For quite some time, I’ve been expectantly waiting for Simple—the “we’re not a bank, we’re a front end for banks” financial platform—to launch. They’re taking on an industry ripe for some serious disruptive innovation. After all, how many people do you know that truly like or even are thrilled with their bank? Simple promises to provide a banking platform that is easy and enjoyable to use with a no-nonsense approach and a customer-friendly business model. And, they’re doing it from Portland, Oregon.
I signed up for an invitation as soon as I could last year. Then, I waited as they built and tested their platform. It took a while—longer than I think anyone would have liked, including the people building it—but they started bringing on thousands of customers last month and my invite was among them. Just a few days later, my Simple card arrived in the mail.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been kicking Simple’s tires by doing the things you normally do with a Visa debit card. Buying stuff, getting cash at an ATM, paying bills online, and pushing money around between my other banks. Nothing earth shattering. In fact, it’s as boring as you’d expect it to be—at least until you see your transactions pop up almost instantaneously on the iPhone app or on the website where you can nicely categorize your spending in a modern and nicely designed UI made for easily staying on top of your cash flow. Sure, other banks have websites and iPhone apps, but Simple’s works the way a modern web app should.
What’s not to like? Not much, really. There are still a few features from the list of already announced features that need to be released, such as photo deposit of checks and goal tracking. But, Simple is already usable enough that I’ve moved a decent portion of my day-to-day spending over—even while traveling overseas—and I don’t see any reason why I won’t be moving the majority of my current account needs to Simple over the next few months.
In fact, there’s only on thing I wish Simple would do that isn’t on their website but which would be a huge win for their customers that travel overseas, like myself. That’s to ditch the raised numbers on the card and move to flat EMV cards, also known as chip-and-PIN cards in Europe. With every US bank lagging on this front, it’d be nice to see Simple move ahead of them. Of course, the big benefit in the short term would be to the subset of their customers that travel outside the US, but a modern sleek card showing a willingness to move on from decades old technology would also be a nice symbol to everyone who handled the card.
In any case, I’m happy that Simple has made it to the point where they’re loading customers onboard and am looking forward to seeing where things go from here.