Welcome to Moving Money (Right). My name is Fawziyah, and I’ve been building financial products as a software engineer for almost 5 years. I’m a big nerd about this industry, and I enjoy educating consumers about how it works, under the hood. If you would like to contact me, please email [email protected].
You’ve likely heard about the 2B in unused gift cards that Starbucks is earning interest from, but you may not know about the 70B that state governments are holding for us because of money we’ve probably forgotten about. Let’s talk about escheatment.
Brazil has reported America to the World Trade organization because it thinks the US is imposing tariffs on them, unfairly. The tariff document had 6 reasons on there, #2 on the list was because of Pix. This feels like a david vs goliath story, except it’s not obvious to me who to root for.
Who do you think your financial data belongs to? Your $2,000 paycheck from last week, the $50 you sent your sister yesterday, the $100 you paid Xfinity this morning, your mortgage payment, your rent, all of the financial data that your bank statement would hold? Who owns it? Is it you or your bank?
Every single month this year, a new bank charter application, rejection, or acceptance has been announced in the US: Coinbase’s approved bank charter application; Block’s (parent company of Square and Cashapp) second bank charter application; Chime buying a bank; Wise, the international remittance company, having its bank charter rejected; Nu, the Brazilian-based bank, applying for a US bank charter; Klarna's bank charter application. And if I wanted to fill this page with more examples, I literally could! How did we get here, and what could this mean for the average consumer?
You may have heard chatter about online banks like Wealthfront, or Chime being risky and how FDIC insurance won’t protect your funds there. Or how you’re doomed unless you move to a real bank. While the concern is very valid, it comes across to me, someone who builds financial products for a living, and educates people about them online, as fear mongering.
I’ve been reflecting on why I like working on financial products, and it reminds me of when I was 20 and starting to build my credit. I was a college student without steady income and a murky residency status in the US. After doing some research, I learned about secured credit cards and applied for a few.
The co-founder of Modern Treasury tweeted asking why we can't just give 16 digit card numbers to agents, because stablecoins are being touted as the more attractive option with the AI boom. Paul Graham responded that it would mean we'd have to pay card fees, and drag the networks into the future with us.
Building a ledger is famously hard to get right. AML and transaction monitoring, to comply with fraud regulations, is tedious. Building your own rewards engine that manages transfers and balances for your customers is complicated.
This week, the start-up Mercury received conditional approval by the OCC to become a bank. This news is part of an emerging trend of software companies no longer using a bank's license to meet regulatory demands and applying for their own charter.