Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683715

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- 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...)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12604343

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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 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.

Out of curiosity by just do you mean today?

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524217

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12474470

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12449641

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