[HN Gopher] Google Drops Plan to Offer Bank Accounts
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Google Drops Plan to Offer Bank Accounts
Author : infodocket
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-10-01 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seekingalpha.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (seekingalpha.com)
| atkbrah wrote:
| Google has managed to make themselves a startup of established
| companies: You never know when the service you are relying on
| gets discontinued.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Oh your google account was disabled for covid misinformation (or
| some other reason), so you cannot access your money anymore. I
| wold trust amazon to do this more than google.
| htrp wrote:
| Banks are heavily regulated for a reason
| sb057 wrote:
| Banks have successfully and legally blacklisted pornographers
| for decades due to "reputational risk".
| vorpalhex wrote:
| But pornography is a high chargeback/fraud sector so that
| is aligned with banks doing risk control.
|
| Ideally a bank would capitalize on the underserved market
| and find a way to manage the risk.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| and they often don't, markets are not perfect rational
| actors
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Merchant banks already do exactly this. There is no
| shortage of banks working with the adult industry, just
| higher transaction fees and other stipulations.
| xnyan wrote:
| >aligned with banks doing risk control
|
| This goes beyond risk control. Insurance has had this
| figured out for a long time. You can model the risk of
| porn chargebacks and charge fees accordingly that cover
| the increased risk of chargeback. Bank behavior towards
| adult entertainment is a reflection of prevailing
| attitude of society in which we live, which is frequently
| quite opposed to sex work. It's not a question of banks
| demanding much higher feels for legal adult services,
| they don't want them.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Doesn't help if the regulators are the ones pushing for it;
| e.g. Operation Choke Point
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
| [deleted]
| junon wrote:
| Tell that to Paypal.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| US PayPal isn't a bank.
| junon wrote:
| It sure acts like one.
| scohesc wrote:
| Banks heavily regulate _themselves_ now in a lot of aspects.
|
| I believe since the PATRIOT act was passed, the onus of fraud
| prevention was put on the financial companies, not the
| government.
|
| This has caused a big rift in the "freedom to exchange
| currency with whoever whenever" crowd since the banks now
| have the authority (and are actively using it!) to push
| private companies into following their bidding.
|
| A large part of Pornhub moving from an "anybody uploads" to
| "premium content only" was because the credit card processors
| didn't want to risk doing financial transactions with a
| company that could _POTENTIALLY_ be (meaning: unproven)
| hosting CSAM materials on their website... [1]
|
| This was part of the reason OnlyFans was going to forbid
| adult content on their platform, because of issues with banks
| and payment processors. They were able to find one with more
| acceptable terms (although with higher transaction fees on
| the part of onlyfans) and were able to go back to providing
| paid adult content. (again, we'll never know the true reason
| why, but it's been the modus operandi of payment processors
| to axe anybody who they don't want on their platform.) [2]
|
| Fun fact, credit card payment processors add individuals to
| their list of "people they don't want to do business with" -
| which is then shared with other payment processors [3] - a
| large one that's used by the majority of payment processors
| is the MATCH list ran by Mastercard.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-
| endi...
|
| [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22641095/onlyfans-sex-
| wor...
|
| [3] https://www.chargebackgurus.com/blog/mastercard-match-
| list-a...
| bazooka_penguin wrote:
| Iirc onlyfans was actually because Christian special
| interests and feminists pressured financial institutions to
| drop them. I'll try to find the article that discussed it
| [deleted]
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I was actually excited about this. I was under the impression at
| least with Plex, I would have more advanced banking
| opportunities. SFCU's app sucks by itself.
|
| With Plex not happening, it would be nice if they could at least
| revert their awful new Pay app. Not being able to send money
| online and the new fees make GPay essentially useless.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I don't understand how they could fuck Google Pay up so bad. At
| least there's Venmo.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/UVSWB
| x-shadowban wrote:
| They ought to do medical insurance, they might get it right, and
| maybe we'd get some kind of standard electronic medical
| representation out of it. You could get physical illness alerts
| along with your windows defender pop ups. Imagine the good (yeah
| yeah and bad) they could do with that. "Your surgery is eight
| dollars but we keep the 4GiB of images we make."
| nexuist wrote:
| My understanding is that it is practically impossible to launch
| a health insurance company today, even with Google's budget,
| because the laws are so complex and impossible to digest that
| there is no way to sign up customers at a worthwhile rate.
| deadmutex wrote:
| I thought most big companies self-insured. So, does that make
| them insurance companies?
|
| Hmm, I guess you still have "insurance" at big companies, and
| they negotiate rates... so maybe the large insurance
| companies are still involved in a significant way.
| kyrra wrote:
| Original article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-is-
| scrapping-its-plan-to...
|
| Mirror: https://archive.is/DfNpk
|
| Googler, opinions are my own.
|
| This was an ambitious product. It was lead by Caesar Sengupta,
| who left back in March. Without the project's primary driver, it
| got killed off (at least before it launched).
| cronix wrote:
| > Without the project's primary driver
|
| Google has never heard of single points of failure? Strange. Is
| this how all of your products are run, in that if the "head" of
| the project leaves/gets ill/dies the whole thing just
| vaporizes?
| cjsplat wrote:
| You jumped from a story about one emerging business line
| concept to "all of your products", which is a pretty big
| leap.
|
| It is actually very common for new business ideas to live or
| die based on the support from one senior executive - I saw
| this from the inside at Fujitsu, Oracle, Sun and Google, and
| at many partner companies from the outside.
|
| In a new business line at an established large company, there
| is almost always another business line executive's toes you
| are going to step on.
|
| For example, making computer hardware at Oracle steps on the
| toes of Oracle people selling to computer hardware makers.
| Shifting to open source steps on toes of internal developers
| and existing suppliers.
|
| It takes a executive support to maintain these kinds of
| programs until the expected gain can be evaluated fairly
| against than the risks.
|
| If a key executive leaves there is quite often blow back on
| their pet projects. From the perspective "outside the room"
| it is frequently unclear whether the exec was just moving on,
| fighting to the end, or saw the writing on the wall and left
| while the leaving was good.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This seems like another incredible example of a bad product
| management strategy of "whatever some employee wants to do".
| Why would a major product direction be shelved because one guy
| switched jobs?
|
| If it was a good product, Google should restaff the project. If
| it was not a good product, Google should seriously rethink the
| autonomy it gives staff to decide to launch new products.
| cat199 wrote:
| he moved fast, and things broke - what's not to like?
| [deleted]
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Seems like a pretty good strategy to me. It's cool that one
| employee can drive such a large change. Google should get
| better at retaining talent though to mitigate this type of
| risk.
| kyrra wrote:
| Caeser was a VP at Google. In the story from when he
| left[0], his replacement has 3,700 people under him. So
| it's a single person with a huge amount of influence. Bill
| Ready came in and decided to do something different.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28251591
| mywittyname wrote:
| > This seems like another incredible example of a bad product
| management strategy of "whatever some employee wants to do".
|
| It would be bad if they used this strategy for every
| employee, but for certain employees, notably, those who are
| likely to go found their own startups, it can be a great
| idea. Google gets the potential to finance a "startup" for a
| fraction of the hypothetical acquisition costs, and the
| downside is paying the salary of a few dead weights if the
| produce never takes off.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I understand that concept, but there are better ways to do
| that. Nobody is shocked when an Area 120 app (or a
| Microsoft Garage app) gets shelved, because those are
| "brands" specifically for Google and Microsoft to
| experiment with startupy apps.
|
| But when Google decides to put their main brand behind
| something, announce it to the world, start collecting
| signups, only to shut it down, that ends up continuing to
| burn the company's reputation. In this case, it also
| represented a significant partnership with a major bank,
| which may have burned some bridges along the way.
|
| And bear in mind, in this case, it sounds like this VP had
| 3,700 employees under him... hardly a trivial cost of all
| the wasted effort.
| xnx wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Google and was interested to see where this
| initiative went. After seeing how Google Pay went (e.g.
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-
| pay-r...), the world may not have missed out on much.
| Marsymars wrote:
| The Google Pay thing is a bit odd, because the new one is
| only actually available in 3 of the 40 countries that Google
| Pay supports - most places are still using the old one.
| tlogan wrote:
| I think he left because he knew that the project will be
| killed.
| r00fus wrote:
| I wonder how the lead of an ambitious project like this one
| gets wind of an upcoming project cancellation? Is it changing
| business needs, or political winds shifting?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| You can frequently see the writing on the wall even if its
| not explicitly made clear, especially in a megacorp
| latchkey wrote:
| He was at Google for 15 years. Now working on something else
| in finance (and he is based in Singapore).
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/next-billion-users-head-
| ca...
|
| https://www.arbo.works/
| [deleted]
| jrm4 wrote:
| As someone who generally likes Google, I'm glad this is _not_
| happening. No currently large tech company should also be a bank;
| that level of extreme consolidation can only end in a negative
| for users.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Google would have been a frontend, like any other neobank. Plex
| accounts would have been offered by Citi, BBVA (RIP), and other
| chartered financial institutions. No consolidation necessary,
| or worth it; retail banking is so heavily regulated that it's
| more of a loss-leader for other products that actually make
| money.
| Zafira wrote:
| I feel like this would have been a culture clash waiting to
| happen and I feel like it would drive Google to eventually
| create some sort of bank subsidiary if this had actually
| worked out.
|
| That said, I can't imagine the customer service experience
| with Google fronting a bank would be very good and random
| failures on free services are enough of a pain, now put
| actual money in it and watch people really flip out.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Google would have been a frontend _at first._
|
| Retail banking is so _currently_ heavily regulated.
|
| etc. etc.
| ikiris wrote:
| I actually disagree here, nothing would have stomped down on
| their account support abuse faster than them being a bank and
| fucking over people.
| kintamanimatt wrote:
| With their track record of discontinuing products I wouldn't
| dream of signing up, even if it were offered and amazing. Who
| knows when the rug would be pulled out from under my fiscal feet?
| brundolf wrote:
| Unlike the other areas Google operates in, banking is actually
| regulated even in the US
|
| Though I'm sure we would quickly discover the exact boundaries
| of what's allowed by said regulation
| [deleted]
| alyandon wrote:
| That or having an algorithm incorrectly decide you are a bad
| actor and immediately freezing your account with no real
| recourse other than appealing the decision via webform only to
| have it denied 7/10ths of a second after you submit it.
| NazakiAid wrote:
| Don't forget the linked Google Account and YouTube account
| getting banned as well
| slownews45 wrote:
| For the best.
|
| Just today we have (another) situation - user added a card that
| works for apple pay to google pay, but google pay not only didn't
| add it but suspended the account entirely. They rely on google
| pay for google fi, so are now likely to lose their phone number.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/googlepay/comments/pmyog8/what_can_...
|
| Customer support is no help (of course).
|
| If Amazon did this it would be a different story, but google just
| takes craps on the users on their way to the bank - I can't
| imagine them having enough customer service focus to manage a
| bank type offering!
| paxys wrote:
| Healthcare, banking/finance, cars, telecom - it seems like every
| time a big tech "disruptor" enters a highly regulated industry
| they get a healthy dose of reality.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| More like, they realize "heavy regulations" are meant to
| protect incumbents from having to compete against new actors.
| paxys wrote:
| Not arguing that regulation is corrupt and broken in a lot of
| ways, but it's also not hard to see that the usual "move fast
| and break things" development and shipping process in tech
| should not be used in areas where people's livelihoods (or
| lives) are on the line.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Or regulations evolve slowly to protect against outliars
| which tend to be ignored otherwise.
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