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Ok I thought you were talking about a physical card that you could swipe in meat space. Narrowing scope to the internet makes your bank idea easier though it wo

Ok I thought you were talking about a physical card that you could swipe in meat space. Narrowing scope to the internet makes your bank idea easier though it would still take a ton of work. How familiar are you with the regulations guarding the banking industry? How do you plan to solve the chicken-egg adoption problem? Most vendors offer 3 to 5 credit card brands, and they won't want to adulterate their payment forms with strange unproven options. I wonder if collaborating with companies that build shopping cart plugins is the way to go or if you would have to fly solo for awhile before the established shopping cart players would take you seriously. How many people are clamoring for such a financial account? If my credit card account gets comprised, the most I'm liable for is $50 or something like that. I check my transaction log for unusual activity, which I do with any financial account. Even companies that have purchasing cards reconcile the transactions. Apart from not having to pay $50 if my card ever gets compromised, what benefit would your bank serve to me?

ChuckMcM 15y ago
All fair points, lets see if I can address each of them: "How familiar are you with the regulations guarding the banking industry?" - out of date. Back when I was trying to get Sun into e-commerce (1995) was plugged in with Visa, First Data, SWIFT, these days not so much. At the time the regulations came in two forms, "Fair Credit" which is to say regulations regarding consumer relationships with the bank, and "Liability management" which was more interested in defining exactly when the liability for a transaction changed from one party to another. "How do you plan to solve the chicken-egg adoption problem?" - I suspect the best way would be to partner with a vendor whose brand is under served (Discover comes to mind) The alternative is a slog ala Paypal's early days and no, we don't have an Ebay to leverage. Apple perhaps, especially if it meant Apple got to collect some buying habits metrics, they also have a big iTunes installed base this could plug into. "How many people are clamoring for such a financial account? If my credit card account gets comprised, the most I'm liable for is $50 or something like that. I check my transaction log for unusual activity, which I do with any financial account. Even companies that have purchasing cards reconcile the transactions. Apart from not having to pay $50 if my card ever gets compromised, what benefit would your bank serve to me?" - One can never know for sure until you ship, but here are some bits of reasoning I've been using successfully: People are being trained to leave a credit card on file for on-going purchases. Started really with iTunes but now every game console has something like it, every e-reader has something like it. Some online merchants like Amazon and O'Reilly support it. Concommitant with that many monthly services have enabled an 'auto-pay' facility of one form or another, currently dominated by banks but we could build one that was bank independent with the right API. These changes are 'new' in that you haven't really had them on your credit card before, so the 'pain' comes when you have to unwind-rewind them. You go to buy something on Steam for example and it complains your card is invalid, and you go "oh yeah I had to cancel that card and they must have the old card." A lot of people who had Playstation network accounts got to experience this when that system got compromised. My claim is that the convienience of 'dynamic subscriptions' will get wider (there are AppStores everywhere now!) the early servers of these are CC companies and phone companies, both of whom have "issues" with customer satisfaction and flexibility. I also claim that the pain of 'losing' control of a card will get worse as you have more and more of these dynamic subscriptions linked to it. I expect the initial response will be multiple cards, but this adds its own issue if the statements are not closely monitored. So while I feel it acutely today (I wondered why I didn't get my FreeBSD CD release and found out that Walnut Creek had my old card) I expect the experience to expand across the population as the number of dynamic subscriptions increase, the number of 'resets' due to exposed cards increases, and the time wastage of re-doing everything creates a value proposition.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

All fair points, lets see if I can address each of them: "How familiar are you with the regulations guarding the banking industry?" - out of date. Back when I was trying to get Sun into e-commerce (1995) was plugged in with Visa, First Data, SWIFT, these days not so much. At the time the regulations came in two forms, "Fair Credit" which is to say regulations regarding consumer relationships with the bank, and "Liability management" which was more interested in defining exactly when the liability for a transaction changed from one party to another. "How do you plan to solve the chicken-egg adoption problem?" - I suspect the best way would be to partner with a vendor whose brand is under served (Discover comes to mind) The alternative is a slog ala Paypal's early days and no, we don't have an Ebay to leverage. Apple perhaps, especially if it meant Apple got to collect some buying habits metrics, they also have a big iTunes installed base this could plug into. "How many people are clamoring for such a financial account? If my credit card account gets comprised, the most I'm liable for is $50 or something like that. I check my transaction log for unusual activity, which I do with any financial account. Even companies that have purchasing cards reconcile the transactions. Apart from not having to pay $50 if my card ever gets compromised, what benefit would your bank serve to me?" - One can never know for sure until you ship, but here are some bits of reasoning I've been using successfully: People are being trained to leave a credit card on file for on-going purchases. Started really with iTunes but now every game console has something like it, every e-reader has something like it. Some online merchants like Amazon and O'Reilly support it. Concommitant with that many monthly services have enabled an 'auto-pay' facility of one form or another, currently dominated by banks but we could build one that was bank independent with the right API. These changes are 'new' in that you haven't really had them on your credit card before, so the 'pain' comes when you have to unwind-rewind them. You go to buy something on Steam for example and it complains your card is invalid, and you go "oh yeah I had to cancel that card and they must have the old card." A lot of people who had Playstation network accounts got to experience this when that system got compromised. My claim is that the convienience of 'dynamic subscriptions' will get wider (there are AppStores everywhere now!) the early servers of these are CC companies and phone companies, both of whom have "issues" with customer satisfaction and flexibility. I also claim that the pain of 'losing' control of a card will get worse as you have more and more of these dynamic subscriptions linked to it. I expect the initial response will be multiple cards, but this adds its own issue if the statements are not closely monitored. So while I feel it acutely today (I wondered why I didn't get my FreeBSD CD release and found out that Walnut Creek had my old card) I expect the experience to expand across the population as the number of dynamic subscriptions increase, the number of 'resets' due to exposed cards increases, and the time wastage of re-doing everything creates a value proposition.