Mint. And, Mint offers more choice by being an aggregator.
And Mint lets you pick a bank like USAA, that has great service as a core competency, rather than trusting a web company like BankSimple that is good at sleek-looking tech.
Then again, BankSimple's only purpose is great service. They delegate the actual money to a partner bank. So... Yeah. It doesn't really get much better than that in terms of motivation.
As far as I know, yes, you are, in fact, completely wrong. The only thing partner banks handle is the actual money. You never talk to them. https://banksimple.com/faq/#whatthedealis
This is something that people would want. But I have a question about business model choice here, because I'm curious why they chose to become a front-end to various banks in this way.
Why choose to be a middle-man here (with all of the pain/cost of providing customer service, etc.) when they could be an enterprise software vendor or a SaaS provider? Banks don't actually make that much off of depositors, right? I'm not saying they made a bad choice; I wanted to see if anyone could rationalize it for me.
Surely banks (especially smaller regional banks and credit unions) would pay good prices to have this software power their banking websites so that they could care for their customers in a more sophisticated way. Right now my credit union, in the Bay Area, has a functional but very ugly e-banking and bill-pay platform which has clearly been purchased from a third party vendor and customized (checkfree, I think (http://www.checkfreecorp.com/cda/corp/L5.jsp?layoutId=51501&...).
I guess I don't understand where significant revenues will come from in a model like this.
The user experience, from the website, mobile to device to phone calls, will be a big part of people signing up.
There are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with their banks.
If they get enough users to sign up with them, the actual banks on the back end (which will probably be a collection of smaller, unknown, entitities), wield less and less power, cause in theory BS would be able to switch over from one bank to another and the user wouldn't know, or care. This may allow them to force certain banks to provide revenue sharing.
The value proposition doesn't appeal to me... Slick GUI, and I'm sure you guys work your asses off, but there's no compelling reason for me to switch to another bank.. that's a huge cost.. I am get off my ass to another bank, tell them to close my account, write a huge check to BankSimple, change my direct deposit, buy new checks, etc... Do you guys replace the checkbook? If so, I'll sign up. That's my main problem with the entire banking process. I hate writing checks and signing checks. When I write a check to the IRS and somehow get a single number wrong, I have to rewrite the whole thing. It seems strangely ancient that we still have this process in place today.
I guess it depends on how you use your bank. I never use my bank for anything but netbanking. In Europe checks are more or less obsolete. I haven't had a check book since I lived in the US back in the late nineties and early zeroes.
The early adopters and innovators will switch based on whether they believe what BankSimple believes in. However, I agree that in order for the tipping point to occur I need to have a compelling reason to do all the leg work of switching. Unless, BankSimple comes up with a way to do that for us.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadSearch and categorized transactions are cool, but does the categorization require manual tagging? I'm pressed for time in my day, and I am not going to spend more than 5 minutes to look at my bank statements, unless I'm specifically sitting down to budget. My biggest concern with a service like this is the time it's asking from you. So many services designed to "make my life simpler" actually require spending more time than just not using the service at all. For that reason, your mobile app needs to be killer.
BankSimple, unlike Mint/Wesabe, is an actual bank* (*ok not techincally for regulatory reasons, but you will store money with them). You will keep/deposit your money there, and be able to spend it via BankSimple-branded debit cards. Its a whole additional level of integration over Mint/Wesabe, which are just web frontends to existing bank accounts
https://banksimple.com/faq/#whatthedealis
It seems to have turned into a credit card statement search & visualisation engine.
There have been countless situations where I've had to make transactions in an internet cafe or using a friend's computer.
From a personal perspective, I rarely use checks, except (and this blew my mind) I can set up a regular payment through my bank's website to a recipient. If the recipient's bank is on a similar system, the transactions are made digitally. If not, then they automatically mail a check each month. Transparent to me, but seriously.
1) It will eventually get reconciled through the clearinghouse and the extra funds reverted.
2) The lawman will come for you.
It's fantastic to be able to deposit checks by taking a picture of both sides instead of driving someplace, or throwing something in the mail.
Personally, I deposit checks via my scanner, but that's just because I don't have a smartphone. But I don't vastly care, because I deposit a check about... once every three months?
(The flip side of USAA is that they have no branches, if you ever need to talk to a human in person. Phone support, yes, in spades; branches, no.)
It's Money Management for Mere Mortals™…
It constantly surprises just how far behind the US is in several areas.
Which bank allows you to:
* Hide money from your main balance for bills and savings
* Create automatic savings accounts on-the-fly for individual items
* plot where each of your transactions occurred on a map
etc
I'm with Lloyds who have one of the best online banking experiences and it's in the stone age compared to this.
Even better: ...and then buy it
After this app, I can search my statements in a convenient way. The problem is that right now I am not searching my statements at all. They seem to be solving a problem that I have not had so far.
Now that I can search Wikipedia or Google at a moment's whim, I find myself confused when I don't have it.
BankSimple may turn out like this: hardly anyone does this kind of searching and organizing of their bank statements because it simply hasn't been easy enough for anyone to care. Once it is, you might not want to go back.
You didn't used to do this because it was not possible. The same thing with expense tracking. Believe me. It's a very powerful feature. I know I have created it for one bank already and seen how the customer satisfaction exploded.
Not everything is a better solution to something that existed before. Sometimes innovation is going to allow you to do things you could never really do before.
Our easily-searchable transaction list is just one feature. That feature alone wouldn't make it work switching. What we're doing is holistic: it's about taking every part of the banking experience, from technology to customer service, and making it better.
What we demoed today was just the beginning. And some of what we're doing doesn't really demo well; it's intangible.
BankSimple are based in Portland, Oregon (so yes, US).
So, it'd be "BankSimple is based in...", instead of "BankSimple are based in...".
When I first started reading things from the UK, I initially thought the writers simply used poor grammar :)
"USAA's investment products, most checking and savings products, credit cards, life insurance, and shopping and discounts are available to other individuals. USAA auto and property insurance is not available due to membership eligibility requirements."
The video states that the "safe to spend" feature calculates recurring bills and such. Is there a way to view and manage these?
That's ING Direct's business model. It was hard to beat until the recession started and interest rates crashed, but even now it's pretty great.
What I worry about is the security behind the scenes and the sharing of sensitive information between BankSimple and the banks.
And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.
Maybe I missed it in the video, but what I would like to see from any of these types of websites is a consolidated view of multiple accounts and banks. So if I have chequing and savings accounts at 3 different banks, I would like a dashboard of my entire spending and saving. It's easy to lose sight of this when you look at individual bank statements.
That's rather extreme. For one thing, they're not advertising and they haven't launched their website yet. It's also not a math equation: it's a name which is what trademarks are for.
I realize that one trademarks a name, which is why later in the sentence I used the word "patent" for the process (of the math equation).
Everything in that video was an advertisement. That was the point of it, and good on them for doing so. The simplicity of the design, words used, and the trademarks and imagery of the product. The whole point of the video in the link is to drum up hype and future business.
What I disagreed with was their use of Safe-To-Spend without further explanation on why it was being trademarked. Otherwise it's just a waste of money. They could have called the result anything and leave the silly trademarks for later, unless they specifically had something to sell the consumer on with that name.
Also a trademark will protect the name, not the underlying technology. Other banks can still use this technique. They just need a different name for it.
I've never seen a bank or financial institution advertise spending money in such a blatant way. Instead, banks typically nudge their customers into purchasing products or services for their benefits, but they never mention the word "spend" because it denotes exhausting one's supply.
We're subject to the same security requirements that the rest of the financial industry is. We try to go above and beyond them. Nobody's security will ever be perfect, but we push our bank partners to be as secure as possible. We take security very, very seriously.
Last year my company managed to get a large Danish bank to implement tracking into their netbank. This is no small accomplishment, which anyone knowing just a little bit about how the IT departments in the banking industry normally works, the systems they work on are arcane.
It took us 18 months from getting the bank to like the idea into actually getting it launched.
The results have been nothing but extraordinary everyone loves it.
The reason they love it is because it's automatic. They get insights into their economy that they could not previously get. There is something quite amazing about seeing your spendings categorized for the first time without you having to do anything.
The banks have a unique identifier on each transaction that can be measured up against a category list. This is something Mint and Wesabe can't do because you can't export that unique identifer from the banks.
The big advantage of BankSimple and why I think it's going to be huge is because they don't have a legacy system to deal with.
In other words BankSimple can potentially be anything you could ever dream of a bank being, because BankSimple will be able to cross reference the data in order to provide not just cost reduction but service improvement.
The banking industry are just waiting to be disrupted by someone like BS. There are thousands of ways to create a better banking experience. BS is a good first stab at it IMHO.
Here in Australia, we have four massive banks. They're some of the most profitable in the world and three of them are currently in the process of major technology renewal programmes.
The problem is that the systems are so complex, inter-linked and old (the last upgrade was apparently in the 80s) that making changes is a nightmare. Indeed, one particular bank, NAB, has had huge problems leaving people unable to access their money for several days, caused by upgrades. Downtime is completely out of the question and making radical changes (could render some obscure system inoperable) is impossible. While there is a lack of vision, I think it goes far deeper than that.
They already have a large customer base.
Their economies are growing very fast, which creates a steadily increasing pressure on old systems. Also, this creates shifting marketplaces where new players in the area can pop up a lot more easy than in old settled markets.
Less preconceptions on what can or cannot be done.
In Finland we're kind of suffering from being pioneers. Finnish banks deployed nice (for the time) web banking interfaces more than a decade ago. But then, having made the big investments in them and seeing little competition, innovation stopped.
Nordea rolled out a slightly improved web interface a couple of years ago, and ever since then their login page has had the message "the new banking interface is coming to our business customers soon"...
So, from my view, BankSimple just does not provide enough value. Hopefully for BankSimple's sake, others are not satisfied like I am.
Sadly (for me) it also works just like my iPhone App "Payday" does (without the live bank ability) that was released last year and then sank without a trace (albeit partly due to a silly bug).
Being able to earmark money for bills in advance and set yourself saving goals is really cool (and was also the core feature of Payday).
If anyone would like to try these features before the release of Bank Simple you can find it here:
http://toccame.com/
and here
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/payday/id351013628
Just beware of a small bug that makes the calculations go off if you choose the last day of the month as Payday. (Yeah. I know. Sadly the talented programmer I worked with has had to move onto other projects. Maybe one day we can fix it. sigh)
Of course, now you need a way to pay for tomorrow, but there's still options: skip a bill or two this month, borrow money (from friends, credit card, payday loan, sell your internal organs), work overtime, or whatever.
Upon seeing the video though, specifically when he was searching through for the bar that he went to, I started wondering how long it'll take before we can actually see precisely what we paid for at said location rather than having to dig through receipts.
I have no idea when that time will come, but when it does, I'll welcome it with open arms.
I also emailed support a while back wondering if it acts as a layer on top of my existing bank, or whether its a replacement: their answer was "its a complete replacement".
http://banksimple.com/blog/BankSimple/partners-funding/
Some people are great at managing their money. Most people are not. A bank that designs its systems to suit an average human rather than to suit the bank itself will be a revolution. This is great design finally being applied to something notoriously difficult for most people.
The big hurdle will be in getting this out of the realm of the geeks and into the general public. If they can do that it will be huge and then every bank will copy them.
I look forward to all banks being simple.
>A First Look at BankSimple
FB: Ok, though "Sneak Peek" is easier to relate to than "First Look".
>Joshua Reich, Wed September 21, 2011
FB: Ok.
>We’ve been very cautious on our blog and website about >talking about what we’ve been building.
FB: Redundant. Why are you telling me you've been "cautious"?
>Instead, we’ve focused on our vision.
FB: What vision? Mention it. Mention the key value proposition.
> Today that is changing: Below is a first public sneak peek of BankSimple. We think it’s far more powerful to show than tell.
FB: Check capitalization. Focus on what the user is getting is getting, rather than what you feel("we think it's far..")
>And now we are ready to show. We’ve been testing the product for a few months now, and it has been awesome. >The product isn’t finished. It will never be finished. We’re constantly improving. But we’ve now reached the >point where we’ve learned as much as possible from testing internally and in a few weeks we’ll be shipping > >cards to our first real customers.
FB: Mostly redundant. Only thing that's relevant is "We’ve successfully tested the product for a few months now, and are looking forward to ship it to our first customers over the next few weeks. (Click here to request a beta invite.)"
>This is only the beginning, but it is a tremendous step forward for our company.
FB: This line might be good for boosting the morale at a company internal meeting, but it means nothing to the customer. Also it seems to reinforce the idea that you're not ready yet to grab my attention.
>We will be sharing more important updates with you soon,
FB: Maybe be a little more specific than "soon"? "over the next couple of weeks"?
> but in the meantime,
FB: OK
>we hope that you enjoy this first look at our product –
FB: Redundant. What's there to enjoy?
>we’d love to hear your feedback.
FB: This looks like a call to action, with no visible action button. What should the user do to provide feedback? Maybe turn the "feedback" word at the end of the sentence to a hyperlink that points to a feedback page? Or better yet, use something lightweight like http://webengage.com/ (disclaimer: it's made by a friend of mine).
Because as far as I can tell, BankSimple has no interest in service at all. They're just a shiny tech company.
Why choose to be a middle-man here (with all of the pain/cost of providing customer service, etc.) when they could be an enterprise software vendor or a SaaS provider? Banks don't actually make that much off of depositors, right? I'm not saying they made a bad choice; I wanted to see if anyone could rationalize it for me.
Surely banks (especially smaller regional banks and credit unions) would pay good prices to have this software power their banking websites so that they could care for their customers in a more sophisticated way. Right now my credit union, in the Bay Area, has a functional but very ugly e-banking and bill-pay platform which has clearly been purchased from a third party vendor and customized (checkfree, I think (http://www.checkfreecorp.com/cda/corp/L5.jsp?layoutId=51501&...).
I guess I don't understand where significant revenues will come from in a model like this.