So what led to the launch of Simple, the banking startup that was acquired today for a reported $117 million by Spanish bank BBVA? Simple, just four years old and has 100,000 customers — and its debit cards have only been in customers’ hands for the last 18 months — was born out of a desire to fully revolutionize banking. To fully appreciate where Simple comes from, what follows is the email that launched Simple: From: Joshua Reich <josh@i2pi.com> Date: Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:43 AM Subject: lets start a retail bank To: Shamir Karkal <shamir_k@yahoo.com>, Jerry Neumann <ganeumann@gmail.com> What would it take to start a really boring, simple bank? As I see it, a bank provides basic functionality: 1. A place to hold my money so I don’t need an oversized wallet or mattress 2. Electronic payment & transfer interfaces 3. Ability to lend my cash to others in exchange for a risk adjusted return 4. The opposite of 3 = borrowing. Atop of this banks go to great lengths to optimize revenue. They invent products with fictitious boundaries so that they may extract the maximum revenue from each consumer. And to do so they make it very difficult for [...]
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