Demon Bank

Indulge me for a post while I dream about a basic banking system. With the crap coming out of the Catfood Commission and the continued squeezing of lower income (and not so low income) consumers for their financial options, plus a nod towards the continual invasion of our privacy, I whiled away the evening pondering the possibility of the Demon Bank.

The Demon part of it refers to how it would be received by the Very Serious People and all of the monied elite. The premise of the bank is to introduce a baseline offering of banking services to the perpetually under- (and just plain un-) served portion of the citizenry who don't have tens of thousands of dollars just lying around to make them the desired customers of giving-you-the-business-as-usual banksters. The two markets this bank would compete against would be local payday loan outfits and regional and national mega banks with their massive ATM infrastructure. In both cases, the main objective is to reduce or remove charges for ordinary, low-risk transactions. The challenge is to not harm local banks and credit unions who are serving their communities well and who cannot leverage scale to distribute operating costs.