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:-
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.
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?
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
The credit card model is a major departure from classical banking, so I wouldn't consider it a valid counter argument here. And besides, credit cards aren't about maximizing eyeballs, they are about maximizing fees and revenue. And I wasn't suggesting you were advocating lawlessness, I was suggesting you were comparing apples to oranges. Facebook and banking are based on totally different business models.
Banking, proper, retail custmers, includes merchant banks, investment banks, money markets, M&A, public markets debt and equity, and such. The piece seemed to boil it down to retail banking.
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 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!
What you´re describing isn´t a bank. It´s an international payment facilitator. There´s more competition in that space than you realise. If you want to be a bank, you´ll need to solve lending, and you should also investigate nostro/vostro accounts.
Yes, Virgin Money does a range of retail financial products. Their residential and buy to let mortgage offerings are based on their 2012 purchase of Northern Rock from the British Gov't. Northern Rock collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis due to the poor quality of its loan book and loss of access to wholesale money markets. Borrow short and lend long to sub prime borrowers turned out to be a bad strategy! I've just come off a year long contract working on the mortgage origination software Virgin Money inherited from Northern Rock. If I learned one thing it's this: the UK mortgage industry is technologically stone age!
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).
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.
The idea of using Barclays, or any 3rd party bank, is just to get enough traction so they have their own participation method later. Also it doesn't show Barclays on the statement from my usage - it shows the end merchants details. I didn't really know it was Barclays till now.
Barclays has been known to help startups by lending them their (global) infrastructure in the UK. Another Example is Dopay where Egyptian Barclays ATMs have been lent out.
The Bank of England is moving towards allowing non banks to participate in the payments system by 2020, its supposedly blockchain secured so it goes a notch above what a sole bank/firm could do. Revolut could theoretically switch from Barclays then.
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, but why? Barclays profits with every customer that revolut brings/ will bring. Other banks would want to profit in a similar way.
Actually they hope the startup does well so they can buy them later. Revolut's cost of acquiring a user is far less than Barclays (<£10 vs £300+).
Barclay's deal isn't free, they take equity in exchange for letting startups using their infrastructure, it's not that expensive considering what they give though.
I think I know what you're getting at, at replacing the Correspondent bank system. There's another one, Transferwise, that seems to be getting transaction where Banks in other countries use it internally to avoid correspondent banks (transferwise often matches transfers to avoid transfers).
The BoE's 2020 system isn't for an ordinary firm to replace a banking partner. It's to join the payment network and have an account backed by the BoE/blockchain without it being at a designated high street bank. It wont be easy to use I guess, but it would be compelling enough for a Fintech company to use it.
I can see alot of value with the service you're describing, I don't think the level of value would be high out of countries which have high legislative requirements/forex controls. I had a similar idea a few years ago and my base assumptions were incorrect regarding people's needs for my service.
Skeleton isn't a framework. It was a set of opinionated CSS styles and a basic grid built by one guy. It's been unmaintained for years but it still works fine. This is my favorite fork of it- https://github.com/whatsnewsaes/Skeleton-Sass
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.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cu7vl4GiQHg8Tqqt_nGj7JOT...