I've been with Simple for about a year and a half, and slowly moved from my TD Bank account to using Simple exclusively for personal banking. They've blown me away with how a bank can operate if it just joins the 21st century. Everything from their UX to their customer service is outstanding.
Calling them on the phone reminds me of going in to my local bank when I lived in a small town in Iowa.
Then again, this is pretty much the way I felt when I joined Commerce Bank in 2002. They were leaps and bounds above any other bank in everything from their down-home attitude to their evening and weekend hours. Then they got acquired.
Things weren't too different with ING Direct. Joined up for their interest-bearing checking and used them as my savings account. Had wonderful experiences. Then they got acquired.
Tangential, but relevant, I got HostGator as my hosting provider many years ago—they were a little company in Texas with great service and great people. I'm leaving them this month. They got acquired, and everything changed.
I hope this goes well for Simple. I really do. But I'm preparing myself. I know the signs to watch out for. First they'll get an automated phone tree, and I'll have to tell the robot what I want. Then it will get just a little longer to wait for a person. A couple fees will show up, nothing much, just little stuff. Tiny, unobtrusive, totally defensible, annoying policies will start taking hold. And soon, it'll be just another online bank—albeit one with a very pretty iPhone app.
I hope that doesn't happen. But I'm bracing myself anyway.
I've had pretty much the exact same banking experience. Commerce Bank was incredible when it came to service, both in the branches and over the phone. The web site wasn't so great, but not specifically bad either compared to most others. TD Bank (which acquired Commerce) was just OK.
ING was absolutely remarkable. Less so after being acquired.
And Simple is by far the best banking experience I've had. The interface is so well done, the customer service has been phenomenal. I actually find myself on my banking tab nearly every day (happily), adjusting goals and making sure I'm on target.
I still use mint to manage all my accounts and consistently wish the interface was even half as good as Simple's. Mint is another example that stopped being incredible after being acquired - or at least stopped progressing in any useful manner.
Agreed on all fronts. Rooting for the Simple crew to keep their product rocking.
I also have to note that the Spanish banking system is among the worst, most troubled, in the world. Santander recently bought Soverign bank (US regional bank) and it makes me wonder whether they are trying to address solvency from bad loans with fresh deposits however they can acquire them.
makes me nervous to think about having any serious amount of funds with a spanish bank.
Simple's support is definitely outstanding. I get little notes like "Fixed it! By the way, it's not my business but I like that you hyphenated your name when you got married." that really reinforce that there are actual humans being allowed to solve problems, not fill out a script.
I think acquirers are aware of notions like yours (I used to work for one of the acquirers you mentioned). These companies will eventually start to take great care to preserve the brand and product of the acquired company.
My experience with one of the banks you mentioned has not changed since it's been acquired.
First: $117M? That seems like an astonishingly low amount of money.
Second: The service you get from simple really is that good, probably better than what most people would expect. The app is amazing, their website is amazing, their customer support is amazing.
It feels like a bank from the 21st century, not from the stone age.
This acquisition actually makes me really sad. Simple is awesome, and I really hope that it doesn't get screwed up by this.
> $117M? That seems like an astonishingly low amount of money.
That seems like a lot of money for a mobile banking app. They didn't actually hold deposits themselves or make loans, the activities that are worth money in banking. They were sort of a VPS for banks--a "bank" sitting on top of real banks that made some painful things easier. Hard to profit that way though.
You hit the nail on the head. They're viewed (and valued) as an app on top of a bank. Without holding and investing deposits, they don't get the other financial benefits. Perhaps their end user data could be worth something, though.
The onboarding process on the other hand is opaque and nigh-useless. I got shot down for an account with these guys due to a .23 (that is not a typo.. twenty-three cents) report on chexsystems from five years ago.
Every bank I've had the ability to talk to an actual person was able to see that this is clearly absurd, I am not a serial check bouncer/overdrafter/etc and to get my account going. Simple..notsomuch. I'd love to use them if they'd let me.
I had issues with the signup process as well, but I will say that a lot of those come from using Bankcorp as their backer. They are, ultimately, the ones that accept or deny you, and I don't know how much information Simple has when it comes to those decisions.
They raised $15M+, which pegs their valuation somewhere in the 50-100M (as a guess). So $117M means that the founders get rich and most of the investor money gets returned at a 1-3X multiple. Not shabby for 4 years of effort, but not what most investors are looking for.
For a counterpoint: I find their overall product pretty obvious and underwhelming. I mean, no joint accounts? Taking days to connect an external account?
The savings goals are certainly nice, but I can get that with most other banks (just don't have the online management component), otherwise they don't offer a whole lot beyond "pretty".
I put a lot more weight into the convenience of drive-through cash deposits a couple blocks from my house. Or spending an hour at the branch and walking out with a loan. Or a rewards card that applies 5X points to my mortgage for purchases I was going to make anyways.
I wouldn't say I'm a "fan" of Wells Fargo. Or that they're particularly "amazing" for any of this. And their iOS app kinda sucks to be honest. Functional but meh.
That said, they set a minimum expectation for their offering that Simple doesn't meet and no amount of pretty Apps or direct-to-live-human (I mean how often do I call my bank? I couple times a year?) service is going to make up for.
The biggest one for me though is Joint Accounts. I mean seriously. It's weird to me as a married guy that my wife and I should maintain multiple separate bank accounts. That alone makes the offering fairly useless for me. If I were single and didn't have a mortgage, I could see how I might have different priorities.
The only reason I'm still a member at this point is that closing an account, needing to hook up a new external account (we changed primary banks during my membership at Simple so the external account I opened with is no longer the one I need to transfer funds back to for closing) is cumbersome.
If you check the press release, Simple is still considered a separate business entity and the Simple CEO is retaining his position. Apparently nothing will change.
It's one thing to remain a separate entity, but anyone who's ever worked for a company that's been acquired can tell you that's not the end of the story.
Profitability targets get set. Quarterly pressures are exerted. The parent company doesn't tell them how to do their job, but they set goals. Goals that may or may not fit with the way they do business, and may be more focused on short-term profits than long-term health.
Most acquisitions start out with promises like "we don't want to change anything," and remaining a separate business entity is a much easier way to integrate than jumping in with both feet from day one. But that's not usually the way things play out after a few years.
A source close to Simple tells The Verge that the company, which had raised $15.3 million, had been shopping itself around in search of a buyer since business wasn't progressing as quickly as it hoped. "They had kind of run out of steam," said the source...
Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure isn't really that innovative. The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology. Unfortunately, the investment required is higher than VCs seem willing to risk.
> Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure...
This was what turned me off. I signed up for an invite right after they announced the service (something like 2-3 years ago at this point, when they were still BankSimple). But they took sooooo long to launch and in the meantime I became disenchanted with corporate banking. With Simple, the money still ends up in corrupt financial institutions and that's something I can't morally justify (I realize I am probably still doing business with corporate banks, but why do more than necessary?).
I now use a local credit union and I get far, far better service than I ever did with BoA. The credit union has a branch 3 blocks from my apartment, across the street from where I work, and on campus at school. Plus they have ATMs in many of the local businesses I visit. Simple just can't compete with that, so for me, it's all upside.
Yes, I was in early too. I never committed money to them because they just kept missing features that I needed. Like transferring money to another bank. Or transferring money to another bank to an account that isn't mine. Or a savings account (or the much ballyhoo'd but never launched automagic movement of spare money into a savings account to get the interest working for you).
It ended up that customer service ended up being pushed as the differentiator (the interface I can get with Mint), but I've had great customer service experiences with both Ally and Charles Schwab. And I get all those previous features I wanted, plus things like ATM refunds. So Simple ended up being a feature-bare product in comparison.
I think their customer growth tailing off was a direct correlation to their feature launch velocity tailing off, and I attribute that to the legal stuff around banking being really hard, rather than any slacking on their part. Hopefully the purchase will allow them to leverage more existing agreements to get more features up and running.
Simple was/is a dressed up version of a prepaid debit card with a good mobile app and a good web ux. Typically prepaid cards net $1-$4 per active user per month depending on the level of fees. An active user is someone that has loaded cash onto the card. So if Simple had 100,000 customer which could translate into 100,000 loaded cards, its gross revenues would be between $100K-$500k per month (1.2-6m per year). My guess is the 100K number is simply customers that ever signed up for it and that their active accounts (loaded cards is much much lower). Kudos to the Simple board, investor and team - selling at that sort of price is unbelievable. I would happily work with any investor who could help me get that sort of valuation for my companies.
I use simple as my main bank account, and I'd say it is pretty innovative - essentially because usability is a feature and simple has by far the best usability of any bank.
What lets them down is the overall power of their offering and the rate at which they have been developing it. If the banking backend was the constraint, maybe this will help them to accelerate.
Yes on the slow development rate. I pretty much signed on to their mailing list as soon as they announced themselves. After hearing nothing for over a year I gave up and switched from bricks and mortar to ING (now Capital 360) which solved most of my issues, so my motivation to go through the bank changing hassle is now really small. I think it took something like 3 years to actually get the "you can now use us" email.
> The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology.
It's likely nearly impossible to build a bank from scratch because of regulatory hurdles. That's why Simple had to team up with a partner bank instead of going it 100% alone. I remember reading a blog post from Simple about it, it seemed they had no choice to partner with an existing bank (if I find the post I'll share it). The banking system is broken on purpose. This is why banks operate like it's the stone age and get away with awful service and fees - there's little chance of nimbler competitors coming along and eating their lunch.
Another piece of the puzzle is that a single new bank isn't going to have it a whole lot better when it comes to interbank stuff (probably they have it worse, having to build useful relationships).
I'm pretty sure the more awesome VCs, like hn-user pmarca at a16z, would have no problem writing checks for $100mm+ to fund a team to fix banking. The other day they were actually bemoaning the lack of people trying to do so.
I always wondered how Simple would acquire non early-adoptor customers. It seems with BBVA there is a natural channel to international markets and millenials.
But they don't have joint accounts, so my wife and I would have to go through a lot of trouble to use their service. It's interesting to say that they are not able to expand as fast as they wanted when they are missing this HUGE feature. Not having this feature has kept me from using their service ever since I received a very early beta invite.
Simple just recently added free instant transfers between Simple accounts. Not as convenient as a joint account, but that's good enough for my wife and I to make the move to Simple.
Does your wife have her own income? My wife is currently a student and I would have to manually transfer money to her account quite often because there would be no other deposits into her account. Can you auto draft between accounts?
I'm a Simple customer, and I'm getting married in March. The lack of joint accounts has been a concern for me for the past few months. I was really hoping they'd announce something soon about their plans on that regard.
But with this news that they're being acquired, I now have even less hope than before. I love Simple, but I'm now wondering if I'm going to have to find a different company to give my business.
Same here; we use it for our separate accounts, but the primary joint account has to remain at a more traditional credit union. They even sent out a notice to all customers regarding tax returns – the IRS requires joint returns to be issued to a bank account listing both names.
> If I am filing a joint return with my spouse, must our refund be deposited to a jointly-held account?
> You can ask IRS to direct deposit a refund on a joint return into your account, your spouse’s account, or a joint account. However, state and financial institution rules can vary and you should first verify your financial institution will accept a joint refund into an individual account.
Not sure if it's a state, Simple, or Bancorp policy, but it's not an IRS one.
Many couples would find it just as annoying as having separate refrigerators and simply transferring food between the two before withdrawing and eating it.
Account-to-account internal transfers is relatively new and they did not have that feature when I was approved from the beta.
But, account to account transfers does not solve the problem at all. I don't want to have to transfer money from my account to my wife's account manually. It's so much easier when she can just access a shared account and move money as needed.
When I moved to my current job a year ago, I shut down my business and closed a checking, savings, business checking, and credit card account with Bank of America. I had a Simple invite sitting around, and thought it made sense to consolidate and...Simplify, making my single Simple account my sole bank.
I couldn't be happier with that decision, and believe that I have been saving money (in both fees and in general) because of Simple's interface.
So with this news, I feel excited for their team, but still very nervous. I joined Simple precisely because I was tired of dealing with a megabank (like many folks here), so if Simple can continue to buck the trend and stay customer-focused and agile, then I'll continue to be all-in.
When I was a kid without a bank account, a 401K or other investments to worry about, I used to put my money in envelopes: one for a new bike; one for a video game, etc. I could glance at my cash and know exactly what was safe to spend without performing mental math.
Simple's Safe to Spend feature is the digital equivalent. I can aside money for rent and emergencies in digital envelopes. I never thought personal finance was fun and easy until I began using Simple. It changed the way I think about money.
The problem is I use credit cards for reward points and I only pay them off once a month. It sounds like you can only get budget reports for money you've spent on your Simple card. Correct me if I'm wrong. This wouldn't be too helpful to me. The budget tool would be awesome if it encompassed all my cards.
I really want a nice envelope budgeting debit card, but for my purposes Simple wasn't it. Most notably, if you mark a transaction as coming from a specific goal, and the amount of the transaction is more than the goal, the goal gets set at $0, and there's no way to determine what the balance was before you marked the transaction. You can unmark the transaction, but at that point you'll actually have more in your goal than you did previously.
Basically I want Simple but with a richer transaction history. It doesn't have to be as cumbersome as a full double-entry account system, but it needs to have roughly a similar level of account history.
I'm not a Simple customer but the way I do this at my fuddy-duddy bank is having a separate "spending" account and a "bills" account (two checking accounts). Every week I "pay" myself into the spending account from the bills account (spending is basically food + gas + shopping). Paycheck goes into the bills account which at the start of the month has enough to cover all expected bills for the remainder of that month.
I've been using Simple for well over a year now can say that the software and website are absolutely amazing at monitoring and tracking your money. It has its flaws though: transferring is pretty much limited to automated mailed checks and accounts you own (they recently added simple to simple instant transfers), and no B&M banks to get things like large cash withdrawals (I do fee-less cash advances at another bank when I need money) or cash deposits.
With that said, I'd actually prefer a quicker integration with BBVA with hopes that their backend banking infrastructure would improve, but I wish they had done it with a more prominent US bank with more branches (BBVA has very few).
I'm a Simple user and occasionally the lack of checks has been a problem.
One specific incident that I had was that I needed a cashier's check to close on my house, but I didn't know the exactly amount until a few days before closing. I paid $50 to have them overnight the check. The check didn't not arrive overnight and I ended up having to chase it down at a FedEx hub so I could have the check at closing.
During this whole time, I had a chat with the SAME rep. I had a whole long conversation that lasted over two weeks regarding how to get the check, asking for the check, talking about problems with the shipping, and even getting a refund for the overnight shipping.
This is what was amazing to me. The same rep was tied to my conversation. When I had problems with Comcast, every time I called I talked to a completely different person and I had to explain my issue over and over again (even worse I often got dropped during a transfer and had to call back and do it all over again).
It's a problem with online only banks also. I was in a similar situation with a closing, needing a cashiers check from usaa. I had to wire the money instead. Does simple allow for wire transfers?
Readit News
Then again, this is pretty much the way I felt when I joined Commerce Bank in 2002. They were leaps and bounds above any other bank in everything from their down-home attitude to their evening and weekend hours. Then they got acquired.
Things weren't too different with ING Direct. Joined up for their interest-bearing checking and used them as my savings account. Had wonderful experiences. Then they got acquired.
Tangential, but relevant, I got HostGator as my hosting provider many years ago—they were a little company in Texas with great service and great people. I'm leaving them this month. They got acquired, and everything changed.
I hope this goes well for Simple. I really do. But I'm preparing myself. I know the signs to watch out for. First they'll get an automated phone tree, and I'll have to tell the robot what I want. Then it will get just a little longer to wait for a person. A couple fees will show up, nothing much, just little stuff. Tiny, unobtrusive, totally defensible, annoying policies will start taking hold. And soon, it'll be just another online bank—albeit one with a very pretty iPhone app.
I hope that doesn't happen. But I'm bracing myself anyway.
ING was absolutely remarkable. Less so after being acquired.
And Simple is by far the best banking experience I've had. The interface is so well done, the customer service has been phenomenal. I actually find myself on my banking tab nearly every day (happily), adjusting goals and making sure I'm on target.
I still use mint to manage all my accounts and consistently wish the interface was even half as good as Simple's. Mint is another example that stopped being incredible after being acquired - or at least stopped progressing in any useful manner.
I also have to note that the Spanish banking system is among the worst, most troubled, in the world. Santander recently bought Soverign bank (US regional bank) and it makes me wonder whether they are trying to address solvency from bad loans with fresh deposits however they can acquire them.
makes me nervous to think about having any serious amount of funds with a spanish bank.
I just wish they offered Two-Factor authentication for "360" accounts.
Relevant link: https://www.facebook.com/CapitalOne360/posts/101515573342295...
My experience with one of the banks you mentioned has not changed since it's been acquired.
Deleted Comment
First: $117M? That seems like an astonishingly low amount of money.
Second: The service you get from simple really is that good, probably better than what most people would expect. The app is amazing, their website is amazing, their customer support is amazing.
It feels like a bank from the 21st century, not from the stone age.
This acquisition actually makes me really sad. Simple is awesome, and I really hope that it doesn't get screwed up by this.
That seems like a lot of money for a mobile banking app. They didn't actually hold deposits themselves or make loans, the activities that are worth money in banking. They were sort of a VPS for banks--a "bank" sitting on top of real banks that made some painful things easier. Hard to profit that way though.
Every bank I've had the ability to talk to an actual person was able to see that this is clearly absurd, I am not a serial check bouncer/overdrafter/etc and to get my account going. Simple..notsomuch. I'd love to use them if they'd let me.
I'd wager that the founders wanted their FU-money to eventually pursue something new.
The savings goals are certainly nice, but I can get that with most other banks (just don't have the online management component), otherwise they don't offer a whole lot beyond "pretty".
I put a lot more weight into the convenience of drive-through cash deposits a couple blocks from my house. Or spending an hour at the branch and walking out with a loan. Or a rewards card that applies 5X points to my mortgage for purchases I was going to make anyways.
I wouldn't say I'm a "fan" of Wells Fargo. Or that they're particularly "amazing" for any of this. And their iOS app kinda sucks to be honest. Functional but meh.
That said, they set a minimum expectation for their offering that Simple doesn't meet and no amount of pretty Apps or direct-to-live-human (I mean how often do I call my bank? I couple times a year?) service is going to make up for.
The biggest one for me though is Joint Accounts. I mean seriously. It's weird to me as a married guy that my wife and I should maintain multiple separate bank accounts. That alone makes the offering fairly useless for me. If I were single and didn't have a mortgage, I could see how I might have different priorities.
The only reason I'm still a member at this point is that closing an account, needing to hook up a new external account (we changed primary banks during my membership at Simple so the external account I opened with is no longer the one I need to transfer funds back to for closing) is cumbersome.
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/20/5429916/bbva-acquires-simp...
Simply (no pun intended) building a layer on top of the existing banking infrastructure isn't really that innovative. The big potential in this space is building a new banking platform from scratch, instead of relying on existing/legacy technology. Unfortunately, the investment required is higher than VCs seem willing to risk.
I now use a local credit union and I get far, far better service than I ever did with BoA. The credit union has a branch 3 blocks from my apartment, across the street from where I work, and on campus at school. Plus they have ATMs in many of the local businesses I visit. Simple just can't compete with that, so for me, it's all upside.
It ended up that customer service ended up being pushed as the differentiator (the interface I can get with Mint), but I've had great customer service experiences with both Ally and Charles Schwab. And I get all those previous features I wanted, plus things like ATM refunds. So Simple ended up being a feature-bare product in comparison.
I think their customer growth tailing off was a direct correlation to their feature launch velocity tailing off, and I attribute that to the legal stuff around banking being really hard, rather than any slacking on their part. Hopefully the purchase will allow them to leverage more existing agreements to get more features up and running.
What lets them down is the overall power of their offering and the rate at which they have been developing it. If the banking backend was the constraint, maybe this will help them to accelerate.
Banks have survived hundreds of years, through hardships like depression and war, long after their founders were all gone.
Now the business model is "shop around for a buyer if your growth isn't high enough in the first five years."
Kind of sad.
It's likely nearly impossible to build a bank from scratch because of regulatory hurdles. That's why Simple had to team up with a partner bank instead of going it 100% alone. I remember reading a blog post from Simple about it, it seemed they had no choice to partner with an existing bank (if I find the post I'll share it). The banking system is broken on purpose. This is why banks operate like it's the stone age and get away with awful service and fees - there's little chance of nimbler competitors coming along and eating their lunch.
Sure, it would be awesome to rebuild a bank from scratch, but that doesn't mean there wasn't innovation here.
What is a bit sadder is that they weren't able to stick it out until they started building their own platform.
But they don't have joint accounts, so my wife and I would have to go through a lot of trouble to use their service. It's interesting to say that they are not able to expand as fast as they wanted when they are missing this HUGE feature. Not having this feature has kept me from using their service ever since I received a very early beta invite.
I transferred a few hundred bucks to Simple when I signed up and finally moved that money back out just last week. I'm done waiting. :(
But with this news that they're being acquired, I now have even less hope than before. I love Simple, but I'm now wondering if I'm going to have to find a different company to give my business.
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Frequently-Asked-Questions-ab...
> If I am filing a joint return with my spouse, must our refund be deposited to a jointly-held account?
> You can ask IRS to direct deposit a refund on a joint return into your account, your spouse’s account, or a joint account. However, state and financial institution rules can vary and you should first verify your financial institution will accept a joint refund into an individual account.
Not sure if it's a state, Simple, or Bancorp policy, but it's not an IRS one.
Why not have one account for each of you? Simple has instant account-to-account internal transfers.
But, account to account transfers does not solve the problem at all. I don't want to have to transfer money from my account to my wife's account manually. It's so much easier when she can just access a shared account and move money as needed.
I couldn't be happier with that decision, and believe that I have been saving money (in both fees and in general) because of Simple's interface.
So with this news, I feel excited for their team, but still very nervous. I joined Simple precisely because I was tired of dealing with a megabank (like many folks here), so if Simple can continue to buck the trend and stay customer-focused and agile, then I'll continue to be all-in.
Simple's Safe to Spend feature is the digital equivalent. I can aside money for rent and emergencies in digital envelopes. I never thought personal finance was fun and easy until I began using Simple. It changed the way I think about money.
Basically I want Simple but with a richer transaction history. It doesn't have to be as cumbersome as a full double-entry account system, but it needs to have roughly a similar level of account history.
With that said, I'd actually prefer a quicker integration with BBVA with hopes that their backend banking infrastructure would improve, but I wish they had done it with a more prominent US bank with more branches (BBVA has very few).
Edit: want an invite? Email in profile.
One specific incident that I had was that I needed a cashier's check to close on my house, but I didn't know the exactly amount until a few days before closing. I paid $50 to have them overnight the check. The check didn't not arrive overnight and I ended up having to chase it down at a FedEx hub so I could have the check at closing.
During this whole time, I had a chat with the SAME rep. I had a whole long conversation that lasted over two weeks regarding how to get the check, asking for the check, talking about problems with the shipping, and even getting a refund for the overnight shipping.
This is what was amazing to me. The same rep was tied to my conversation. When I had problems with Comcast, every time I called I talked to a completely different person and I had to explain my issue over and over again (even worse I often got dropped during a transfer and had to call back and do it all over again).