Israel's first new bank since 1978

I know someone who was seriously trying to start a bank. After all his research he concluded that starting a bank from scratch was cost prohibitive. However buying an existing bank was way easier.<p>For the US the amount of regulation that banks have to comply with is enormous. I&#x27;m not entirely sure all of it is value add. In contrast bitcoin has almost no regulations or controls around it. Is there not anything in between?

This article doesn&#x27;t tell me what I really want to know, which is <i>why</i> a country with enormous FDI and GDP like Israel has gone almost 5 decades with no new banks. Is there a regulatory hurdle? Cultural taboos?

“ Shashua said the bank will use artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies to meet customer needs.”<p>AI for banking? Something like ‘our ML system said you don’t qualify for a loan’? Sounds so futuristic!

I was a customer of Simple&#x27;s for several years and while it didn&#x27;t pan out and they weren&#x27;t really a &quot;bank&quot; but lipstick over one, I LOVED the modern touch on what is normally a cumbersome and painful experience.<p>Kudos to any company that is trying to update the banking system. It could really use it.

I’m not sure it will last, Israel has an extremely tightly regulated banking sector, and major banks already offer a competitive digital platform.<p>Unlike the EU where digital banks can start in a small market and then expand by using their passporting rights a bank in Israel is constrained to a rather small market.

I’ve got a true admiration for this mobile eye cto, after seing a presentation he gave 4 years ago (can be found online), where he explained the current theoretical limitation of ML for autonomous driving, at the time where tesla was saying it was just around the corner.<p>It takes some guts to publicly state « we have no clue how to do that thing our ex-customer now competitor claims is able to do , and we think nobody knows how to do it safely, and here’s why ».<p>It’s even more exceptional when you compare it to the gigantic amount of crap that many israelis startup advertize , surfing on the reputation of the country for being a startup nation (i can’t count the number of cancer cure that i’ve seen israelis biotech companies claim)

Direct link (In Hebrew, English coming soon, Google Translate broken):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digibank.co.il&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digibank.co.il&#x2F;</a>

It uses artificial intelligence, because real intelligence is not an option.