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Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

He's starting a new Bank, "Bank Simple"

From their FAQ:

Why do other banks make it such a pain to transfer money?

Many banks make transferring money from your account painful as they fear losing your deposits. We figure if we make it easy to do the things you want to do, you’ll be happier and less likely to leave. So, transfers are simple with us.

I've always viewed the difficulty of transferring money out of my account as a robust security feature.

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Basically it sounds like he's trying to create a non-US style bank, in the US.

Transferring money in the UK is a simple process - login, click transfer, put in the amount and destination, and click [go]. It'll appear in the destination account in an hour or 2 usually. There's nothing insecure about that (Login is done using chip+pin card, pin, or one-time keychain generator thingy etc etc)

How does it work in the US?

The same but not as fast. Usually 3 days to go through the ACH process. I routinely transfer money between my two bank accounts.

Ah, thanks. To be honest, in the UK in my experience the "within a few hours" thing only seems to apply when the transfers are between accounts at the same bank.

Transfers to other banks are the same process, they just take days; especially if it's a weekend or a public holiday. I'm sure all of that's just an excuse to hang on to your money for as long as they can.

Actually, the faster payments system make interbank transfers (for member banks) go within minutes, and intrabank transfers shouldn't take more than a few seconds.

That, at least, is my most recent uk banking experience...

"Within same bank" transfers in the U.S. usually happen by end-of-same-business-day, sometimes within minutes.

I always figured that the 3-business-day wait was because of the interbank settlement process. Banks settle up at midnight between each business day: at that point, there's a shuffle where they figure out how much capital they need to meet reserve ratio requirements after the day's deposits & withdrawals, borrow from other banks at the Fed funds rate, or in the worst case, borrow from the Fed's discount window. If you figure a business day to transfer the money internally, then a business day to settle up with counterparties, then a business day for the money to appear in the receiving account, there's your 3 days.

(I suspect they also pad the times a bit...when I've transferred money, it's usually taken a day and a half to two days for it to appear, which is consistent with the intraday settlement process. They want a little bit of a cushion in case some employee isn't on the ball or things otherwise get hung up.)

Are keychain generators common outside the US? I'm curious why physical measures like this aren't more common.

The situation in Holland is pretty good. Only 1 bank (Postbank) has a system where you can login with a username and password (instead of using a physical authenticator) but you still need to authorize payments etc via your mobile phone (textmessages). All the other banks have authenticators where you insert your debitcard and have to input your 4 digit code to login and make transfers.

Transfers are usually instantaneously except to the aforementioned bank Postbank :-)

For completeness:

You can choose to receive Postbank authentication tokens either on your mobile phone, or a sheet of paper delivered by regular mail.

(also, Postbank has been rebranded to ING Bank, "Postbank" as such no longer exists).

The banks I use in Singapore use dual factor authentication devices or SMS. Not sure if it's mandatory.

UK inter-bank transfers can take over 48hs sometimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

since that went live I've managed to send most payments in about 15 minutes.

If your bank is on this list you should be fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service#Partici...

Strange. Last week a transfer took over 48hs across two banks in that list.

Interesting. I thought banks made it difficult to transfer money because:

1) The longer a bank possesses your money the more money they make loaning it to other people and 2) when a bank has your money, they've got you over a barrel so you're willing to pay a fee to get it back (see ATM fees, check fees and myriad other "ransom" fees regularly levied on customers)

hows that a security feature? If someone has access to your account, end of story.

That being said, a bank which spells out the semantics of how different sorts of transaction will work and doesn't relegate understanding how your account works to reams of fine print or reading a subsection of wikipedia would probably be a refreshing experience.

(and thats without looking at how poorly maintained many bank webapps are, i recently had the experience where BOA complained that chrome mac beta was out of date and I should upgrade to netscape navigator!!!!)

How is it "end of story?"

If someone logs into my bank account right now:

1) they can't transfer money; the feature is not available.

2) they can set up a bill pay, but I get an email notice in time to stop it.

How else can they steal from me?

do you mean that a) you have transferring disabled for your account

b) that your bank doesn't let you do that?

I forget the exact context, but Joel wrote about this exact same thing a while back. By lowering the barrier for users to leave (and take their stuff with them), they will be more likely to join. You keep them with service, not lock-in.

>I've always viewed the difficulty of transferring money out of my account as a robust security feature.

As long as he adds a commit/rollback transaction feature, I'm cool with it.

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