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Comment by ci5er | Hacker News Reader

> They can terminate your account suddenly for opaque reasons.

I generally am 'ok' with modern (US) banks and global, partly because I know their rules and set my expectations accordingly, but unlike what one of the sub-commenters said: "Chase" completely fucked up my world with no recompense for a while. No rhyme. No reason. Ultimately it was because I had connections to executives of the bank at the CEO level that I was able to get it sorted out, but until then, I was literally "without any money" for about 60 days. That, to put it mildly, if you don't have a reason or a recovery time-line (hard to tell your friends: trust me - I'll pay you in 15 days) if you literally don't know.

EDIT: It was /u/callmeed below. I can't say 'no' to his/her experience - but while I still work with Chase - I feel "on edge" all the time because I never know what they are going to do to me without notice.

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Same thing happened to my wife earlier this year. She deposited a check (from an insurance company), Chase apparently deemed it fraudulent (it was not) and with absolutely zero notice simply closed her account. She pulled open the app one day and noticed that the account was just missing, with all the money that was in it.

Hours on the phone with no resolution. They told us we had to get the insurance company to contact them and verify that the check was valid. Like wtf is that. That’s not how checks work. And we’re not talking about a large sum of money. I think it was around $4k. Not particularly abnormal.

We finally walked into a branch with our 4 month old daughter, plopped ourselves in the manager’s office and told him we weren’t leaving until it was resolved. A few hours later we were told that the account was permanently closed and could not be reopened. But that we would receive a check in the mail for the funds that they quite literally stole from us.

As soon as that check cleared we closed all our accounts with Chase. Fuck them.

Even worse scenario here. I had 4 accounts (a personal checking, savings, a joint checking, and a business account) at Chase. I transferred money from my savings to my checking one day to buy a car. Did a wire transfer from the checking to the dealership. The next day transferred excess funds back to my savings. To me a completely normal set of banking transactions. To some Chase fraud algorithm though it was a red flag and my primary checking was closed. But instead of notifying me there was an issue or that they were closing the account they opted to just lock me out of online banking entirely on ALL my accounts since they were all linked together with one user id.

When I called to figure out what was going on I was advised the account was closed and that a check would be mailed with remaining funds within 60-90 days. I asked about the other accounts and they are all fine and open. BUT, because the fraud closure was related to an online banking transaction I would no longer have access to online banking. Pretty much rendered the remaining accounts useless at this point. So while they didn't close all my accounts themselves, they pretty much forced my hand to close my remaining accounts.

Sure, don't do business with Chase. But this points to why people use banks, you take for granted that your money won't disappear permanently with no recourse. So you go ballistic when it seems like it might happen. Nobody in their right mind wants to use anything where it really does happen.

If Google had money that belonged to me, I have no idea where to even begin trying to get it back. Do they have offices that you can stage a sit-in in?

Luckily we have regulations for that.

Google is not a bank. If they start to offer banking services it will be through a partnership with an actual bank. Your money will not be “with Google”, unless they enter the multi year, very expensive process of applying for a banking license which they’re not doing.

Not that I don’t disagree with your point, in general. But google can’t just take your money like that. At least not in the US

And where might that bank be? I live in a relatively small city (~100k people) and each of the three banks I have accounts with has at least 3 branches within 30 minutes walking distance. Even if all of them tell me to fuck off, I can hop in a car and be at their headquarters in 2 hours or at the ministry of finance to file a formal complaint in even less.

Best case scenario for me with Google's bank would be an 8-hour drive to Germany, just to run into not only a language barrier, but a buerocratic one as my ID would not mean shit to them and their regulatory bodies would not even consider hearing me out without going through the EU first (== more buerocracy). All of this I would of course have to accomplish while not having access to my bank account.

Banks are one of the few decentralized services that have survived the modern economy and while I would switch banks immediately to have access to even something as simple as a balance check API, I would rather continue to fight the reverse-engineering arms race with my current bank than hand over my finances to a faceless, poorly regulated, foreign corporation and risk any one of a million possible small mistakes leave me penniless.

> the multi year, very expensive process of applying for a banking license

If the upside is taking a chunk of Mastercard/Visa's 600bn market-cap, the $0.01bn effort of a "very expensive" banking licence is peanuts.

Then why aren’t more companies trying to get one?

It’s a huge undertaking to do. You have to prove to the US government that you’re capable of handling people’s money safely and that you’re providing a benefit to your customers. Years of internal systems audits with nebulous requirements. How do you do that without handling people’s money? You partner with a bank. It’s easy and relatively cheap.

But regardless of your ignorance on the subject, the original point still stands that Google is not gonna just “take your money”. Your money will always be in the custody of an actual bank.

The problem is that thing will be regulated like a bank, there will be a lot more scrutiny. And unlike Uber's "but we're just a tech company so we can disrupt by going around the regulation" tactic, doing this with banking would be a tad more challenging. Not necessarily unprofitable but it feels antithetical to the way Google usually works.

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