New member introductions
Pelle Braendgaard
Many of us on the list have already done introductions so please feel
free to search it to find out more about us. But there are a lot of
interesting new people here so I would like to invite you all to
introduce yourself, your projects/companies and what your interest is
in Agile Banking.
P
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Count Zero
I then created an online "Wallet" called InterWallet.com, between 2003 ~ 2005, which was intended for third world countries (where regulation is relatively scarce or relaxed). The system had a successful pilot for a bit over a year (served around 50 select merchants, and around 15,000 customers were billed), at which point we stopped the pilot, and began pursuing regulatory procedures to get a real live system up in several countries. However I originally partnered with a very eccentric individual, and our partnership went sour two years into the venture, so I gave up the IP and sold him my part for 25 cents. He of course didn't know what to do with it, and the company went bust 1 month later.
And now, after a few more years of creating online trading systems, I find myself attracted again to the world of online wallets, transactions, virtual money, virtual currencies, and their potential to change the world in very radical ways.
I believe in Open Standards, Open Source, and that they are extremely powerful forces that can really change the world, by achieving wide adoption around the globe, thanks to being open to scrutiny and peer review.
Pelle Braendgaard
talk about how InterWallet worked?
P
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Count Zero
Well, InterWallet was started with very little money. We were very sick of the whole VC world, and we thought we could do it with tiny amounts of money, and make our own decisions quickly, agile style, without much management overhead (At the time, VC did not really understand Agile - they are like sheep, going after the herd. If another VC is doing something, and it worked out well, only then they will copy that VC). This worked well, and we had a working product in around 9 month, without boring board meetings and without having to prepare financial projections and sales/marketing plans.
The UI was very friendly, and used Ajax all over. At the time, it was quite revolutionary, and you could say it was much friendlier and easier to use than PayPal even with their current interface, and I take a lot of pride in that. It also had an amazing Ajax based Address Book where you could manage your relationship with merchants and friends/family/colleagues, and you could send them money directly from within the address book, very easily.
InterWallet had two merchant accounts for credit card billing, one in the middle east and one in the USA. It also had a connection to Israeli banks for wire transfers to merchants during the pilot (Only Israeli merchants were accepted for the pilot). And it even had a connection to the credit card companies via something called "The Ring", which was basically a data collection and synchronization service non-profit organization setup by all Credit Card Companies & Banks in Israel, in association with the largest ISP (Bezeq). What they provided us, was the exact data from the credit card companies, and our company's bank account, after they were finished with their processing, so we could actually know when a credit card transaction was really REALLY complete ;-) (full cycle). We also had real-time chargeback/representation request notification thanks to that service, so everything was 100% automated.
Money was held until the full cycle was complete (we did not want to take any risks because we didn't have huge money backing us up), so until the money for a transaction was actually received to our own bank account, the receiver of the funds could not use the money. However as soon as money arrived, we released the funds. The minimum wait time was a few days, and the maximum wait time was almost 1 month, because of the way credit card companies credit merchants in Israel (twice per month, on the 2nd and on the 8th of the month).
The system supported credit card transactions, wire transfers, transfer to and from debit cards, scratch cards (prepaid), issuance of scratch cards for merchants, with specific amounts, flexible scratch cards (with a variable amount, like cheques), internal transfers (like paypal), and even Western Union style transfers (with a code similar to MTCN, etc). The system even had some unique features to combat fishing, which I am only now starting to see happening elsewhere. It was also multilingual and even had "in-place" Ajax translation facility, so you could translate the system to your language while working on it ;-)
Transactions were like small "programs", with rollback functionality. The rollback did not have to be 100% symmetrical (some money you can give back, some of it was hard expenses, so you can't give back, etc). There were money buffers (Money in "Limbo"), and if you want I can elaborate more on this.
At our peak we were 4 developers, it was a lot of fun, and many interesting investors came and wanted to either buy us completely or invest in us, but the condition with my partner did not allow any of that to happen, and the rest is history ;-)
And now I am back at it again with OpenWallet.org and I am really excited to be touching this scene again. We have a very interesting partner in Jordan, and I believe it's a pretty good place to start the business again because regulation is flexible and relaxed, and the local partner over there already has all the authorities informed, and the license to engage in the planned activity.
Steven Talcott Smith
I worked as a software developer in the financial and dot com
industries in Boston from the mid 90s to 2002. There I attended
Robert Hettinga's monthly luncheons and grew acquainted with the e$
crowd.
Out of curiosity, I attended the Financial Cryptography conference in
2000 in Anguilla where I met some of the founders of Paypal, Hushmail,
ZeroKnowledge and other companies of the era as well as Pelle, our
list organizer. After the dot-com-bust and events of this decade,
interest in these topics waned and it seemed like nothing was
happening. I returned to Florida and took a vacation from software.
In 2005, I jumped back in full time by developing a subscription-based
web application and a consulting business around web and connected
mobile applications. I ran into Pelle recently in Miami and he
suggested I join this group.
My interest in Agile Banking stems from my appreciation for open
source software, my political philosophy, and my ongoing study of the
monetary and banking system.
I am interested in local exchange trading systems (which I first heard
about on this list), electronic commodity money, open source banks,
radical transparency, localism, agorism, e-cash, and new transaction
and payment methods.
Regards,
Steven Talcott Smith
President
Talcott Systems, LLC
3701 FAU Blvd Ste 210, Boca Raton, FL 33431
st...@talcottsystems.com
http://www.talcottsystems.com/
Pelle Braendgaard
>
> Well, InterWallet was started with very little money. We were very sick of the whole VC world, and we thought we could do it with tiny amounts of money, and make our own decisions quickly, agile style, without much management overhead (At the time, VC did not really understand Agile - they are like sheep, going after the herd. If another VC is doing something, and it worked out well, only then they will copy that VC). This worked well, and we had a working product in around 9 month, without boring board meetings and without having to prepare financial projections and sales/marketing plans.
I agree that it's best to at least avoid VC in the beginning phases of
any innovative startup. Unfortunately reserve requirements in the EU
and (probably the US) make it necessary to bring them in at some stage
of the project if you want to operate there. However it sounds like
you guys are solving this by operating in Jordan.
> InterWallet had two merchant accounts for credit card billing, one in the middle east and one in the USA. It also had a connection to Israeli banks for wire transfers to merchants during the pilot (Only Israeli merchants were accepted for the pilot). And it even had a connection to the credit card companies via something called "The Ring", which was basically a data collection and synchronization service non-profit organization setup by all Credit Card Companies & Banks in Israel, in association with the largest ISP (Bezeq). What they provided us, was the exact data from the credit card companies, and our company's bank account, after they were finished with their processing, so we could actually know when a credit card transaction was really REALLY complete ;-) (full cycle). We also had real-time chargeback/representation request notification thanks to that service, so everything was 100% automated.
So was it mainly Israeli merchants/customers?
>
> Money was held until the full cycle was complete (we did not want to take any risks because we didn't have huge money backing us up), so until the money for a transaction was actually received to our own bank account, the receiver of the funds could not use the money. However as soon as money arrived, we released the funds. The minimum wait time was a few days, and the maximum wait time was almost 1 month, because of the way credit card companies credit merchants in Israel (twice per month, on the 2nd and on the 8th of the month).
There is always a risk dealing with the established banking system. I
like the way e-gold handled it by not interfacing directly with the
external financial world and letting independent firms profit from the
risk.
> Transactions were like small "programs", with rollback functionality. The rollback did not have to be 100% symmetrical (some money you can give back, some of it was hard expenses, so you can't give back, etc). There were money buffers (Money in "Limbo"), and if you want I can elaborate more on this.
That is very interesting. Do you have any ideas on how that could be
modelled into OpenTransact? My instinct is to not have it as part of
the core standard.
>
> At our peak we were 4 developers, it was a lot of fun, and many interesting investors came and wanted to either buy us completely or invest in us, but the condition with my partner did not allow any of that to happen, and the rest is history ;-)
Hey, learning experiences like that are very valuable ;-)
>
> And now I am back at it again with OpenWallet.org and I am really excited to be touching this scene again. We have a very interesting partner in Jordan, and I believe it's a pretty good place to start the business again because regulation is flexible and relaxed, and the local partner over there already has all the authorities informed, and the license to engage in the planned activity.
Good luck to you guys. So is Jordan generally open to financial startups?
P
Dan Mux
My name is Dan Mullineux and I know sfa about banking and banking
systems even so I am building out www.wehuhu.co.uk (and www.wehuhu.com)
wehuhu = we help you, help you.
Its about how we can help each other within our trust networks to
manage money better, mainly because I've become so pissed off with the
way banks treat us - like fools (why are there still no open standards
and apis), transacting in those trust networks would be a step change!
- naturally my nascent thoughts drew me towards this movement.
Looking forward to seeing some of you at BarCampLondon.
Dan.
> --http://agree2.com- Reach Agreement!http://extraeagle.com- Solutions for the electronic Extra Legal worldhttp://stakeventures.com- Bootstrapping blog
Erich
I became interested in this topic last week when OpenTransact was a
story on HN. Pelle linked me to this group, and it seems interesting!
I really don't know much about the financial world, or agile banking,
or anything financial really. What I do know is that moving money
around is annoyingly complex, particularly if I would like to receive
it. I find this preposterous given current levels of technology. I am
even more annoyed by the fact that I cannot sell anything without
giving some series of middlemen transaction fees AND percentage cuts
-- once again particularly given that the whole database thing is
pretty well understood, even to massive scales.
When I heard about OpenTransact I thought, "good idea, too much money
to be lost by big players tho, fail". But pelle suggested it may be
different, perhaps there is something which can be done. So I'm here
to learn (and contribute if i can). I suspect Ill mostly be lurking
for a while.
Regards,
Erich
On Jan 1, 7:24 pm, Pelle Braendgaard <pe...@stakeventures.com> wrote:
> Happy New Year and welcome to a lot of new members.
>
> Many of us on the list have already done introductions so please feel
> free to search it to find out more about us. But there are a lot of
> interesting new people here so I would like to invite you all to
> introduce yourself, your projects/companies and what your interest is
> in Agile Banking.
>
> P
>
> --http://agree2.com- Reach Agreement!http://extraeagle.com- Solutions for the electronic Extra Legal worldhttp://stakeventures.com- Bootstrapping blog
Don Park
My area of expertise is unreasonably broad but I've worked in security
& payment projects like 3D-Secure while at Arcot and Bank of America's
Sitekey while at Passmark. I'm also credited as creator of Identicon
which is in use by Wordpress and StackOverflow.
I haven't had time to examine OpenTransact closely but the general
idea of agile-banking is of interest to me. So here I am. :-)
Best,
Don Park
Pelle Braendgaard
I've been following your blog for almost longer than I can remember.
P
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Steve Dekorte
Hi all,
I'm a developer, was an early employee at iPin (a micro-transaction service for a while), use PayPal IPN for my business and am a user of goldmoney.com.
I'm interested in free markets and the vertical disintegration of financial services - separating unit of account, asset transfer, asset storage, payment communication and lending services/markets.
The service I'd most like to see in the near future made is paypal+goldmoney (CC gateway with option for 100% deposit gold asset storage and zero cost transfer) as this would allow the value held in fiat currencies to more easily flow into gold and prevent the central banks from devaluing (stealing) from the savings and wages of the poor and middle class.
- Steve Dekorte
http://dekorte.com/
bk127001
contributing to the conversation - there are a lot of really
interesting ideas coming up through this group and I'm enjoying
contemplating the ideas and want to be more of a contributor to the
discussion. I think I got hooked up to this group after meeting Pelle
at BarCampSF in 2008 and following him online. The discussions in this
group have certainly shaped my thinking about a number of technology
issues, particularly oAuth and some of the ideas around OpenTransact.
Currently, I work for FIS (formerly Fidelity National Information
Services and Metevante), and fall in a role connecting technology and
business. I used to be a coder, but wasn't all that brilliant with it
(though I still enjoy writing code for fun or to make life easier),
but I like technology and understand it enough to explain it to
business people who have little understanding of technology (or desire
to). Over the last 7 years or so, my focus has been around fraud, risk
and compliance, so I often think about issues in terms of
opportunities for fraud, compliance issues, etc. At the same time, I'm
very excited about changing the face of banking. As mentioned in
another thread, I tend to relate to Austrian economists, in particular
Hayek - yet I think these things will take quite some time and we need
to think about incremental steps - there is zero chance the entire
banking system will be turned inside out in a day. As with any big
change, I think there are opportunities to get there incrementally,
and will be driven by demand (bottom up rather than top down).
Enjoy the conversations happening in this group and look forward to
participating in more. You can find more on me if you're interested at
http://google.benknieff.com.
BK
On Jan 1, 5:24 pm, Pelle Braendgaard <pe...@stakeventures.com> wrote:
> Happy New Year and welcome to a lot of new members.
>
> Many of us on the list have already done introductions so please feel
> free to search it to find out more about us. But there are a lot of
> interesting new people here so I would like to invite you all to
> introduce yourself, your projects/companies and what your interest is
> in Agile Banking.
>
> P
>
> --http://agree2.com- Reach Agreement!http://extraeagle.com- Solutions for the electronic Extra Legal worldhttp://stakeventures.com- Bootstrapping blog
Pelle Braendgaard
Thanks for introducing yourself and welcome to the list. It's great to
have someone experienced in fraud and compliance issues as these are
ones that us coders tend to dismiss to the last minute. Please feel
free to interject if we get out of hand ;-).
P
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