I've been using Simple for well over a year now can say that the software and website are absolutely amazing at monitoring and tracking your money. It has its flaws though: transferring is pretty much limited to automated mailed checks and accounts you own (they recently added simple to simple instant transfers), and no B&M banks to get things like large cash withdrawals (I do fee-less cash advances at another bank when I need money) or cash deposits.
With that said, I'd actually prefer a quicker integration with BBVA with hopes that their backend banking infrastructure would improve, but I wish they had done it with a more prominent US bank with more branches (BBVA has very few).
A source close to Simple tells The Verge that the company, which had raised $15.3 million, had been shopping itself around in search of a buyer since business wasn't progressing as quickly as it hoped. "They had kind of run out of steam," said the source...
Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure isn't really that innovative. The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology. Unfortunately, the investment required is higher than VCs seem willing to risk.
I use simple as my main bank account, and I'd say it is pretty innovative - essentially because usability is a feature and simple has by far the best usability of any bank.
What lets them down is the overall power of their offering and the rate at which they have been developing it. If the banking backend was the constraint, maybe this will help them to accelerate.
Yes on the slow development rate. I pretty much signed on to their mailing list as soon as they announced themselves. After hearing nothing for over a year I gave up and switched from bricks and mortar to ING (now Capital 360) which solved most of my issues, so my motivation to go through the bank changing hassle is now really small. I think it took something like 3 years to actually get the "you can now use us" email.
> Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure...
This was what turned me off. I signed up for an invite right after they announced the service (something like 2-3 years ago at this point, when they were still BankSimple). But they took sooooo long to launch and in the meantime I became disenchanted with corporate banking. With Simple, the money still ends up in corrupt financial institutions and that's something I can't morally justify (I realize I am probably still doing business with corporate banks, but why do more than necessary?).
I now use a local credit union and I get far, far better service than I ever did with BoA. The credit union has a branch 3 blocks from my apartment, across the street from where I work, and on campus at school. Plus they have ATMs in many of the local businesses I visit. Simple just can't compete with that, so for me, it's all upside.
Yes, I was in early too. I never committed money to them because they just kept missing features that I needed. Like transferring money to another bank. Or transferring money to another bank to an account that isn't mine. Or a savings account (or the much ballyhoo'd but never launched automagic movement of spare money into a savings account to get the interest working for you).
It ended up that customer service ended up being pushed as the differentiator (the interface I can get with Mint), but I've had great customer service experiences with both Ally and Charles Schwab. And I get all those previous features I wanted, plus things like ATM refunds. So Simple ended up being a feature-bare product in comparison.
I think their customer growth tailing off was a direct correlation to their feature launch velocity tailing off, and I attribute that to the legal stuff around banking being really hard, rather than any slacking on their part. Hopefully the purchase will allow them to leverage more existing agreements to get more features up and running.
> Like transferring money to another bank. Or transferring money to another bank to an account that isn't mine.
These sound like good avenues for fraud, i.e. places where a bank would need to put in a fee so they can afford computers and people to watch for fraud when someone attempts one of these transactions.
> Or a savings account
My Simple account bears interest every month. I suspect they implemented this automagic movement of money without actually exposing it to the user.
Just because something is a possible attack vector for fraud, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Other US banks offer the feature. And, at least in the UK, it's a standard thing to do. If they combined with two-factor auth, then it's no less secure than the debit card and PIN they offer.
The interest of a Simple checking account is no more than the interest on any other banks checking account, so I don't think they're doing it at all. Checking accounts usually accrue some tiny amount of interest.
Help me out here, I'm not sure if I'm following: Is it _not_ possible to transfer money from Bank A, your account, to Bank B, your brother's account with that system? I.. guess I'm missing something, because that surely cannot be true - that's how I pay my bills.
Yes, it's not possible. This is the very same way my wife and I were running bills for years, and yes, that's why I didn't move to Simple due to that feature not being there.
Interesting. So, if you forgive my ignorance once more: How do you use a Simple account? I mean.. What can you do with it? Grab cash from an ATM only? Write (oh my god, please say no) checks backed by that account?
In other words: If you cannot transfer the money to a different account, how do you USE the money at all?
> The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology.
It's likely nearly impossible to build a bank from scratch because of regulatory hurdles. That's why Simple had to team up with a partner bank instead of going it 100% alone. I remember reading a blog post from Simple about it, it seemed they had no choice to partner with an existing bank (if I find the post I'll share it). The banking system is broken on purpose. This is why banks operate like it's the stone age and get away with awful service and fees - there's little chance of nimbler competitors coming along and eating their lunch.
Another piece of the puzzle is that a single new bank isn't going to have it a whole lot better when it comes to interbank stuff (probably they have it worse, having to build useful relationships).
> Another piece of the puzzle is that a single new bank isn't going to have it a whole lot better when it comes to interbank stuff (probably they have it worse, having to build useful relationships).
Interbank transfers -- wire and ACH -- are processed through central clearinghouses. You just show up with a copy of your bank charter, pay the fees, and you're now on equal terms with any other bank when it comes to moving money around.
The hard part is getting that charter in the first place. Just two months ago, the Bank of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania became the first new consumer bank to be chartered in the United States since 2010. One bank, in the past three years. It was huge news in the banking world, even made the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It's an Amish bank -- they have a drive-through lane for horses and buggies.
It's been a long, hard slog for Metro Bank. To date, they've raised £641m (that's over $1bn) in investment and racked up total cumulative losses of over £130m ($220m).
And don't forget Metro didn't build their own platform - they outsourced all their technology.
Despite their apparent enthusiasm (see links at the bottom of this post), I don't think VCs are ready to sink over a billion dollars into a single startup, even if it is a bank. They're looking for billion-dollar exits like Facebook and Whatsapp, not a $1bn investment with a $100+bn exit.
I'm pretty sure the more awesome VCs, like hn-user pmarca at a16z, would have no problem writing checks for $100mm+ to fund a team to fix banking. The other day they were actually bemoaning the lack of people trying to do so.
Simple was/is a dressed up version of a prepaid debit card with a good mobile app and a good web ux. Typically prepaid cards net $1-$4 per active user per month depending on the level of fees. An active user is someone that has loaded cash onto the card. So if Simple had 100,000 customer which could translate into 100,000 loaded cards, its gross revenues would be between $100K-$500k per month (1.2-6m per year). My guess is the 100K number is simply customers that ever signed up for it and that their active accounts (loaded cards is much much lower). Kudos to the Simple board, investor and team - selling at that sort of price is unbelievable. I would happily work with any investor who could help me get that sort of valuation for my companies.
I always wondered how Simple would acquire non early-adoptor customers. It seems with BBVA there is a natural channel to international markets and millenials.
Wow. I closed my Bank of America account and have been depending on Simple alone for a while now. I was really looking forward to seeing Simple flourish on their own, but hey, congrats to them! Let's hope for the best here.
Shutting down in 1..2... Despite what the CEO says, I don't see how Simple is going to see the light of day in a giant that manages $800+ billion in assets...too bad, the prospect of a new type of banking was something I was actually excited about.
Or maybe they acquired Simple to gain next-generation online banking for their own customers. If they were feeling very ambitious, they could take further advantage of Simple's bank abstraction layer to license the system to other banks and/or credit unions -- a sort of online banking-as-a-service.
I signed up for Simple because of the pretty video and app and I was hooked. I now spend everything from Simple and just use my old Wells Fargo account for recurring bills. It's a beautiful app, has a cool goals feature, and alerts you right away how much you just spent, which is helpful for verifying your receipts. Their customer service is like WP Engine status and you can chat them right away. Their transaction categorizing it 10x better than Mint. Mint puts 1/3 of my stuff as uncategorized.
I only hope they don't go the way of Mint, even though they're two different products. Has Mint improved any features at all since they were acquired?
> Well, they added the nice "feature" of bugging you sign up for partner offers, whether loans, credit cards, or whatever.
That was the whole business model that Mint was based upon. They'd give you the service for free, and make money on lead-generation.
When they were a startup, they could afford not to be quite so annoying about it. Now that Intuit owns it, they can no longer keep burning cash. They have to show that they can make a profit. If lead-gen won't do it, then they'll have no choice but to start charging.
Most of the original team is gone. We have a startup that is trying to innovate and fill the gap in this space. If you're interested, check out https://www.budgetsimple.com
Mint categorizes most of my stuff correctly, it can take a little learning for it to know what services are tied to what category. Also, I see Simple and Mint as different services. At least how I use Mint, I track all of my income and expenses through it (loans, cards, investments, etc...), while simple just handles a single bank card. While there is some overlap in functionality between the 2, I don't see them as the same.
Yea, Mint is the aggregator of all of your accounts into one platform so it's pretty cool in that regard, although there haven't been many improvements since 2008.
The absolute best thing about Simple is their goals, I just got into them and they really reshape your thinking about planning your money for future goals. What makes them better than Mint is that they actually hide your money in your goals every day
I recall reading (and no, I can't find a source now, sorry) that Simple had a lot of trouble initially because they weren't a bank in many of the ways that you need to be a bank in order to work with other banks.
So hopefully this will give them the 'establishment' they need along with the independence to keep innovating. Hopefully.
When I moved to my current job a year ago, I shut down my business and closed a checking, savings, business checking, and credit card account with Bank of America. I had a Simple invite sitting around, and thought it made sense to consolidate and...Simplify, making my single Simple account my sole bank.
I couldn't be happier with that decision, and believe that I have been saving money (in both fees and in general) because of Simple's interface.
So with this news, I feel excited for their team, but still very nervous. I joined Simple precisely because I was tired of dealing with a megabank (like many folks here), so if Simple can continue to buck the trend and stay customer-focused and agile, then I'll continue to be all-in.
I don't see why anyone would use Simple for Banking. They don't pay any great interest rates at least not that they advertise and their features are equivalent to what you can get with CapitalOne360 formerly ingDirect but those guys will pay you interest on your deposits.
Do you get good interest rates anywhere? Last time I checked at banks I think checking accounts had .06% and even a long term CD was around 0.9%.
I'd be better off just playing the market at that point (or using something like betterment/wealthfront to hold most money).
Simple is nice because the interface/app are solid and they have incredible customer service. The only other thing I'd want from them is a decent rewards credit card.
The best I've found are with Ally -- 0.85% for a MM account and 0.25% for a checking account. Still pretty meaningless, which is why, despite banking with Ally, I keep a sizable amount of my money in Betterment.
If you have 120k with an interest rate of 1.0%, you are basically losing out on about $3.33 a day. In one year, you end up losing out on the amount of money you would need to buy a nice UHD monitor. It's simply not worth it, IMO.
Mint has never worked for my wife. When she's out looking to spend all of our money she doesn't want to be bothered trying to open up mint and get a current snapshot of our finances. She also doesn't care about our 401k or brokerage accounts.
The only thing which has worked is the Simple app that by opening it tells her exactly how much money she can spend without sabotaging her savings goals.
Sorry, I should've clarified. I want that and _only_ that. I don't other things that typical banks offer, because they create complexity where I want none and waste my time with spammy offers that I'm not interested in. I don't want to be using/understand only 5% of my bank's capabilities.
Looking at the numbers, if you have $10,000 in your checking account, CapitalOne360 Checking pays .2% APR while Simple pays 0.01%. With $10,000 in your account, that's a difference of $19 / year. To me, that's negligible. Especially with inflation being an order of magnitude higher than both.
I am a customer of theirs. It's quite limited, and I don't think I can recommend it unfortunately. They're nice people and their support is peerless, but people don't tend to choose a bank on those criteria.
I keep a few hundred bucks in a Simple account just so I get access to more ATMs. Other than that, they've been pretty underwhelming. A slick smartphone app doesn't make up for all their other lacking features.
That's my point, you can get free access to AllPoint ATMs with a capitalone360 checking account and they pay interest and you don't have to worry about multiple bank accounts. Which is why I'm surprised anyone would bother with Simple.
Yeah but that slick phone app means you find out immediately when $.02 of interest is added to your account. Hard to overstate the importance of that, you know.
But they don't have joint accounts, so my wife and I would have to go through a lot of trouble to use their service. It's interesting to say that they are not able to expand as fast as they wanted when they are missing this HUGE feature. Not having this feature has kept me from using their service ever since I received a very early beta invite.
Simple just recently added free instant transfers between Simple accounts. Not as convenient as a joint account, but that's good enough for my wife and I to make the move to Simple.
Does your wife have her own income? My wife is currently a student and I would have to manually transfer money to her account quite often because there would be no other deposits into her account. Can you auto draft between accounts?
I'm on a similar boat. She manages certain budgets, so every pay check I make a few instant transfers (so I can categorize/track on my side) and that's it. And if she uses her account (debit card) for other stuff outside the budget, I just instant transfer.
The real problem would be if both earned an income, as there would be no way to "share" a goal. (A feature which Simple is supposed to be working on.)
Same here; we use it for our separate accounts, but the primary joint account has to remain at a more traditional credit union. They even sent out a notice to all customers regarding tax returns – the IRS requires joint returns to be issued to a bank account listing both names.
> If I am filing a joint return with my spouse, must our refund be deposited to a jointly-held account?
> You can ask IRS to direct deposit a refund on a joint return into your account, your spouse’s account, or a joint account. However, state and financial institution rules can vary and you should first verify your financial institution will accept a joint refund into an individual account.
Not sure if it's a state, Simple, or Bancorp policy, but it's not an IRS one.
I'm a Simple customer, and I'm getting married in March. The lack of joint accounts has been a concern for me for the past few months. I was really hoping they'd announce something soon about their plans on that regard.
But with this news that they're being acquired, I now have even less hope than before. I love Simple, but I'm now wondering if I'm going to have to find a different company to give my business.
Account-to-account internal transfers is relatively new and they did not have that feature when I was approved from the beta.
But, account to account transfers does not solve the problem at all. I don't want to have to transfer money from my account to my wife's account manually. It's so much easier when she can just access a shared account and move money as needed.
Many couples would find it just as annoying as having separate refrigerators and simply transferring food between the two before withdrawing and eating it.
This could be a great move for Simple. It could allow them to execute really quickly on the core product and user experience, while giving them access and expertise to backend banking support. Staying independent meant the latter was more challenging than any engineering/product problem they could want to solve.
First: $117M? That seems like an astonishingly low amount of money.
Second: The service you get from simple really is that good, probably better than what most people would expect. The app is amazing, their website is amazing, their customer support is amazing.
It feels like a bank from the 21st century, not from the stone age.
This acquisition actually makes me really sad. Simple is awesome, and I really hope that it doesn't get screwed up by this.
If you check the press release, Simple is still considered a separate business entity and the Simple CEO is retaining his position. Apparently nothing will change.
It's one thing to remain a separate entity, but anyone who's ever worked for a company that's been acquired can tell you that's not the end of the story.
Profitability targets get set. Quarterly pressures are exerted. The parent company doesn't tell them how to do their job, but they set goals. Goals that may or may not fit with the way they do business, and may be more focused on short-term profits than long-term health.
Most acquisitions start out with promises like "we don't want to change anything," and remaining a separate business entity is a much easier way to integrate than jumping in with both feet from day one. But that's not usually the way things play out after a few years.
The onboarding process on the other hand is opaque and nigh-useless. I got shot down for an account with these guys due to a .23 (that is not a typo.. twenty-three cents) report on chexsystems from five years ago.
Every bank I've had the ability to talk to an actual person was able to see that this is clearly absurd, I am not a serial check bouncer/overdrafter/etc and to get my account going. Simple..notsomuch. I'd love to use them if they'd let me.
I had issues with the signup process as well, but I will say that a lot of those come from using Bankcorp as their backer. They are, ultimately, the ones that accept or deny you, and I don't know how much information Simple has when it comes to those decisions.
> $117M? That seems like an astonishingly low amount of money.
That seems like a lot of money for a mobile banking app. They didn't actually hold deposits themselves or make loans, the activities that are worth money in banking. They were sort of a VPS for banks--a "bank" sitting on top of real banks that made some painful things easier. Hard to profit that way though.
You hit the nail on the head. They're viewed (and valued) as an app on top of a bank. Without holding and investing deposits, they don't get the other financial benefits. Perhaps their end user data could be worth something, though.
They get half the interchange fees on every transaction. That's the benefit, worth MUCH more than "interest" (which is only at 0.01 percent at the moment). The other half of the fee goes to Bancorp.
> They get half the interchange fees on every transaction. That's the benefit, worth MUCH more than "interest" (which is only at 0.01 percent at the moment). The other half of the fee goes to Bancorp.
They have a lot of costs for that interchange fee though. That's not where banks make they money and the .01% interest you mention is what they pay, not what they would earn if they actually held your deposits. If they held your deposits and worked like a regular bank it would be dramatically more profitable: $10,000 in your account means they would owe you $1 a year in interest. They could simply park that about anywhere else and make a decent amount, but banks really make their money by leveraging.
Sort of. If an individual bank has $30M on deposit, then they only have $30M to lend to mortgage borrowers. In order to be able to have $30M in deposit they must have investors invest $3M into the bank (i.e. Tier One Capital must be ~10% of deposits). If this were a real life example this fictional bank would have to borrow from their local federal reserve bank to cover any daily cash flow needs (e.g. Customers withdrew more money from their savings accounts then they deposited in one day).
haha well the interest YOU get may be 0.01. But the loans banks give out charge a much higher interest rate. 3-5% for a home right now depending on factors.
They raised $15M+, which pegs their valuation somewhere in the 50-100M (as a guess). So $117M means that the founders get rich and most of the investor money gets returned at a 1-3X multiple. Not shabby for 4 years of effort, but not what most investors are looking for.
For a counterpoint: I find their overall product pretty obvious and underwhelming. I mean, no joint accounts? Taking days to connect an external account?
The savings goals are certainly nice, but I can get that with most other banks (just don't have the online management component), otherwise they don't offer a whole lot beyond "pretty".
I put a lot more weight into the convenience of drive-through cash deposits a couple blocks from my house. Or spending an hour at the branch and walking out with a loan. Or a rewards card that applies 5X points to my mortgage for purchases I was going to make anyways.
I wouldn't say I'm a "fan" of Wells Fargo. Or that they're particularly "amazing" for any of this. And their iOS app kinda sucks to be honest. Functional but meh.
That said, they set a minimum expectation for their offering that Simple doesn't meet and no amount of pretty Apps or direct-to-live-human (I mean how often do I call my bank? I couple times a year?) service is going to make up for.
The biggest one for me though is Joint Accounts. I mean seriously. It's weird to me as a married guy that my wife and I should maintain multiple separate bank accounts. That alone makes the offering fairly useless for me. If I were single and didn't have a mortgage, I could see how I might have different priorities.
The only reason I'm still a member at this point is that closing an account, needing to hook up a new external account (we changed primary banks during my membership at Simple so the external account I opened with is no longer the one I need to transfer funds back to for closing) is cumbersome.
When I was a kid without a bank account, a 401K or other investments to worry about, I used to put my money in envelopes: one for a new bike; one for a video game, etc. I could glance at my cash and know exactly what was safe to spend without performing mental math.
Simple's Safe to Spend feature is the digital equivalent. I can aside money for rent and emergencies in digital envelopes. I never thought personal finance was fun and easy until I began using Simple. It changed the way I think about money.
I'm not a Simple customer but the way I do this at my fuddy-duddy bank is having a separate "spending" account and a "bills" account (two checking accounts). Every week I "pay" myself into the spending account from the bills account (spending is basically food + gas + shopping). Paycheck goes into the bills account which at the start of the month has enough to cover all expected bills for the remainder of that month.
The problem is I use credit cards for reward points and I only pay them off once a month. It sounds like you can only get budget reports for money you've spent on your Simple card. Correct me if I'm wrong. This wouldn't be too helpful to me. The budget tool would be awesome if it encompassed all my cards.
I really want a nice envelope budgeting debit card, but for my purposes Simple wasn't it. Most notably, if you mark a transaction as coming from a specific goal, and the amount of the transaction is more than the goal, the goal gets set at $0, and there's no way to determine what the balance was before you marked the transaction. You can unmark the transaction, but at that point you'll actually have more in your goal than you did previously.
Basically I want Simple but with a richer transaction history. It doesn't have to be as cumbersome as a full double-entry account system, but it needs to have roughly a similar level of account history.
I've been with Simple for about a year and a half, and slowly moved from my TD Bank account to using Simple exclusively for personal banking. They've blown me away with how a bank can operate if it just joins the 21st century. Everything from their UX to their customer service is outstanding.
Calling them on the phone reminds me of going in to my local bank when I lived in a small town in Iowa.
Then again, this is pretty much the way I felt when I joined Commerce Bank in 2002. They were leaps and bounds above any other bank in everything from their down-home attitude to their evening and weekend hours. Then they got acquired.
Things weren't too different with ING Direct. Joined up for their interest-bearing checking and used them as my savings account. Had wonderful experiences. Then they got acquired.
Tangential, but relevant, I got HostGator as my hosting provider many years ago—they were a little company in Texas with great service and great people. I'm leaving them this month. They got acquired, and everything changed.
I hope this goes well for Simple. I really do. But I'm preparing myself. I know the signs to watch out for. First they'll get an automated phone tree, and I'll have to tell the robot what I want. Then it will get just a little longer to wait for a person. A couple fees will show up, nothing much, just little stuff. Tiny, unobtrusive, totally defensible, annoying policies will start taking hold. And soon, it'll be just another online bank—albeit one with a very pretty iPhone app.
I hope that doesn't happen. But I'm bracing myself anyway.
I've had pretty much the exact same banking experience. Commerce Bank was incredible when it came to service, both in the branches and over the phone. The web site wasn't so great, but not specifically bad either compared to most others. TD Bank (which acquired Commerce) was just OK.
ING was absolutely remarkable. Less so after being acquired.
And Simple is by far the best banking experience I've had. The interface is so well done, the customer service has been phenomenal. I actually find myself on my banking tab nearly every day (happily), adjusting goals and making sure I'm on target.
I still use mint to manage all my accounts and consistently wish the interface was even half as good as Simple's. Mint is another example that stopped being incredible after being acquired - or at least stopped progressing in any useful manner.
Agreed on all fronts. Rooting for the Simple crew to keep their product rocking.
I also have to note that the Spanish banking system is among the worst, most troubled, in the world. Santander recently bought Soverign bank (US regional bank) and it makes me wonder whether they are trying to address solvency from bad loans with fresh deposits however they can acquire them.
makes me nervous to think about having any serious amount of funds with a spanish bank.
Simple's support is definitely outstanding. I get little notes like "Fixed it! By the way, it's not my business but I like that you hyphenated your name when you got married." that really reinforce that there are actual humans being allowed to solve problems, not fill out a script.
I feel the same way. It would bother me to know that the support person has an opinion regarding my personal details regardless of what that opinion is.
Agreed; I'm getting sick of this faux-friendliness that's trendy in American customer service these days. Banks and B2B startups are equally as guilty. I don't want to be asked how I'm doing or discuss the weather every time I call you for a quick question, wasting lots of time with useless polite banter. I'd rather a business call with an established vendor go like this:
In my experience it feels different in part because you have the person in front of you (it's harder to fake seeming genuine face to face).
It also feels different because they are talking while they are doing something else, unlike on a phone call where these questions are preventing you from doing the communication you need to do to finish the call. It would be more similar to Trader Joe's employee stopping you on your way in to ask you a bunch of questions about your day and the weather outside.
I live in NYC and was actually thinking about Trader Joe's and checkout lines here generally when I wrote my comment. Cashiers here generally don't waste anytime with small-talk and that's understood as common practice since we're all in a hurry. In other parts of the country, some small talk is expected and one party will be viewed as rude if they don't participate. I prefer we skip it.
Depends on what the conversation is about. The ring on my finger? (similar to the example above?) No-no.
The weather, because it is summer and hot? Ok. Just banter.
The crowded store and the fact that I had to stand in line 5 minutes? ("Crazy, we didn't expect that many customers today!") Yes! Shows they are aware and care.
It's not that I don't want to interact, I just don't want to be dragged into that 'we're friends' game.
One thing is that it can be a sort of breach of trust. While of course banks have access to this info, it's sort of an unwritten rule that they're not going to go looking through it just out of curiosity/malice.
Obviously this depends on the situation, but usually info like bank transactions are considered private.
Same here. One time a Simple rep made a comment about how they liked my employer. While the comment itself was innocuous, I expected them to have a bit more discretion when going through my transaction history.
It could be a very subtle AML tactic. BofA asked me if I remembered the name of the staff member who set up my business account prior to letting me make a wire transfer. Of course, since they can't tell you it's AML you think they're insane until you catch on and give the standard answers.
On an unregistered browser, someone has to guess the answer to two security questions and the PIN. Did it occur to you that maybe it's not a problem since it's been that way for at least 8 years now (I signed up in 06)?
I think acquirers are aware of notions like yours (I used to work for one of the acquirers you mentioned). These companies will eventually start to take great care to preserve the brand and product of the acquired company.
My experience with one of the banks you mentioned has not changed since it's been acquired.
The killer for me is that it didn't seem to have a way to track spending from my credit card. To get the benefits, I'd have to give up my rewards card, and the rewards and customer protection are more important (to me) than a clean interface.
I was one of the early customers of Simple. When I received their card in that lovely cardboard with a rubber band on, I was hooked. I really wanted to move to Simple.
But did not. I mean I still have an account a few hundred dollars in it, but I have never found a reason to use it.
My main account is a combination of Credit Union and Chase. Chase's mobile App does all that I need, and the credit union staff are so fantastic, I have stayed with them for 15 years.
In addition Chase comes through for "serious" banking stuff like wire transfers, LoCs etc.
All the best. I still have the cardboard they sent me as an example of how something simple can be lovely.
By the time I finally got a Simple/BankSimple invite, the online features and offerings from my local/regional bank (Frost, for those of you in TX) matched "close enough" to what Simple was offering at the time that there wasn't any advantage to moving everything over and leaving a bank I've been with for 18 years. Sure, the UI's not as pretty, but that's not everything.
I still have the account, and like my USAA one, transfer money into it every month as a secondary emergency fund in case something happens with my Frost account and I get locked out over a weekend.
Frost's UI/UX is no where near Simple's, IMHO. My girlfriend was using Frost for a long time, saw me using Simple, and wanted to switch over immediately - super happy since. Since then every mobile banking app I've had to use (ATFCU, Chase, Citi, and BofA) is ridiculous. Bad design, limited functionality, no concept of UX (BofA's mobile app at least has it together but their webapp is stupid).
I fully agree that Frost's UI/UX is nowhere near Simple's, but it lets me do what I need to do online, and I can deposit checks via my Android phone now. Good enough.
Early user of simple here and, while their design was excellent, there was little else to recommend them. Plenty of other banks offer no-fee atm access and have apps. Those banks, unlike simple, reliably process transactions. They went down more than once, which meant my card was declined. The customer service rep was nice when he told me their servers were down. No advance notice. It would be nice to have a bank that, you know, works.
It is reliable! Growing pains happen. Downtime happens. Expecting five nines from a little startup, even when it's out of beta, is silly!
I've built three companies now and it is really hard! Balancing up-time, product development, customer support, and bug fixing is difficult. I'm sure interfacing with legacy banking systems made it even worse. If it were down all the time (the way Reddit was during their major growth phase) then I would agree, that is an issue. But they are not and were not - insignificant downtime is not something to criticize, there are other more constructive things to criticize about the product which is consistently evolving anyway.
It upsets me to see people on HN get up on their soapbox and say demoralizing things about trivial issues (that are part of the life of a growing product) of little startups that are doing well, continuously improving, and doing their best.
This is surprising to say the least.
The BBVA online banking is a prime example of a forgotten service to their clients. The .pt website will often output errors in Spanish.
Not sure if I should expect the tech to trickle into existing services, one can hope. It seems to be a nice deal for BBVA to expand to the Americas and for Simple to get in Europe.
As a Simple user, I want them to stay exactly the same, as the contrast they offer to almost everything else out there is outstanding.
But as an outside observer, I hope they grow like crazy. The amount that the banking industry needs to be shaken up to the point of near-destruction (preferably without the taxpayers having to bail them out) cannot be understated.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadWith that said, I'd actually prefer a quicker integration with BBVA with hopes that their backend banking infrastructure would improve, but I wish they had done it with a more prominent US bank with more branches (BBVA has very few).
Edit: want an invite? Email in profile.
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/20/5429916/bbva-acquires-simp...
Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure isn't really that innovative. The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology. Unfortunately, the investment required is higher than VCs seem willing to risk.
Sure, it would be awesome to rebuild a bank from scratch, but that doesn't mean there wasn't innovation here.
What lets them down is the overall power of their offering and the rate at which they have been developing it. If the banking backend was the constraint, maybe this will help them to accelerate.
What is a bit sadder is that they weren't able to stick it out until they started building their own platform.
I now use a local credit union and I get far, far better service than I ever did with BoA. The credit union has a branch 3 blocks from my apartment, across the street from where I work, and on campus at school. Plus they have ATMs in many of the local businesses I visit. Simple just can't compete with that, so for me, it's all upside.
It ended up that customer service ended up being pushed as the differentiator (the interface I can get with Mint), but I've had great customer service experiences with both Ally and Charles Schwab. And I get all those previous features I wanted, plus things like ATM refunds. So Simple ended up being a feature-bare product in comparison.
I think their customer growth tailing off was a direct correlation to their feature launch velocity tailing off, and I attribute that to the legal stuff around banking being really hard, rather than any slacking on their part. Hopefully the purchase will allow them to leverage more existing agreements to get more features up and running.
These sound like good avenues for fraud, i.e. places where a bank would need to put in a fee so they can afford computers and people to watch for fraud when someone attempts one of these transactions.
> Or a savings account
My Simple account bears interest every month. I suspect they implemented this automagic movement of money without actually exposing it to the user.
The interest of a Simple checking account is no more than the interest on any other banks checking account, so I don't think they're doing it at all. Checking accounts usually accrue some tiny amount of interest.
In other words: If you cannot transfer the money to a different account, how do you USE the money at all?
Banks have survived hundreds of years, through hardships like depression and war, long after their founders were all gone.
Now the business model is "shop around for a buyer if your growth isn't high enough in the first five years."
Kind of sad.
It's likely nearly impossible to build a bank from scratch because of regulatory hurdles. That's why Simple had to team up with a partner bank instead of going it 100% alone. I remember reading a blog post from Simple about it, it seemed they had no choice to partner with an existing bank (if I find the post I'll share it). The banking system is broken on purpose. This is why banks operate like it's the stone age and get away with awful service and fees - there's little chance of nimbler competitors coming along and eating their lunch.
Interbank transfers -- wire and ACH -- are processed through central clearinghouses. You just show up with a copy of your bank charter, pay the fees, and you're now on equal terms with any other bank when it comes to moving money around.
The hard part is getting that charter in the first place. Just two months ago, the Bank of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania became the first new consumer bank to be chartered in the United States since 2010. One bank, in the past three years. It was huge news in the banking world, even made the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It's an Amish bank -- they have a drive-through lane for horses and buggies.
And don't forget Metro didn't build their own platform - they outsourced all their technology.
Despite their apparent enthusiasm (see links at the bottom of this post), I don't think VCs are ready to sink over a billion dollars into a single startup, even if it is a bank. They're looking for billion-dollar exits like Facebook and Whatsapp, not a $1bn investment with a $100+bn exit.
VCs Start Pining to Own a Bank - http://www.bankinnovation.net/2014/02/vcs-start-pining-for-a...
“I am dying to fund a disruptive bank.” - Marc Andreessen - https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/432651247909208064
...
>The acquiring company, BBVA, is a 150-year old financial services corporation
I think that was the problem.
I predict they kill it within 6 months, either overtly or by halting all development.
I only hope they don't go the way of Mint, even though they're two different products. Has Mint improved any features at all since they were acquired?
Not really. I looks pretty much the same to me as when they started and it certainly looks the same as when they were bought, five years ago.
I'd be very interested in knowing how many product and engineering people still work on it. (if any…)
So: changes, yes. Improvements? No.
That was the whole business model that Mint was based upon. They'd give you the service for free, and make money on lead-generation.
When they were a startup, they could afford not to be quite so annoying about it. Now that Intuit owns it, they can no longer keep burning cash. They have to show that they can make a profit. If lead-gen won't do it, then they'll have no choice but to start charging.
The absolute best thing about Simple is their goals, I just got into them and they really reshape your thinking about planning your money for future goals. What makes them better than Mint is that they actually hide your money in your goals every day
So hopefully this will give them the 'establishment' they need along with the independence to keep innovating. Hopefully.
I couldn't be happier with that decision, and believe that I have been saving money (in both fees and in general) because of Simple's interface.
So with this news, I feel excited for their team, but still very nervous. I joined Simple precisely because I was tired of dealing with a megabank (like many folks here), so if Simple can continue to buck the trend and stay customer-focused and agile, then I'll continue to be all-in.
I'd be better off just playing the market at that point (or using something like betterment/wealthfront to hold most money).
Simple is nice because the interface/app are solid and they have incredible customer service. The only other thing I'd want from them is a decent rewards credit card.
I am baffled by anyone who peaks their checking account beyond 30-40k.
I'm sure CapitalOne has "budget tools" marked off of some internal checklist but imagine it's pretty crappy.
Giving up a few bucks a month in exchange for a great budgeting tool is the reason I use Simple.
The only thing which has worked is the Simple app that by opening it tells her exactly how much money she can spend without sabotaging her savings goals.
I would use it, but I can't because I have a working US visa and they only let you make an account if you're a US citizen.
https://home.capitalone360.com/rates https://www.simple.com/policies/rates/
But they don't have joint accounts, so my wife and I would have to go through a lot of trouble to use their service. It's interesting to say that they are not able to expand as fast as they wanted when they are missing this HUGE feature. Not having this feature has kept me from using their service ever since I received a very early beta invite.
I'm on a similar boat. She manages certain budgets, so every pay check I make a few instant transfers (so I can categorize/track on my side) and that's it. And if she uses her account (debit card) for other stuff outside the budget, I just instant transfer.
The real problem would be if both earned an income, as there would be no way to "share" a goal. (A feature which Simple is supposed to be working on.)
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Frequently-Asked-Questions-ab...
> If I am filing a joint return with my spouse, must our refund be deposited to a jointly-held account?
> You can ask IRS to direct deposit a refund on a joint return into your account, your spouse’s account, or a joint account. However, state and financial institution rules can vary and you should first verify your financial institution will accept a joint refund into an individual account.
Not sure if it's a state, Simple, or Bancorp policy, but it's not an IRS one.
But with this news that they're being acquired, I now have even less hope than before. I love Simple, but I'm now wondering if I'm going to have to find a different company to give my business.
I transferred a few hundred bucks to Simple when I signed up and finally moved that money back out just last week. I'm done waiting. :(
Why not have one account for each of you? Simple has instant account-to-account internal transfers.
But, account to account transfers does not solve the problem at all. I don't want to have to transfer money from my account to my wife's account manually. It's so much easier when she can just access a shared account and move money as needed.
I really found it as an unnecessary layer.
First: $117M? That seems like an astonishingly low amount of money.
Second: The service you get from simple really is that good, probably better than what most people would expect. The app is amazing, their website is amazing, their customer support is amazing.
It feels like a bank from the 21st century, not from the stone age.
This acquisition actually makes me really sad. Simple is awesome, and I really hope that it doesn't get screwed up by this.
Every bank I've had the ability to talk to an actual person was able to see that this is clearly absurd, I am not a serial check bouncer/overdrafter/etc and to get my account going. Simple..notsomuch. I'd love to use them if they'd let me.
That seems like a lot of money for a mobile banking app. They didn't actually hold deposits themselves or make loans, the activities that are worth money in banking. They were sort of a VPS for banks--a "bank" sitting on top of real banks that made some painful things easier. Hard to profit that way though.
TL;DR Its about the transaction volume.
They have a lot of costs for that interchange fee though. That's not where banks make they money and the .01% interest you mention is what they pay, not what they would earn if they actually held your deposits. If they held your deposits and worked like a regular bank it would be dramatically more profitable: $10,000 in your account means they would owe you $1 a year in interest. They could simply park that about anywhere else and make a decent amount, but banks really make their money by leveraging.
I'd wager that the founders wanted their FU-money to eventually pursue something new.
The savings goals are certainly nice, but I can get that with most other banks (just don't have the online management component), otherwise they don't offer a whole lot beyond "pretty".
I put a lot more weight into the convenience of drive-through cash deposits a couple blocks from my house. Or spending an hour at the branch and walking out with a loan. Or a rewards card that applies 5X points to my mortgage for purchases I was going to make anyways.
I wouldn't say I'm a "fan" of Wells Fargo. Or that they're particularly "amazing" for any of this. And their iOS app kinda sucks to be honest. Functional but meh.
That said, they set a minimum expectation for their offering that Simple doesn't meet and no amount of pretty Apps or direct-to-live-human (I mean how often do I call my bank? I couple times a year?) service is going to make up for.
The biggest one for me though is Joint Accounts. I mean seriously. It's weird to me as a married guy that my wife and I should maintain multiple separate bank accounts. That alone makes the offering fairly useless for me. If I were single and didn't have a mortgage, I could see how I might have different priorities.
The only reason I'm still a member at this point is that closing an account, needing to hook up a new external account (we changed primary banks during my membership at Simple so the external account I opened with is no longer the one I need to transfer funds back to for closing) is cumbersome.
Simple's Safe to Spend feature is the digital equivalent. I can aside money for rent and emergencies in digital envelopes. I never thought personal finance was fun and easy until I began using Simple. It changed the way I think about money.
Basically I want Simple but with a richer transaction history. It doesn't have to be as cumbersome as a full double-entry account system, but it needs to have roughly a similar level of account history.
Then again, this is pretty much the way I felt when I joined Commerce Bank in 2002. They were leaps and bounds above any other bank in everything from their down-home attitude to their evening and weekend hours. Then they got acquired.
Things weren't too different with ING Direct. Joined up for their interest-bearing checking and used them as my savings account. Had wonderful experiences. Then they got acquired.
Tangential, but relevant, I got HostGator as my hosting provider many years ago—they were a little company in Texas with great service and great people. I'm leaving them this month. They got acquired, and everything changed.
I hope this goes well for Simple. I really do. But I'm preparing myself. I know the signs to watch out for. First they'll get an automated phone tree, and I'll have to tell the robot what I want. Then it will get just a little longer to wait for a person. A couple fees will show up, nothing much, just little stuff. Tiny, unobtrusive, totally defensible, annoying policies will start taking hold. And soon, it'll be just another online bank—albeit one with a very pretty iPhone app.
I hope that doesn't happen. But I'm bracing myself anyway.
ING was absolutely remarkable. Less so after being acquired.
And Simple is by far the best banking experience I've had. The interface is so well done, the customer service has been phenomenal. I actually find myself on my banking tab nearly every day (happily), adjusting goals and making sure I'm on target.
I still use mint to manage all my accounts and consistently wish the interface was even half as good as Simple's. Mint is another example that stopped being incredible after being acquired - or at least stopped progressing in any useful manner.
I also have to note that the Spanish banking system is among the worst, most troubled, in the world. Santander recently bought Soverign bank (US regional bank) and it makes me wonder whether they are trying to address solvency from bad loans with fresh deposits however they can acquire them.
makes me nervous to think about having any serious amount of funds with a spanish bank.
Simply put, I parse that as a creepy attempt of simulating a personal relationship that just isn't there.
* Ring, quick answer
* V: Yeah?
* Me: I need X changed to Y.
* V: Got it.
* Me: Thanks. end call
It also feels different because they are talking while they are doing something else, unlike on a phone call where these questions are preventing you from doing the communication you need to do to finish the call. It would be more similar to Trader Joe's employee stopping you on your way in to ask you a bunch of questions about your day and the weather outside.
The weather, because it is summer and hot? Ok. Just banter.
The crowded store and the fact that I had to stand in line 5 minutes? ("Crazy, we didn't expect that many customers today!") Yes! Shows they are aware and care.
It's not that I don't want to interact, I just don't want to be dragged into that 'we're friends' game.
"Thank you for calling XXX where it's always a great day, my name is XXX and how about you tell me what I can help you bring home today?"
Obviously this depends on the situation, but usually info like bank transactions are considered private.
I just wish they offered Two-Factor authentication for "360" accounts.
Relevant link: https://www.facebook.com/CapitalOne360/posts/101515573342295...
On an unregistered browser, someone has to guess the answer to two security questions and the PIN. Did it occur to you that maybe it's not a problem since it's been that way for at least 8 years now (I signed up in 06)?
It also allows you to only authorise specific actions e.g. transferring a specific amount to a specific payee, so protects against replay attacks.
My experience with one of the banks you mentioned has not changed since it's been acquired.
Maybe this acquisition can help that.
But did not. I mean I still have an account a few hundred dollars in it, but I have never found a reason to use it.
My main account is a combination of Credit Union and Chase. Chase's mobile App does all that I need, and the credit union staff are so fantastic, I have stayed with them for 15 years.
In addition Chase comes through for "serious" banking stuff like wire transfers, LoCs etc.
All the best. I still have the cardboard they sent me as an example of how something simple can be lovely.
Good deal to the Simple team, I hope this works out for everyone involved well.
I still have the account, and like my USAA one, transfer money into it every month as a secondary emergency fund in case something happens with my Frost account and I get locked out over a weekend.
I myself never experienced downtime and they've only gotten more reliable, better customer service, and more features.
I've built three companies now and it is really hard! Balancing up-time, product development, customer support, and bug fixing is difficult. I'm sure interfacing with legacy banking systems made it even worse. If it were down all the time (the way Reddit was during their major growth phase) then I would agree, that is an issue. But they are not and were not - insignificant downtime is not something to criticize, there are other more constructive things to criticize about the product which is consistently evolving anyway.
It upsets me to see people on HN get up on their soapbox and say demoralizing things about trivial issues (that are part of the life of a growing product) of little startups that are doing well, continuously improving, and doing their best.
This is surprising to say the least. The BBVA online banking is a prime example of a forgotten service to their clients. The .pt website will often output errors in Spanish.
Not sure if I should expect the tech to trickle into existing services, one can hope. It seems to be a nice deal for BBVA to expand to the Americas and for Simple to get in Europe.
But as an outside observer, I hope they grow like crazy. The amount that the banking industry needs to be shaken up to the point of near-destruction (preferably without the taxpayers having to bail them out) cannot be understated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBVA#Criminal_charges:_money_la... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBVA#Connection_to_drug_syndica...
I know most banks have some skeletons in their closets, but BBVA seems to be less ethical than average.