Marc Hedlund and the Wesabe team have begun to flex the muscles of community finance. By tagging abusive bank fees, Wesabians are exposing and beginning to change a reprehensible practice.
I’m hoping to see a “worst offenders” report sometime soon!
(from Marc’s original post)
When we first launched Wesabe last November, we were not surprised to see that our #1 top merchant at that point was Amazon, and #2 was Netflix. That matched well with the stereotype of “early adopters.” What was surprising, though, was the merchant #20 was Overdraft Fee. If you think overdraft fees just hit people who are “bad with money,” they don’t — they hit a huge percentage of the population, and as Wesabe has grown, we’ve seen that more and more. Currently, our users have been charged roughly $200,000.00 in overdraft charges in just the past few months — an average of one overdraft charge for each and every person tracking their money on Wesabe.
See the original thread, and Marc’s post about it.
Update: you should also read this analysis by of NetBanker!
April 30th, 2007
Allegra and I met yesterday with Joe Edelman of RipplePay which looks really cool. I really like the ability to create loans of time… “I owe you 1 hour of work”.
“Ripple is a monetary system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks. By cutting out the institutional middlemen, Ripple is both more community-oriented and more efficient as a means of exchange.
National monetary systems rely on trust in large financial institutions. A bank account balance, stored as electronic bits in a computer, represents a promise by the bank to pay the account holder. That promise is only meaningful if the bank is trustworthy. Banks, in turn, leverage those deposits to issue new money by making loans to trustworthy individuals as determined by an often labour-intensive screening process.
Ripple cuts the banks right out of the picture by allowing anyone to act as a bank and grant credit within the Ripple system to anyone they know. The system keeps track of the source of all IOUs, so that debts that are not repaid are automatically borne by the issuer.”
April 22nd, 2007
It’s been a while, and so I wanted to send out a quick update on what’s been happening with the project.
Recent updates:
- I spoke about the project at the IgnitionNW Town Hall Meeting on March 26th and made two important announcements:
- The first group in our Field of Membership will be IgnitionNW.
- I’m building a technology platform to create and operate Credit Unions like Black Rock Federal. (There will be more about this soon!)
- I also had an outstanding meeting with Carmen Mauk of Burners without Borders, who is taking BWB in some exciting directions.
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Upcoming:
- I’m sending our revised Field-of-Membership to the NCUA on Friday.
On Saturday I’m flying to San Francisco to help Brady run the Ignite Event @ the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco. (Justin.tv will be there and presenting, so you might be able to see it live… and from a speakers perspective!)- I might be speaking at the Web2.0 Expo as well (check my personal blog if you want to know more)
Next Update: Friday, April 20th
April 11th, 2007
