I also don't understand banking. "Do you need help?" when I'm making a deposit, or when my investments are set a certain way?
Here's a better idea, guys. Tell me your value proposition. How can I get access to your luxury box? Will you lend me money at ultra-low rates? How about a free toaster? Anything?
Chase sucks so bad, I would spend a lifetime encouraging anyone to bank elsewhere. I know Mitch is nice enough to say Chase wasn't the problem, but their "controls" are so archaic it makes doing business with them a chore and not a pleasure.
Funny to see this pop up again (I'm the author). The year is now 2025 and I still use Chase as a personal bank and I'm now discovering new funny banking behaviors. I'll use this as a chance to share. :)
My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.
As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.
Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.
Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.
This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.
I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.
> private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors
> depositing a quick check.....Zelle.
Good lord
American banking really is in the stone age. I don't think I've seen a cheque in 20 years. As for private banks, in Blighty they all (?) offer 'retail' services that out perform high street offerings.
Incidentally, all high street banking is free in the UK. Only private banks tend to charge for their services.
That was an interesting and entertaining read. Well written. Thanks for sharing. It reminds me I do have a bank with physical branches, the digital world made me forget all about that.
Congrats on the success! I’ve had a similar experience since I started moving more money around. My local branch started calling me too. I live in a busy area where lines at the bank can take hours, but now they told me I can just message someone whenever I go and they’ll move me to the front.
The other day I was just poking around the investment section of the app to see what kind of rates they offered, and almost immediately I got a call from my personal banker, haha. I actually ended up trying the investment since the returns looked good.
Great read - as a young startup with Chase, this is an interesting story. As Mitch says, this isn't inherently an issue with Chase, but interesting bank behavior. I'll be sure to keep this story in mind, if we ever get to these amounts of cash!
During COVID, I took a major haircut in my day job, and ended up doing a lot of side work to stay solvent. All my banking was with Chase; I setup a new checking account for my side work. One day they just took about $900. No matter who I spoke to, they bounced me around and never gave me an answer why. I can only guess there was a fraud trigger or something, but to this day, I've never gotten the money back or even gotten an answer as to what happened. I'm fortunate enough in life that $900 isn't a big deal, but at the time, it was HUGE. As a result, I will never, never do business with Chase again (and it would be very convenient, given how many branches I have around me)
Amusing to read this and think back on GitHub's seed round ($100M). At the time we just had a small business account from Bank of America... going from relatively thin cushion in the account over the previous few years to suddenly dropping in $100M was pretty amusing. I believe we moved to a more sophisticated setup quickly thereafter.
This was a super-interesting read, but I'm disappointed there isn't a description of what, exactly, was wrong about what he did, and what one should do instead. The only thing that comes to mind is the obvious one: you don't want more than the FDIC limit in a single bank account.
Eh, depends. It's perfectly alright to put in more than the FDIC limit in a bank with consumer banking services. The amount of scrutiny and shit they have to put up with means that they can't really try SVB type shenanigans. You can bet your ass if Wells Fargo, UBS or Chase goes under, the Fed will bail them (you) out. The alternative would be having bigger problems in your plate than that.
Source: I'm a recent Credit Suisse business banking customer. Now UBS.
> you don't want more than the FDIC limit in a single bank account.
If the FDIC limit is a concern, you don't want to make the mistake of thinking it applies on a per account basis (it applies per depositor per institution per account class.)
I had the same experience at Citibank. We started at a small branch in downtown LA with our Series Seed round check for $3M. Even then we barely got any attention, and dealt with just a local branch manager. Later we closed $7.5M, still no attention; except this time due to consolidation we were kicked to a regional team that handled our account as a team. In fact we never had a dedicated banker, we were just handled like so many SMB by calling a banking center. Over the years we asked for things like corporate credit cards and the like, but it always seemed we were just a little too small (I guess with Fortune 50 clients, we were small to them). Anyway we eventually moved to a smaller independent bank for different reasons.
We sold our company in 2020. Anticipating the wire I decided I needed to upgrade to a big boy bank from my small regional bank that I've been using since I was 16.
What finer institution is there than J.P. Morgan Chase? I opened an account with them. I called them telling them there was going to be a larger than average transfer. I put in $500 to "warm up" the account (stupid in retrospect).
Acquisition goes through. Champagne for everyone. I try to login to look at the funds and my account has been closed. I call Chase and ask them "wtf?"
They say there's been fraud in the account. We've closed it. We will mail the check to your address. So I'm thinking they're going to mail me my acquisition funds over check?? FML. 24 agonizing hours and 10 calls to them later (all leading nowhere), I eventually got the funds to be wired to my original regional bank lmao. No thanks to Chase, this was all because of PNC who was in charge of the acquisition.
This is probably my fault for using a new account like this (I think someone told me to use a large bank or something I don't remember), but I will forever hold a grudge against Chase.
P.S. I never got back my $500 that they stole from me
Semi-interesting, but it felt like it was leading up to something big or interesting knowledge all the way up to the end.
Seems like it could have been way shorter, the plot is essentially "Deposited more and more money into a local Chase branch, made some guy named Alex a rising star. They called once in awhile, not sure why. Moving lots of money around isn't super straightforward."
> Ultimately, there was no long term negative impact of the events that transpired (except maybe for Alex, but I truly don't know) and I can now look back on it with amusement.
So a software guy who didn't understand people or banking opens an account at Chase. And a guy from Chase who didn't understand people or software calls him-- repeatedly over years-- and fails to ever connect on any human level whatsoever. Now when first guy withdraws millions from Chase, he unwittingly causes the second guy to lose his job. This means the the second guy isn't around to help the first guy when he needs him the most-- to help him navigate banking fraud on that same account.
This just seems tragic. Second guy's success as a banker and first guy's ease of mind as a customer were inextricably linked. Yet neither of them knew how to form the simple social bond of two 4 year-olds playing in the same sandbox.
Seriously-- how did Chase not hand the account to someone who could connect with this guy? For a multi-million dollar account this just doesn't pass the smell test.
Once upon a time my wife went to close a bank account in Italy.
She went to the post office which is also a bank in Rome. She asked to closed her account. She was told that she needed to go to the branch where she opened her account in Florence.
We rented a car and drove to Florence.
When we arrived at the bank in Florence, the teller informed us that we would have to come back “domani” which is Italian for tomorrow because the only person who could help us was the banker who had originally opened the account for my wife when she was a student many moons ago.
We came back the next day and met the banker who immediately recognized my wife including recanting that she was an artist. He informed her that he could not close her account, she would have to speak to the Director of the bank.
We waited in line for the director of the bank but we were told it was too close to the end of the day and the bank was out of money so we’d have to come back… Domani.
Domani arrived and my wife again waited. The Director willfully ignored her for 2 hours and it wasn’t until my wife began to cry that the Director finally called her over and allowed her to close her account.
This for €2500. That was a balance that meant a lot to us at the time.
42 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 60.6 ms ] threadHere's a better idea, guys. Tell me your value proposition. How can I get access to your luxury box? Will you lend me money at ultra-low rates? How about a free toaster? Anything?
My startup banking story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157959 - March 2023 (257 comments)
Let's say that a friend of mine has a startup funded account at Chase, and where should they go?
My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.
As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.
Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.
Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.
This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.
I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.
every time i have to interact financially with americans its always focused around these random transfer apps like zelle, cash, venmo etc.
> depositing a quick check.....Zelle.
Good lord
American banking really is in the stone age. I don't think I've seen a cheque in 20 years. As for private banks, in Blighty they all (?) offer 'retail' services that out perform high street offerings.
Incidentally, all high street banking is free in the UK. Only private banks tend to charge for their services.
The other day I was just poking around the investment section of the app to see what kind of rates they offered, and almost immediately I got a call from my personal banker, haha. I actually ended up trying the investment since the returns looked good.
You create a startup -> Do you need to do anything special with regard to the bank you chose?
I wonder why the investors didn't at least do some due diligence into where the money was being stored?
Source: I'm a recent Credit Suisse business banking customer. Now UBS.
If the FDIC limit is a concern, you don't want to make the mistake of thinking it applies on a per account basis (it applies per depositor per institution per account class.)
My understanding of banks is much like his naive version. So what's the more enlightened understanding?
We sold our company in 2020. Anticipating the wire I decided I needed to upgrade to a big boy bank from my small regional bank that I've been using since I was 16.
What finer institution is there than J.P. Morgan Chase? I opened an account with them. I called them telling them there was going to be a larger than average transfer. I put in $500 to "warm up" the account (stupid in retrospect).
Acquisition goes through. Champagne for everyone. I try to login to look at the funds and my account has been closed. I call Chase and ask them "wtf?"
They say there's been fraud in the account. We've closed it. We will mail the check to your address. So I'm thinking they're going to mail me my acquisition funds over check?? FML. 24 agonizing hours and 10 calls to them later (all leading nowhere), I eventually got the funds to be wired to my original regional bank lmao. No thanks to Chase, this was all because of PNC who was in charge of the acquisition.
This is probably my fault for using a new account like this (I think someone told me to use a large bank or something I don't remember), but I will forever hold a grudge against Chase.
P.S. I never got back my $500 that they stole from me
Seems like it could have been way shorter, the plot is essentially "Deposited more and more money into a local Chase branch, made some guy named Alex a rising star. They called once in awhile, not sure why. Moving lots of money around isn't super straightforward."
So a software guy who didn't understand people or banking opens an account at Chase. And a guy from Chase who didn't understand people or software calls him-- repeatedly over years-- and fails to ever connect on any human level whatsoever. Now when first guy withdraws millions from Chase, he unwittingly causes the second guy to lose his job. This means the the second guy isn't around to help the first guy when he needs him the most-- to help him navigate banking fraud on that same account.
This just seems tragic. Second guy's success as a banker and first guy's ease of mind as a customer were inextricably linked. Yet neither of them knew how to form the simple social bond of two 4 year-olds playing in the same sandbox.
Seriously-- how did Chase not hand the account to someone who could connect with this guy? For a multi-million dollar account this just doesn't pass the smell test.
I had one call the police on me recently for (non-surreptitiously) recording our interaction as we conducted a safe deposit box inventory.
https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/
I finally just closed all my accounts there. It feels great. Fuck Chase.
She went to the post office which is also a bank in Rome. She asked to closed her account. She was told that she needed to go to the branch where she opened her account in Florence.
We rented a car and drove to Florence.
When we arrived at the bank in Florence, the teller informed us that we would have to come back “domani” which is Italian for tomorrow because the only person who could help us was the banker who had originally opened the account for my wife when she was a student many moons ago.
We came back the next day and met the banker who immediately recognized my wife including recanting that she was an artist. He informed her that he could not close her account, she would have to speak to the Director of the bank.
We waited in line for the director of the bank but we were told it was too close to the end of the day and the bank was out of money so we’d have to come back… Domani.
Domani arrived and my wife again waited. The Director willfully ignored her for 2 hours and it wasn’t until my wife began to cry that the Director finally called her over and allowed her to close her account.
This for €2500. That was a balance that meant a lot to us at the time.
I will never forget banking in Italy.