Title: Hey there, I&#x27;m Irish, and here our banks are shady and private. The government owns most of them (through bailouts) yet still there&#x27;s little to no transparency - they act as the please, grabbing as much profit off their customers as possible. Most people here hate their bank and would gladly move to a half decent alternative, but of course there is none. It&#x27;s identical in most countries nowadays, including the US. I think we can all agree that fundamentally, the finance industry is backward, greedy and corrupt. It needs to change.<p>Here&#x27;s the idea: An open source, upfront, transparant and <i>humane</i> bank driven not by profit but by the passion to simply create a bank that people like and enjoy using.<p>A few key ideas or keystones might include:<p><pre><code>    * Transparant&#x2F;Open Source
    * Non Profit
    * Great Customer Support
    * Few and fair fees
    * Great User Experience
    * Mobile First (cliche I know..)
    * Open API

  
</code></pre>
This wouldn&#x27;t just be a projects for fellow developers. We&#x27;d need designers, lawyers, and people involved in banks who are dissatisfied at the current status quo (after all we&#x27;ll need a partner bank in every country we want to operate in to avoid logistical nightmares). I really think it could be a project anyone could help out in - Think of it as a generation coming together to drag one of the biggest industries in the world into the 21st century.<p>By partnering with a local bank in each country, it would cut out a lot of issue logistically, making the project a lot easier to implement than just building a new bank from the ground up.<p>Any thoughts?<p>By the way, my email address is npaterson1 [at] gmail [dot] com if you&#x27;re interested&#x2F;want to know more :)
Niall<p>P.S Regarding Credit Unions, I can see why people are bringing them up but mcuy issue with them is that they don&#x27;t offer stuff like checking accounts, atms etc, aren&#x27;t really open that much, are exceptionally slow at allowing you withdraw and are completely offline. That&#x27;s just my experience, but I don&#x27;t think you could actually <i>bank</i> with a credit union, which is what I&#x27;m trying to get at.<p>P.P.S I think if you were to look at the three things I mentioned - online, non profit and open source, non profit is the one I think is least differentiable if that makes any sense. I think an online open source bank is the real innovative part, not the non profit part.<p>EDIT: A lot of people are asking something along the lines of &#x27;well this works when it comes to banking, what else is there to it?&#x27;. I think banking is a really really backward system, there&#x27;s so much you could do, simple tiny things that would make experiences so much more pleasant. Here&#x27;s an example: Imagine if your bank account had a profile, almost like a social network, and you could go to someone else&#x27;s profile and quickly see recent transactions you&#x27;ve had with them. I&#x27;m not thinking of something like a credit union, rather something quite different, and I really feel there&#x27;s lots more that can be done with banking from a tech pov. I don&#x27;t get why we have to assume banking is as advanced as it can be, it&#x27;s clearly not.
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