brickcap

Our two part plan for corporate banking innovation:-

- The low hanging fruits in corporate banking services (https://docs.google.com/document/d/11SRXfuC0-L5iGlHypnviI9H5...)

- A scalable banking proxy (https://docs.google.com/document/d/11SRXfuC0-L5iGlHypnviI9H5...)

We've compiled a list of questions that Banking partners,investors and startup mentors and other people have asked us in the past. If nothing else the document is a good overview of how the concept has evolved during the last couple of months. We're constantly updating the list as new questions come in. Here's the link:-

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cu7vl4GiQHg8Tqqt_nGj7JOT...

Added a new option "-w" that allows you to watch the project directory for changes in .lua and nginx configuration files and automatically restart nginx process to make those changes available.

Thanks for the great explanation about acquisition costs. I think we can use it :)

Point taken, though I disagree with your assertions that credit cards don't have much to do with classical banking and that they are not about promotion.

It's also true that banking services are entirely different from facebook. But the goals are similar.

I guess one way to restate my opinion in a couple of lines would be

There are markets and customers that are not immediately in the operational radius of a local bank. Any bank that can create offerings that would appeal to such markets would stand to gain profit.

Also to flip the discussion we could ask if facebook were to create a bank how would they do it?

The website is out of sync with our ideas. We need to update it. Apologies for any confusion caused.

If you don't see any new idea then can you at least see a concept that has been proven already by revolut. If so can you see a possibility that this concept can be taken further to include other businesses and banks? If you do can you can you imagine a scenario where ideas we suggest might be probable?

And if we are able to overcome the challenges you put forth would you say that this idea is a winner?

>the UK mortgage industry is technologically stone age!

Very interesting. Would love to have more details!

May I also ask if Virgin money has services that integrate with their other business, like say virgin airlines, as well?

Great critiques! Please understand that when you write a pitch the tone has to be a bit assertive. It wasn't meant to be insulting but rather invigorating. However I apologize for any offence if might have caused. We didn't mean any of it.

Having said that you raise many important points. Let me try to respond to them

>Where does the assumption come from that banks aren't aware of this market.

I'll concede that they probably are aware of this market. Now we want to build a service that caters to this market. And in the process make a profit for everyone involved. We know that there are businesses like revolut that have proven a part of this concept. We want to take it further.

If the market has been observed, services have been shown to be deficient and the concept proposed has been shown to be working then it should be smooth sailing.

>"not all business models try to maximize "eyeballs", or customers and that some attempt simply to maximixe revenue or profit"

There may be some business that don't try to maximize eyeballs or customers. But banks are not one of them for sure. If you look at the history of original credit cards they were made popular by

>"mass mailing of unsolicited credit cards (actual working cards, not mere applications) to a large population.[1]

It has also been my personal observation that banks put on large advertisements to attract new customers based on attributes like interest rates and after a certain period of time these attributes get constant across banks. We are suggesting that it could be beneficial in the long run to look for a different set of customers.

>And how on earth does one compare near lawlessness of Facebook with the most heavily regulated sector of banking

But we didn't suggest any lawlessness!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#History

The idea of posting it on hacker news is to make sure that if we can't do it someone else (better) can. There is a market. There is big money to be made. Banks are more receptive of startups than they've ever been. It'd be a shame to see this opportunity pass by.

Further we're not building a new bank. We're proposing to use the existing systems available, in any international bank today ,in a new way.

Simple was a challenger. We want to collaborate. Hacker news might just be the rabbit's foot!

You misunderstand me....

You can think of revolut as a front end for barclays client pool account. This is a very simplistic explanation but what I'm trying to emphasize here is that the money revolut manages is effectively with Barclays.

So the idea of having Barclays is not to get traction or to have their own participation method later but to have the muscle of a bank that can handle large scale international payments.

There are other big banks who don't have something like revolut. So our solution can be a good proposition for them (Not saying that we don't have ideas for any new features. We do, but we've been caught off guard by the new announcement. It'll take a few more days to make it's way to the pitch)

>"Barclays has been known to help startups by lending them their (global) infrastructure in the UK"

Yes, but why? Barclays profits with every customer that revolut brings/ will bring. Other banks would want to profit in a similar way.

I didn't know about BOE but I don't think that switching banking partners after about 5 years of operation is going to be that easy... Not sure could be wrong.

Yes! and virgin has a bank as well. This is a very lucrative market.

It should be on bank statements and on the card. What I was trying to say though was that the fact that Barclays has a system like Revolut is a problem for other banks that don't have a system like that. So our solution is still valuable for them.

Ha! didn't know. Any way Revolut works in partnership with barclays. There are other banks to whom the service will be valuable.

Out of curiosity by just do you mean today?

You are right about the countries wanting to protect their own banks. We're not suggesting a "savings account" in the sense that you keep your money in a foreign bank. This is more like an efficient "bank proxy". Does "nginx for banks" explain what I'm trying to say? The money at the end of the day will be kept in your own banks.

Your point about foreign transaction fees is also correct in part. There are many layers of fees in a foreign transaction, many portions of which are directly controllable by the parent bank as is already proven by services like Revolut and centtrip.

Not much can be done about the remaining charges but even the savings that can be done with the help of a parent bank are very substantial and within the bounds of regulation.

Yes both Revolut and centtrip have marketed their products to only consumers (travelers) where as the concept of multicurrency accounts is very useful to business as well. Not just individuals. The customer acquisition strategy is like Revolut but the larger goal is not (Not that I can say what they have in mind,long term).

Yes it seems so. But there are forked repositories that are being maintained. They are

1. Skeleton framework (https://github.com/skeleton-framework/skeleton-framework) and

2.Skeleton Plus (https://github.com/oltmannsdaniel/skeleton-plus)

I like skeleton plus because of the responsive menu. The colours are not so good :P

Has anyone tried some of the newer css frameworks? Lots of them are listed on cssdb [1]. I especially like skeleton [2].

[1]http://cssdb.co/

[2]http://getskeleton.com/

The documents that are stored in couchdb are versioned as long as you don't replicate/ don't compress the database. You can query for all the _revs of a document. You can make api calls to give you an older _rev of the document.

The _revs themselves follow a pattern that is semi-human readable.Like so:-

`1-some_uuid,2-some_uuid,3-some_uuid` and so on.

The versioning functionality is not comprehensive but you certainly have the building blocks.

Indexes are cached on disk. As the new data comes in that satisfies the query function,that you have written,it will automatically be appended to the index that has already been built up to that point.

The query results are retuned with Etags that you can cache like you do any http resource.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4952429/couchdb-supports-...

>I want to have just indexes to do the queries I need to do with insane speed

couchdb seems to fit this requirement really well. You explicitly create indexes on the fields that you want to query. The index creation part is slow but once it's done your queries are really fast. All data is compressed with snappy[1].

couchdb also encourages you to split your data across multiple databases. Effectively you can have thousands of databases all managed by a single couchdb server instance. You can move your data in temporary databases and "purge" them when they are no longer required. It's all really cool once you get a hang of how to use this feature. Although if you query across databases you'll have to "join" the result set within your application.

You should give it a try, you'll really like it :)

[1]https://github.com/google/snappy

Have you looked at couchdb? It has an http api and you can "watch" the modifications made to the database using a "_changes" feed that has options for longpoll, eventsource and a "continuous poll".

Web socket is not supported out of the box yet but you can always put couchdb in front of a proxy and send the changes feed over the socket connection once it's established.

Do you still organize bike rides?

"Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it" -- thomasahle, 28 Jan 2016

This is a great idea actually. I do something like that myself where I've exposed a couchdb instance publically but the access through it is controlled by access_by_lua. I use basic authentication instead of token based auth but the principle is the same.

What I wanted to say was.. openresty is like a second application server + proxy combined into one. So you can have some of your validation at proxy level itself and reject dirty data then and there without ever having to bother your application server.

>as it can return a <form> with carefully placed messages for instance.

Openresty can also do that. The choice may vary from person to person. But the point I was trying to make was that if I have to use nginx I'd rather use openresty. And if I use openresty I'd probably do all little tasks like validation at the proxy level itself.

I suppose you already know this but poetry is not to be taken too seriously. They are far removed (three times) from the truth. This is what Socrates says about them [1]

"I do not mind telling you in confidence that all poetry is an outrage on the understanding, unless the hearers have that balm of knowledge which heals error."

"All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them"

"Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic and epic poets are imitators in the highest degree."

I'm not saying one shouldn’t enjoy poetry. But like most other literature, in general, they should only offer a perspective. A different point of view. Nothing more. A true poem, as Socrates says, is a lyric of the soul. Something that lifts the fallen spirit and gives hope in defeat.

Romanticism is certainly tender and is good for softening a coarse exterior. But in the end it is just entertainment.

[1]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#link2H...

I studied prolog too! For a semester only but I loved it. I don't remember much of it but I loved it because it felt like a true "high level" programming language to me. Describe it a problem and ask questions. Felt like magic.

Also learning erlang was much easier when you had some basic idea of prolog. Clauses did not seem so weird and once you understood how clauses work you've basically got 80% of the language nailed.

What I don't really understand though is why erlang didn't go all the way. Why take only surface level features of prolog and ignore the really cool parts?

I would recommend openresty. A library that allows you to script nginx using a lightweight,easy to learn language lua. You get all the advantages of nginx (unmatched speed and resource efficiency) along with the ability to "inject" lua code into it's event loop. Which should be a compelling enough reason for you to give it at least some serious thought.

As far as organization of code is concerned openresty does not impose any restrictions on you. But since it is just lua you can bundle you code into modules. And then you can use those modules using "require" much like in node js (though it is slightly different)

Also there is lapis[1] and sailor[2] if you are looking for something more organized.

[1]https://github.com/leafo/lapis [2]https://github.com/Etiene/sailor

Thanks! and yes we could do with a better design. The challenge for us has been to find a good arrangement of all the text that we have (may be we should cut some of it out?). Landlord vision looks beautiful.

I feel that any one who is using nginx would benefit if he learnt a bit of openresty (http://openresty.org/)