
The Big Banks - joeyespo
https://www.simple.com/blog/Banking/the-big-banks/
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kruhft
I like how I got to the site, get a 1/2 second flash of the article which is
then covered up by a full screen popup telling me to enable javascript (I use
noscript). I just wanted to read the goddamn article!

~~~
Iaks
I came to the comments just to bemoan this as well.

I see this pretty often and I have a tip for developers who really want to
insist on JS without infuriating their visitors: Don't let me see the site
work before intentionally breaking it to try and force me to be tracked by
your marketing code.

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jason_slack
Is anyone sort of thinking that Bank Simple is sort of like Diaspora in some
essence? They certainly have a presence and are vocal about their plans, but
seeing any actual product from them seems to get pushed out further and
further?

I was one of the first to request an invite. I needed/wanted to switch banks.
It has been a really long time and nothing with Bank Simple saying "coming
soon".

I think these delays are narrowing their potential customer base. People dont
wait forever to switch banks because one bank is saying they will be better.
They switch immediately because usually it is urgent, feed up, etc. They dont
tend to switch on a whim, IMO. They decide that their bank is good enough and
avoid the headache of switching institutions, changing direct deposit, auto
payments, etc.

Reading these periodic blog posts seems a way to keep up hype in the absence
of really letting people see the product and be eager to switch.

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jrockway
_failures of large banks can be most devastating in small communities where
all other banks have been subsumed_

Citation needed. Isn't the FDIC's insurance enough to cover most of these
people? The risk is not in the bank failing; it's in the bank succeeding. If a
bank is the only bank in the market, customers have no recourse when the bank
lowers their interest rates on savings accounts or adds random $5 debit card
use fees. That's the risk in one bank becoming too big.

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richardburton
_Between 1980-1998, almost 8,000 small banks were acquired by larger
institutions in the US._

Incredible.

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BillSaysThis
How is ~420 acquisitions a year in a large industry amazing? Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, Amazon and Cisco probably average over 100 a year between them and
they are unlikely to be 25% of the tech industry total. Simple's blog post, at
least, doesn't say how many small banks existed in 1980 or 1998 so we have no
idea how this changed the small bank landscape. Oddly it does say that the
number of large banks declined by 50% but I bet a lot of that was taking over
failing banks.

