Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

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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?

You still have a debit card that you can make purchases anywhere with.

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