Do FDIC insured savings depositories normally let you spin a wheel to have them pay your bills?
@FicoMike0 wrote:I'll have to admit to having some money with fidelity and robinhood, neither of which is a bank. I do so because I want to invest in stocks, funds and trade options. All inherently risky.
I've found I can average ~2% a week on $10,000, trading options. I don't risk more than I can afford to lose, and I wouldn't do it for 7-8% apr.
Why do folks have money with outfits with names like gotta and juno? What's the attraction?
I think Fidelity's CMA has the same model as every other fintech, having all these middlemen makes me nervous.
@FicoMike0 wrote:I'll have to admit to having some money with fidelity and robinhood, neither of which is a bank. I do so because I want to invest in stocks, funds and trade options. All inherently risky.
I've found I can average ~2% a week on $10,000, trading options. I don't risk more than I can afford to lose, and I wouldn't do it for 7-8% apr.
Why do folks have money with outfits with names like gotta and juno? What's the attraction?
What I don't get is why someone would put $280,000 from selling their house into something called "Yotta" which is not a bank and has all this "anti-lawsuit" language on it like "We're a tech company, that means we're not responsible for anything.".
Now they get $500 of it back. Which is notta lotta yotta. But I gotta feeling that someone out there bought-a yacht-a with this person's money 
Painful lesson.
I mean, tragically there are people who harm themselves after something like this happens, and probably nobody who did it to them will even get in much trouble. Just file bankruptcy and have some new scam cooking next month. The world of finance is such a horrible place, horrible people in it.
This whole "We're not a bank, we're a tech company." thing as an excuse to break laws or at least exploit legal gray areas reminds me a lot of Uber says they're not responsible if one of their drivers which they didn't properly background check, assaults a female passenger, because "We're a tech company, and as everyone knows, we're not responsible for anything!"
Or the computer software world, where Nvidia was putting proprietary video drivers out and hooking them into the Linux kernel, and saying "Well we're not really violating the GPL because we're doing it indirectly. Through a 'glue layer'."
It shouldn't be legal. It violates the spirit of the rules at least, if not the rules themselves.
But FDIC insurance should apply anywhere someone says they're holding onto your money and if the money disappears, someone needs to go to prison.
The most lucrative business seems to always be staying one step ahead of the law or what anyone is willing to enforce. You notice that businesses like Uber don't exactly thrive when laws are passed requiring people to be treated as employees, and these fintechs are going to dry up when someone starts regulating them like banks.
Nobody deserves to lose their money to a white collar crime with a bankruptcy fraud chaser which is probably whatta lotta yotta customers are going to find out happened. The least that they deserve is to lose it to 15% annual inflation like the rest of us.
(I looked at an apartment in one of the worst ghettos in Chicago today. I lived there in 2016-2017 and me and my ex got mugged at gunpoint in separate incidents. There was nowhere to shop for food for many miles except an Aldi with an armed off duty cop watching you. It was $550 a month. Now they want $1,687 every month. This isn't even unusual, and yet they claim that inflation is tame. If rents triple every 8 years or so and wages only rise about 50%, we're in serious trouble. As recently as 2021, they rented that unit for $860 a month. Maybe it has something to do with the Obama library which is going in whenever they find a few hundred people locally (which was one of the demands) who can actually build something. But it'll be great for the local alderperson when she can get out her ornamental shovel and stop taking credit for the same Starbucks every year since 2006.)
Anyway, I digress. The rest of us are all aboard Inflation Express, but the people putting their money in fintechs seem to want to cruise at Warp 9.975.
I've been looking for something with a better trading platform than Merrill to open an account for options trading, but stuff like this makes me not want to.
Honestly, you get what you get when using fintech. I have 2 fintech's left, mercury (for business), and Creditkarma. I joined CK for the initial promo they were doing where everytime you made a weekly deposit, you went into a sweepstakes. So i did a recurring $1 deposit. Never won anything.
Mercury was more or less convenient, and I am working to move it locally. The appeal was more or less some of the easy things, like sending ACH out, which my local business bank has agreed to do for me. So, I am better off moving off the platform.
I never did much with fintech deposits (outside of above). You are right, the appeal is low and some of the names of these places should raise red flags.
