Our Virtual Accounts are the first step towards exactly that – we were thinking that virtual debit numbers tied to virtual accounts might make the most sense from a payment flow perspective. And that would allow you to do just what you described, provided the payment recipient takes debit vs ACH. Having virtual account/routing numbers would be a great extension of that capability too!
Yes, security/privacy. Banks are heavily regulated, and "I can't avoid them to store my data" anyway. (I do mostly use cash, much to the irritation of shops these days.) I have multiple accounts, which I manage offline without giving any third-party service access to them. The transaction data for my bank accounts is not very interesting thanks to me doing most things in cash. I don't need banks (or credit card companies), tax authorities or tax advisors to know how I spend my money, where I eat, what kind of services I enjoy.
I would however have an interest in some of what these fancy new "let us have access to your account" companies are offering. If it was simply software to use 'offline'.
Gotcha. IMHO, cash provides a number of functions where f(x) = security, privacy, or physical partitioning. And those are valuable!
For functions where f(x) is something one would want to program or automate in the digital realm of money, that's where we hope to add value to the experience of managing your finances.
Hi Hackernews,
Gil here, co-founder at Astra. Would love to hear what you think about this new technical architecture for your bank accounts! With Virtual Sub Accounts, you can partition your cash or give your dollars purpose – and you can transfer funds to and from those virtual accounts with programmable routines.
Over and over in conversations with other startup founders and VCs, we kept hearing the analogy of AWS for Fintech. I think it's a really interesting thought experiment, but I haven't seen a breakdown from a technology perspective. What's in place, and what's missing? So I did a write up using Cloud Computing as the framework.
Why should there be a moment? Seems to me money has been around for a while and will be slow to change. Cloud computing was a new concept
Technology is more of an enabler than a driver. Finance is a highly regulated industry, you don't want any Joe Shmoe building applications which handle money, because security.
I agree that their API is great, but there's so much more to building a business - most of all perseverance. Many people can make a good or great API but very few can execute on the rest.
Well in this case their API is backed by a connection to credit card systems... the hard part. The card companies could have done it, but they needed Stripe to show how obvious it is.
The reason Stripe exists is because the card companies couldn't do it. They were incompetent, unimaginative, lazy, slow, arrogant, etc.
Exactly what you typically see out of entrenched goliaths.
It's the same reason several of them that have tried can't catch up with Stripe, despite trying for years, despite vast resources, and despite Stripe showing them how to do it.
It's only in a non-reality-touching theory that the card companies could have done it (ie if you entirely disregard everything about them and only focus on resources and then give them attributes they don't possess). In actuality, they couldn't do it.
Microsoft and Nokia couldn't have produced the iPhone. IBM couldn't have produced AWS. AOL couldn't have produced Google. Disney couldn't have produced Netflix. Facebook couldn't have produced Instagram. Xerox couldn't have produced the Apple II. Sony and Microsoft couldn't have produced Steam. GM and Ford couldn't have produced the Model S. Boeing and Lockheed couldn't have produced the Falcon 9. Wyndham and Hilton couldn't have produced Airbnb. The taxi cartels couldn't have produced Uber or Lyft.
Culture acting as an innovation blockade is the unifying impediment between them all, not lack of resources or that something was technically too challenging.
That's not how card companies work. There's 100s of payment processor out there and the card companies let you shop around and pick one that's right for you. They do however require said processors to have large amounts of money just to access their systems.
Stripe has lots of funding to do that AND get good developers to build a decent payment processor.
You can set reminders for emails to come back to your inbox both at send and separately when reviewing email. It also has read receipts. And the hotkeys and shortcuts are super powerful. Worth the $ if you have to spend a lot of time in email for the efficiency increase alone.
It's not the reminder of emails that the OP is talking about. You can do that in Gmail. It's the freedom of adding any reminder to your inbox, not related to emails, that made a huge difference.
Really cool project! Loaded up Gauntlet and was able to start the game but saw a lot of artifacts after my warrior moved across the screen. Did the ROM have some dust on it like my old Gauntlet cartridge? Hehe.
Our Virtual Accounts are the first step towards exactly that – we were thinking that virtual debit numbers tied to virtual accounts might make the most sense from a payment flow perspective. And that would allow you to do just what you described, provided the payment recipient takes debit vs ACH. Having virtual account/routing numbers would be a great extension of that capability too!