This morning Simple sold for $117M to BBVA. It’s great news for the team and I think it’s going to be great news for retail banking. Simple has had an amazing amount of potential but also ran into all sorts of difficulties by being built on top of Bancorp, not owning their own rails, and starting at retail size. Simple never really got the infrastructure they needed for the product they really wanted to build because what they have is not a bank account as people understand it. BBVA will change that. We chatted with Shamir for awhile in Standard Treasury’s early days. Simple walked down the path of trying to get a bank charter but never followed through. It was partially timing — they were looking into buying or become a bank at the worst time possible — and partially because they did not build the company’s capitalization to allow them to go down this path. Also, looking at their history, it seems like they didn’t become a bank because along the way, every step, it appeared to be the wrong choice — why build infrastructure when there are seemingly off-the-shelf options? But when you look at the course of the [...]
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