arfrank

It's linked from here: https://bb.visa.com/legal/privacy-policy-opt-out.html

Will leave these here, just one small step to help you regain your privacy:

* https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do

* https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/...

Anne gave a talk a few years back that was enjoyable and informative for the NSAs position 5 years ago http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/aug/06/inside-nsa/

With details found on Reddit https://m.imgur.com/gallery/PuWx39O

I’d suggest you look at what we built at Final. Getfinal.com

We took a hard deep look at a massive stagnant industry (credit cards) and use experience and features as differentiators

From about a month ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-and-lyft-look-to-hail-cred...

Amazon is 4 in every $10 spent online in the US. They have a scale similar to Costco/WM who only got deals for/to break exclusivity. Amazon pays less than 2%, much less depending on card type. Manages fraud to about 6BPS on transactional basis. But the concept of the running a CC is not out of the question, but the economics/complexity don't align yet...

It's core to one of the leader's in banking core's new cloud based offerings: https://www.fisglobal.com/Solutions/Banking-and-Wealth/Servi...

There are a tons of reasons to keep our signups closed for now. One non-obvious reason to most people is that it costs us money to lend out money to customers. Theres a ton of others we're working on solving in parallel too

Email me @ aaron@getfinal.com I'd love to hear more, if you don't mind. We encourage people to use the physical card and just treat it as disposable if it ever gets skimmed/breached/stolen/lost. We made sure it impacts none of your other relationships :)

Email me at aaron@getfinal.com and we can get you a code to apply :) We're working on broadening our underwriting criteria, but this is a complicated business overseen by an incredible amount of regulation, while also taking risk when we issue new lines of credit. Large banks throw around a lot of $ to make it work (a lot in this statement), but to start a new provider takes a lot of tactical decisions and iteration to grow in a safe and sustainable way.

Industry standard is about 10 BPS for affinity programs and a bounty for acquiring customers for the bank. No rewards program might make this one higher, maybe 70-110 but none more.

A better plan if you wanted to support Linux would be 2% cashback card that you donate all rewards to Linux.

Thanks will look into it. Some old janky JS we have from what is still our original marketing site at its core. This codebase is separate from all actual customer data/sensitive things, so it could use some JS best practice cleanup clearly (even though this might be a responsive CSS thing)

Both email and phone, but for full transparency we actually prefer email since it keeps a full log of conversations with consumers for both parties to have. Our card has a number on the back of it and a few other in-app spots have our number on it.

We seriously appreciate the thoughtful feedback. Email me, aaron@getfinal.com, if you want to learn/discuss more about why we made some of the decisions we made day one. It really comes down to resources and a team of 12 working against incumbents with teams of 1200+.

Yes, many times over, but always looking for holes, and actually that infrastructure is separate from the pieces that are exposed to public web.

Traditionally, we do it this way too, these piece of the payments ecosystem are all whitelisted IPs for access and MPLC circuits for connections.

Working on native Android full steam now, but yep started with iPhone for now. Web is full responsive and have a ton of Android users using it and happy w/ experience. But point taken.

Fair point, problem is that theres no short answer here. We partners with a bank to get our own BIN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number), that when loaded onto the networks, gets routed to our core infrastructure. There are many ways to segment this BIN, randomly, PRIN(?), few other industry standards, and so when you want to issue a new consumer a new card # you use whatever your algorithm is, and assign it to that customers account (or whatever exactly your data model is).

So its 2/3rds BD to get setup, 1/3 enterprise engineering and a lot of integration work to get fully setup and running. Payments is the only trillion dollar industry where nothing is written down, we're working on changing that since we find a lot of the stories fascinating and so do most people we retell them to.

If anyone is in Oakland area and wants a primer, always happy to share, we spent 3 years learning industry and now its our time to start giving back.

In all honesty, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. When you put a battery into that form factor battery life is a big issue and keeping in sync with your phone really harms it. Add recharging and you have other tradeoffs, so EMV gets us 95%+ of the way there and we're happy not having to solve really hard esoteric challenges related to things like the Bluetooth stack for BLE use.

Email aaron@getfinal.com.

And not sure why someone reposted our website, but always happy to discuss the intricacies of human behavior and how it relates to payments.

A lot of funny stories about how that piece of consumer software exists in the world today. About 5 different parties involved, some who are 100% competitors (V vs. MC). 16 or so years ago, MC bought a company called Orbiscom that provides what Citi & BoA use for vCards. Its a layer at the network to provide these mappings and so when BoA issues a Visa card, and you request a virtual card, you're making a call out to a MC service to generate them on a Visa BIN.

None of this even addresses or ties who BoA uses as their core processor for CC, which is now TSYS, and typically have little knowledge a vCard was used.

The good thing for what we're doing at Final is that this goes beyond many credit card numbers, its rethinking what is a piece of plastic in hundreds of millions consumers pockets for how we shop and interact w/ merchants in this day and age.

We do it from the core infrastructure we run ourselves. Built the full stack to have flexibility and innovate in industry where 90+% of CC transactions still run on mainframes & COBOL

All companies start somewhere, and when we look at the rewards games being played it becomes beyond a loss leader (been meaning to write up a blog post explaining issuer side economics on interchange). Deals like this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/costco-see... (<0.40% interchange) make it overly painful to compete at top tier rewards today without having perverse consumer incentives, but we have ideas of where loyalty should go and are driving towards that.

As for customer service, we believe you can't tout that as differentiator, you just have to do a great job and your customers will speak for you. Amex did a great job over last 50 years, but is struggling to be relevant in this day and age (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/)

Virtual cards are just about 20 years old, we're starting there, but already working on a lot more pieces to what it takes to be a truly digital credit card.

Will have team take a look tomorrow and adjust it to the intent is clearer, this reads weirdly. Honestly, don't think the wordplay was intentional, we just went through our second PCI level 1 audit & take cardholder security & privacy very seriously.

Prepaid vs Credit is one main one, which drives towards a lot of acceptance issues. Many other pieces two around a holistic credit card product, happy to provide invites to anyone who pings me (info in profile). Disclaimer: CEO @ Final

You're using https://developer.visa.com/products/visa_direct & the MC equivalent to accomplish this, right?

There's no legal requirement to send a statement exactly, the bank can't force the customer to eStatements, but they can choose not to keep the account open if they opt out. There's additional complexity around if it's a debit account vs credit account. But usually what happens is the system the bank bought to run their core is setup one way and hasn't been switched for a long long time.

The other big difference is prepaid vs credit, which while nuanced, unlocks a ton of other functionality on any payments product.

We're still hard at work, working on getting it in consumers hands shortly.