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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

It's a beautifully clean design. I like the simplicity of it.

What I worry about is the security behind the scenes and the sharing of sensitive information between BankSimple and the banks.

And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.

Maybe I missed it in the video, but what I would like to see from any of these types of websites is a consolidated view of multiple accounts and banks. So if I have chequing and savings accounts at 3 different banks, I would like a dashboard of my entire spending and saving. It's easy to lose sight of this when you look at individual bank statements.

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> And trademarking "Safe-To-Spend"? Come on... It's a math equation that shows how much running profit you have. You don't need to trademark such a thing unless you intend to use it in advertising or throughout the website, yet I only see it used in one place. Next thing you know it'll be patented.

That's rather extreme. For one thing, they're not advertising and they haven't launched their website yet. It's also not a math equation: it's a name which is what trademarks are for.

What's extreme? I expressed an opinion about a selling tactic used on a website.

I realize that one trademarks a name, which is why later in the sentence I used the word "patent" for the process (of the math equation).

Everything in that video was an advertisement. That was the point of it, and good on them for doing so. The simplicity of the design, words used, and the trademarks and imagery of the product. The whole point of the video in the link is to drum up hype and future business.

What I disagreed with was their use of Safe-To-Spend without further explanation on why it was being trademarked. Otherwise it's just a waste of money. They could have called the result anything and leave the silly trademarks for later, unless they specifically had something to sell the consumer on with that name.

Safe-to-spend isn't about the math, it's about the psychology. When you see $100 as your "balance", you're much more likely to spend a little more than when you only see $60. What's unique about it is that they show it in place of your actual balance, which really hasn't been done by another bank before.

Also a trademark will protect the name, not the underlying technology. Other banks can still use this technique. They just need a different name for it.

In this economy and with global debt crises, they'd do better to show the user how much money was saved.

I've never seen a bank or financial institution advertise spending money in such a blatant way. Instead, banks typically nudge their customers into purchasing products or services for their benefits, but they never mention the word "spend" because it denotes exhausting one's supply.

We're not doing the consolidation/aggregation thing. Mint does, of course. But we can't do a lot of what we want to do with the sort of low-fidelity, read-only data access that a service like Mint has.

We're subject to the same security requirements that the rest of the financial industry is. We try to go above and beyond them. Nobody's security will ever be perfect, but we push our bank partners to be as secure as possible. We take security very, very seriously.

trademark != patent

mint.com does a pretty good job of tracking your overall spending and saving for multiple accounts.

Trademarks are super cheap. Why not? It is a unique label they wouldn't want copied.

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