Shitty Fintech “Banks” Have Become Hard to Ignore – Launch Banking Channel

We have seen way too many financial technology (fintech) “banks” as of late and I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say a good chunk of them are bad. Most of the time you can can see exactly how awful it is after reading about their pitch. In some cases, it requires playing with the app for a few minutes to see through the nonsense. Too many times I have found myself asking “how did this stupid idea even get funded?” Sometimes the stupidity lies in the fact that they’re giving away so much to the users that their business model isn’t sustainable at all.

I have signed up for a good chunk of these products/apps but I (almost) never blog about them. In 2018, I wrote a somewhat negative piece on Beam Financial. Over 7 months later, I guilted myself into revisiting the app, found it to be awful yet again, and I felt like I was being generous in leaving even 10 cents with them. I probably didn’t say that in my original post because you know, it was after all someone’s sweat and blood and I would have preferred not to spend 5 minutes pissing all over someone’s year’s worth of work.

So despite juggling between from various fintech apps, my approach thus far has been “I am not going to talk about them”. But then, they started doing something interesting – they started to have decent signup bonus. Now it has gotten to a point that literally all of them have had signup bonuses now. And even though I knew they were awful, I signed up everyone in the family with an account.

See the interesting thing about signup bonus is that it is a great way to get users to try the product but if the product is mediocre (or worse terrible) it only ensures that the product is exposed at which point it potentially requires even greater incentive for the user to come back. Obviously, promoting bad product also leads to the loss of revenue from the promotion not being as fruitful.

Anyway, since I am comfortable signing up my family members to these types of account, I thought I should change my attitude of “don’t write about it” and I am doing just that by starting a discourse on the blog. I don’t know how many of them I will write about. I don’t blog very often so I probably will continue to skip over a good chunk of them.

But they are worth talking about, not just because of the signup bonus, but also because some of them are stupidly good for a short duration of their existence. Since I can’t cover all of that, I am naturally going to launch a channel where you, I, and everyone else can keep up the every-changing scenario in a more private and relaxed setting. You can find the link to said channel in this Telegram Channels post.