Wow these are awesome questions.

tbh I just did not think people would find these kinds of things as interesting as I do. I would love to start an AMA for this and go through it if people want me to do that I'm happy to try to make it happen, not sure if there's usually a formal process for setting them up on HN?

I'll do my best to address those brief questions here though. You're right that at the outset it looks like we're doing things that are better for the customer but the overall goal is to actually properly align ourselves with the customer, for instance one of the things we plan to do is pay a higher interest rate if you save a higher percentage of your income. Thus incentivizing users to have better financial habits and as a result become the exact type of borrower we would like to lend to.

The no credit apps thing is actually very simple, it just means we're using a soft pull rather than a hard pull and we still know your credit history so we're not doing anything blind.

The assets and pre-investment question is another good one. We've actually entered into an agreement to become a minority shareholder in a bank that has been in existence since 1921, as they grow (as a result of the things we're building) we intend to keep buying more shares of the underlying Bank Holding Company and to eventually become a BHC ourselves. This means the bank has the capital requirements in the short term and we are just a minority shareholder that happens to build software for the bank!

It's a structure we arrived at after looking at a ton of options and deciding this was the best possible way to test buying a bank without outlaying all the capital on the frontend.

as for the insurance etc. That is relatively explainable as a result of the above. This is an established bank that has been in existence for a very long time, we're just building software we believe will help it grow while being able to share in the upside as an actual shareholder rather than the mis-aligned incentives you see with most of the challenger "banks" in the US since they only make money from interchange.

We are in no way incentivized for our customers to spend money since our number 1 task is to grow overall assets at the bank level.

We're basically ready to start opening accounts, we should have the core ready to go for friends and family around Jan 15 and then from there we will start onboarding the ~9k signups we have as well.

The main hold up has been that Mastercard has a moratorium on new products over the holiday season so we have not been able to issue cards just yet, but we've also been building the app, getting the core provider setup etc. (We actually got a new routing number issued for the bank and a brand new core provider)

Again, if there's a sanctioned way to do an AMA or something similar I'm happy to set it up with @dang or whoever is necessary and walk through this in more detail if its interesting to folks?

EDIT: One other important piece ... we think we may actually have some paid features eventually, things like Metal cards, Free international ATMs etc. that would mean people using us more like a subscription service in some ways. For instance I would gladly pay a monthly fee to be able to have my bank become my financial conduit meaning that they would handle finding the best prices on loans, cars, houses etc. without me having to fill out an application (because they already know the answers) and I think others might be willing to pay for that as well