BankSimple was a startup building a consumer bank, and its blog covered its launch, product plans and banking fees.
Commenters like its clean site and the team's named faces, link it for its no-surprise-fees pitch, and note it was being built on Scala.
Starting a new bank - if only it were that simple.
I actually looked into the requirements for establishing a new bank (not in US) and the requirements were so prohibitive (tens of millions in reserve from day one, virtually obliged that no single shareholder hold more than 5-10% stake), not to mention meeting regulatory requirements like BASEL in Europe and SOX in the US mean that the big banks own the market in many countries, with no fear of swifter moving newcomers "eating their lunch". Not to mention people's resistance to change, especially with something as important as their money. And that is only on the retail banking side. It's even worse in i-banking, with the bigger investment banks making more money than ever on Wall Street, as if the crash of 2008 never happened. They may be crooks, but they have the money and influence to make sure the laws get written in their favour - see https://www.banksimple.net/blog/2010/07/21/banks-strike-back/ (there was an article on HN recently around this post.)
Also looked into providing the "valuable services" you mention too, a la Mint.com (no equivalent where I live) and this is something I believe there is certain potential (you will have to build a service that taps into banks online portals and offers more useful features than the banks themselves, e.g. account aggregation, financial product comparisons, tailored financial advice etc.) I think the future is one where virtually ordinary transactions will be done online…
It's not just a pretty interface to Bank of America or anything like that. But they aren't a normal bank with a charter and millions of dollars put up in bonds to allow them to operate legally. They haven't gone into detail about exactly how everything works, but they have a "network of banks" where the money will be stored (which is how they get it FDIC insured), and they sit on top of that in some way.
http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/23/status-update/
>When we first started thinking about starting a bank we looked into the de novo banking process. This is the process by which new banks are formed from scratch. This is both expensive and, more importantly, it takes too long to launch. It is near impossible to innovate with an imposed three year launch delay. The best way to serve your needs is to launch quickly and to adapt our offering to meet your individual needs. Modern technology lets us do that. To achieve this we are planning to launch with a special corporate structure. We are bringing together a group of financial institutions to provide our underlying banking services. Our partner banks hold all deposits in insured accounts.
from the FAQ (https://www.banksimple.com/faq/)
> If you don’t charge hidden fees, how do you make money?
We make money from two sources: interchange and interest margin. Interest margin is the revenue earned from lending, less what they pay on deposits. For example a bank may charge a customer 12% to borrow money, but pay 5% interest on a savings account. The difference, less any defaults on the loan, is revenue to the bank. Interchange is a small revenue source that card issuing banks earn whenever that card is used at a store. Typically banks earn less than 1% for each time the card is used to make a purchase. These are both great revenue streams, but banks got greedy and started charging additional fees to bolster their revenue. Without hundreds or thousands of branches, our operation is low cost, so we don’t need to rely on extraneous fee revenue.
> I like the transaction searching capabilities shown in the demo, but I was hoping to see more info on how to do actual "banking" tasks. Can I initiate a wire transfer from an internet cafe in Laos? Can people send a check to an address in the US that automatically gets deposited in my account? That sort of thing. When these guys came on the scene, I got the impression that that was the kind of thing they'd be doing better than other banks. Frankly, sorting my past transactions just isn't a problem I desperately need to have solved.
Did you watch the whole thing? They showed sending money through the website. You can deposit checks by mail or with your phone (take a picture).
https://banksimple.com/faq/
Your page doesn't function well as a landing page or give enough information straight away about how it all works. The comment from Ben Thacker (facebook comment) is the kind of thing you need to get to the user quickly:
"For US bank-account-holders only, an interesting idea. Choose whether or not to donate $1 per day to a variety of charities pre-vetted by Philanthroper. Religious/personal appeals are excluded, and the website makes its money from ads, not by taking a cut. The only fee is a 1% charge for the payment processing."
https://www.banksimple.com/ has a pretty epic page/intro, open source too. Do some testing anyway, but it's a good idea you have got going there. Congratulations on your launch.
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.
https://banksimple.com/faq/#whatthedealis