Will you run bill pay to pay mortgages and utility bills? I am waiting for a neo-bitcoin banking solution and something like this would fit my needs and finally ditch fiat banks
Yes. There will be some quirks around what is possible and it will depend on the bank account you are using. What we are trying to do is work around existing bank accounts such that you can do YourExistingBankAccount+Caliber and get an experience that feels like a single unified bitcoin neobanking product in many respects.
The idea is we decrease friction by not forcing people to switch bank accounts, and we ensure there are no feature limitations. Even with many neobanks, they still have a minority of market share so building around the idea that people will want to keep their Chase / Wells Fargo / Chime, etc account.
We lose the ability to capture interchange on debit cards with this approach, but we might be able to partner with existing banks/neobanks that have existing distribution on the basis that we bring that customers that will bring interchange spend. I think we can make this better than what NYDIG is trying to do in terms of natively bringing bitcoin to banks e.g. they just announced a product that is purely price exposure without withdrawals.
The trend to open-banking and growth in web APIs may mean the best "integrated" products are those that are actually quasi-integrated separate products. If incumbent banks control the bitcoin buying/allocation experience, they will push people away from bitcoin since they make money on dollar deposits -- they will warn people about holding "too much bitcoin" (and probably discourage self-custody), whereas we will warn people about holding too many dollars.
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So when will the product be available? But based on your answers it sounds like a more sophisticated swan? Or am I missing something
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Targeting mid-September launch, though that's not a firm date. Will definitely have features not available on Swan, but we won't have the level of personalized customer service Swan and River focus on. So focusing on tech over hand-holding -- fine if people want the latter, but I think bundling it in an exchange leads to overpaying for it.