Google won't let me read this unless I login or view it in an Incognito window, and that's not good enough.

Simple Bank and Why You Shouldn't Bank in Beta

The Story
Bad day for #SimpleBank .

They sent out a message to all their account holders. Presumably the collective "WTF is wrong with my account?!" caused all account holders to try logging in, and accidentally DDoSed their login page. The result is that logins are rejected.

I try getting a password reset (because, hey, maybe the message is my account was compromised), and the email doesn't come. Try again, no email. Now I'm getting worried that something is properly wrong. I head over to the Simple bank status page and Twitter feed, and find out that their login servers toppled over and they're trying to fix it.

Once everything was ironed out, it turned out the secure message was about Simple launching their "Goals" feature.

As @nerded on Twitter[1] posted: "you emailed me a notification to log in to see a msg about a public announcement? This feels very “old bank” : ("

The Simple Bank rep responded with "Actually, I agree with you. We'll consider better ways of doing it in the future. ^RG", which is a fine mea culpa, but does not engender confidence.

Banks are people's money, they aren't just web sites
During the login troubles, the Twitter account contained a tweet from Simple to an angry customer who accused them of incompetence, with Simple replying that it is "just a web site" (I can't get a citation right now due to Twitter overload). This is a really bad way of framing the discussion. Simple acts as a bank from the consumer's perspective, and when critical pieces of infrastructure go down, your response should be an immediate apology.

What makes this worse is that Simple markets itself as a company that understands the Internet, but if you know your login page is down, and have no way to push that information to users (after you asked every single one to log in) without resorting to a blog post on your status page, you are acting very much like a company that doesn't get the Internet at all. You're playing in the old bank space, and competition there is getting fiercer (Ally, for example, refunds bank fees from anywhere, which Simple doesn't [2]).

Simple seems to be running with the argument that everyone in their is beta, that betas don't go smoothly, and early adopters should be used to this. To some extent, I get that. But this is people's money, and that's important. When you're building a company on having excellent Internet know-how, being trustworthy and generally just doing better, people remember this stuff. What I find particularly galling is that Simple does not have a means of electronically moving money away from it, only to their account. It's like data lock in, where the only export means (withdrawing it all back in cash from an ATM, writing yourself a check) really sucks. I'd argue that Simple are trying to launch without their MVP (money goes in, money goes out).

Put on a suit, if only in your mind
A long time ago, when Simple were first appearing, there was a team photo, and they were in the standard hacker clothing: t-shirts, hoodies, jeans. Not one of them was wearing a suit, and I found that strange and somewhat disconcerting. I want my bank to wear suits. I want them to be diligent, conservative and fearful of screwing up with my money; the loss of such fear being arguably the thing that has changed about consumer banking in the last decade.

Simple give off the impression of a company that is very much a start-up, moving fast and breaking things, and that's not what I, or I suspect, many people, want from their bank. I want you to move slow and keep things working right. Put the suit on in your mind, if not your body.

[1] http://twitter.com/nerded/status/237984492323753984
[2] https://www.simple.com/faq/#usingsimple*