Hacker News Reader

There's gotta be some viable way to "rent" the services of a small, forward-thinking bank (or, better, Utah industrial loan comp/corp) that would let you control most or all of the customer-facing aspects, no?

We went down this route at X.com (PayPal pre-cursor) but the intent was to eventually buy FWNB (http://www.netbanker.com/xcom/).

View on HN

I'd love to pick your brain. I've chatted some with Roelof and Dana about x.com but I think it was actually before their time. I'd really like to unpack that history a little bit and understand the problems. One obvious difference in our vision and it's is that we'd prefer to start on the commercial side.

More generally, we've just found it difficult - in the current regulatory environment - to find a small bank that is also forward-thinking.

BancBox tried this with Four Oaks Bank in North Carolina. This is where Four Oaks is now:

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/index.html?id=5178849

BancBox is now applying for a California money transmission license.

Bancorp was the path for Simple and WePay, and Clinkle is reportedly talking to them as well after Zions Bancorp pulled out of their agreement (which was probably wise). None of these companies have had any impact on the financial system. It's not an easy thing to pull off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com