Square Banking

It&#x27;s amazing to me how much of a better product can be created when everything is in one place.<p>It&#x27;s obvious that when you&#x27;re charging customers and paying invoices through the same interface, that you&#x27;ll have more visibility on your cash flow and it&#x27;ll generally be easier to use, but this goes so much further.<p>The reason those loans are easy is because Square know your history of charging customers. The reason they can pay &quot;instantly&quot; into your account is because they don&#x27;t have to actually move any money until you pay out of your account, the reason they can charge no account fees is because they&#x27;re charging at the point of taking payments from customers.<p>The economics of the whole offering are far different to what the regular combo of payment service provider + bank + loan company can provide.<p>Great move. Square has always been the sort of product that makes me wish I was in a business where I could use it.

0 overdraft fees. Yay. More like it. It will force major banks to rethink their overdraft fees as a revenue center. As someone who was not so well financially just a decade ago, overdraft fees seemed like penalty for being poor. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, you never know when your account will get overdrawn. And most evil thing was - bank will deny the charge because you didn’t have enough funds but will still charge you for $34 fee.<p>Some banks offer overdraft protection but it’s not obvious in lot of banking websites&#x2F;apps in my experience and has been recent development. Plus - lot of people don’t understand the concept of overdrafts. They assume bank will deny if your account doesn’t have enough funds.<p>I’m surprised congress didn’t take action on overdraft fees as it mostly affects middle class and poor people.

I think we really have to take a step back away from this annoying scrolling &#x2F; auto-moving element behavior for product info pages. I had a moment where my mouse was chasing a moving &#x27;Loans&#x27; tile.

This was the &quot;Aha!&quot; part for me:<p>&gt; Get a customized offer based on your card sales through Square, and then choose your loan size.<p>and then a bit further down:<p>&gt; Repay it automatically with a percentage of your daily card sales through Square.<p>Such an incredibly obvious idea in hindsight. While I can see why putting all your eggs in one basket like this can pose something of a problem, there&#x27;s no denying this level of integration is amazing for a small business.

2021 is a great time to own a small regional &#x2F; community bank. All the mature FinTech companies are trying to buy a bank to expedite the cumbersome bank chartering process (+ mortgage origination and servicing companies are too)

&gt;Square Banking<p>&gt;Square, Inc. is a financial services company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Square’s banking affiliate, Square Financial Services, Inc. or Sutton Bank; Members FDIC.<p>Um so they are insured by the FDIC?<p>Am I doing business with Square, Square Financial Services, Inc., or Sutton Bank?<p>Do I have any recurse when it comes to typical banking expectations &#x2F; rules here when it comes to either of the three companies I may or may not be using?

While Square makes (more) sense to get into the banking game, I&#x27;ve noticed a lot of companies only tangentially related to finance doing similar things, and I wonder what it&#x27;s indicative of:<p>- T-Mobile offers an exclusive checking account for their customers<p>- Credit Karma promoting their own debit card<p>- Robin hood doing &quot;Cash Management&quot;<p>- Coinbase offering a debit card with crypto rewards<p>Has something changed with the ecosystem in the past 5 years? I&#x27;m half expecting NYTimes to release a banking&#x2F;checking account these days where you get rewarded with newspapers.

I guess at some point, starting a business will be equivalent to downloading the square business app.

Square has confirmed they are having issues: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.issquareup.com&#x2F;incidents&#x2F;9hzcgjpvj9dv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.issquareup.com&#x2F;incidents&#x2F;9hzcgjpvj9dv</a>

This seems like a promising alternative to Simple, which shut down a few months ago

I&#x27;m curious about the small business loans. I&#x27;m from Europe and the animations suggests for a $9000 loan a total repayment of $10305. Let&#x27;s assume you make $5000 in revenue per month and they use 10% as a repayment cut per transaction. That would yield a 20 month long repayment schedule. The &quot;interest&quot; would be roughly 7% annually. In today&#x27;s world, isn&#x27;t that greedy? In today&#x27;s world, Warren Buffet can issue a 0% coupon bond[1]. I&#x27;m just perplexed. Especially since it&#x27;s Square and not Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan.<p>According to the St Louis Fed, the average interest rate for Small Businesses was about 3.5 - 5% [2]. For me this sounds like an incredibly bad deal.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cbonds.com&#x2F;bonds&#x2F;698053&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cbonds.com&#x2F;bonds&#x2F;698053&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;EEBXSSNQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;EEBXSSNQ</a>

&gt; 0.5% APY on savings accounts<p>How insulting, and yet still better than the competition

Did Square get a bank license or is an existing bank being used behind the scene?<p>If Square did get a bank license - this would be interesting since now they have all kinds of regulatory requirements to meet.

Nope. I&#x27;m keeping Schwab for my banking needs. The last thing I need is a &quot;bank&quot; with more data about me than they really need and a lack of impeccable phone support.<p>Unfortunately, it&#x27;s probably going to take some time for people to realize the benefits of a &quot;slow and inefficient&quot; means of banking with lots of people in between. It sucks sometimes, but boy am I okay with it when they spot fraud or it takes someone days to empty my bank accounts instead of minutes.

These app-only banks seem to prey on the Robinhood customer set: users who respond positively to a nice UI and are willing to pay for it through friction, feature restriction and non-existent customer service.<p>Retail finance&#x27;s CLI to the saccharine of these apps is Fidelity. Free CMA with no ATM fees (third-party ATM fees reimbursed), no minimums, free wires in and out, securities able to be held in the account and good customer service on the phone and via chat.

In case anyone was thinking this .5% APY savings account would be great for their company, this launch is just for sole proprietors.<p>&gt; <i>Your business entity type is a sole proprietorship, meaning you pay taxes for your business as an individual as opposed to another entity type (often the case for self-employed individuals or independent contractors)</i><p>They are apparently looking to add other entity types in the future.

Given the issues that Chime customers have had[1], and the fact that this seems to be organized in roughly the same way (actual banking services are provided by a contracted bank at a distance), I&#x27;d be a little skeptical.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;chime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;chime</a>

The biggest question I would have is: How good the customer support is?<p>I have the worst luck, and all my new age accounts like Robinhood and Coinbase have little to no customer support compared to the incumbents.<p>I got lucky and the Robinhood situation resolved itself but I&#x27;ve been trying for over a year to contact Coinbase and circle the drain. Hopefully Square has better support.

Warning: The site has some funky scrolling, but if you keep going there is more information that eventually shows up.<p>$scrolljackingRant

Downside to anything associated with @jack is that every tweet is flooded with spammy and low-grade crypto comments. (was checking to see if there was info re the 500 errors)

Looking for a new business bank for the small reselling business I run with my wife, so I thought I&#x27;d sign up.<p>All attempts are erroring out; signup endpoint is returning a 500.

Site looks very nice but is somewhat unpleasant to use on desktop. Would have preferred a more basic experience.

Does it allow business sign up? Like for accounting and limited liability?

Jeez this was hard to read with the annoying scrolling

Just like a bank, without the security. Have a look like modern banks are done say in the UK - Monzo etc.

just try getting customer service from cashapp...near impossible.

&quot;Square, Inc. is a financial services company, not a bank. &quot;

PayPal

RIP Chime.

The brutalist website design for this new product is suffocating. Tried it on many browser widths on my desktop.

Yeah, another app-only bank. Or at least that what it seems. The desktop site in unreadable. Giant fonts.<p>So I&#x27;ll assume they&#x27;re like the rest - shitty &#x2F; no customer support outsourced to god who knows, and they&#x27;ll change &quot;shifts&quot; every 10 minutes.<p>No thank you, I&#x27;ll stay with the good old, dinosaur banks.