A college hackathon organizer here (and former high school hackathon organizer). This is so useful. Dealing with high school/university administration takes up an incredible amount of time. When it came to reimbursements, my university took months to pay back student organizers who paid out of their own pocket to buy last minute items.
This is a great example of a niche banking solution which is far better than any traditional bank can provide. I think we'll see a lot more of this as banking APIs become more available.
My company is working on similar problem and solution for youth sports teams and clubs which are also non-profits (formally or informally).
Thats awesome! The debit card solution and 501(c)3 eligibility that hack club presents is genius and so often overlooked in fledgling youth sports and organizations. I hope that ground.work can find a way for fringe sports and teams to also get their organization finances in order as many sports businesses tend to focus only on the main priority sports. (I run an ultimate frisbee organization)
>This is a great example of a niche banking solution which is far better than any traditional bank can provide
Seems to me it is a traditional bank offering the banking services...only in authentic Silicon Valley style its being marketed exactly as you describe, a non traditional bank disrupting the status quo.
> I think we'll see a lot more of this as banking APIs become more available.
Available to whom, though? Companies with millions of dollars of capital or VC money?
I've been asking for, in the past decade, is a read/write API access to my personal account. I can make it work from there myself, and I can do it better than the bank. Hell, even just read-only access would streamline my banking and solve 90% of the use cases I have in mind. But no, it didn't happen, and it's not going to happen.
And I suspect why: because web and mobile apps are first and foremost a way for the bank to upsell financial products.
Overall interesting, except I wonder how they manage to make it legal since basically no jurisdiction anywhere lets anyone under age sign legal contracts. So some adult somewhere is legally responsible, and if they are remote as this suggests, that's just asking for trouble.
This doesn't seem to include insurance, liability issues, etc.
Get a teacher at any public school in the USA to sponsor you (i.e. a school club), and suddenly the Public School System will handle ALL of this insanity for you, and ran through the schools bookstore(usually).
Plus they will eat all of the costs of running it, the insurance problems, the liability issues, etc. If you are under 18 and need this stuff, it's probably easier to just find a teacher to sponsor you and let them deal with all these headaches.
I imagine other countries have similar system(s) in place through their schools. It's not like "hackers" suddenly created these problems.
Parents co-sign contracts with students, but our contracts are designed to work elegantly with co-signers, different than similar programs. We're really just a modern fiscal sponsor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_sponsorship) designed for students that has a financial model that is still viable when project budgets are small (i.e. <$5K). We cut costs by writing software to do repetitive work, like producing basic financial reports, instead of hiring humans. You'd be shocked by some of the work fiscal sponsors do manually.
Student organizer teams assume liability for their events with our model, but we equip them with liability releases for attendees and have a relationship with a great insurance broker they can use to acquire insurance if needed.
You're right: some schools offer financial services, but they're often poorly managed due to lack of resources and are usually only available in well-off areas. Even then, most teachers and school administrators are already crushed by the burden of their workload and are hesitant to take on additional work, especially if it involves potential liability issues. There are probably students in this thread who have had that experience of being turned away—it's pretty common.
At my high school the teacher advisor of the school store also taught social studies.
In his class you could buy snacks, passes to get out of homework or pop quizzes, rights to sit on the couch, etc.
He also made us pick stocks and bring in cash so he could buy them for us and said we’d get the $$$ + any profits back when we graduated.
When we were seniors and asked for the cash from all those stock picks he acted like we didn’t know what we were talking about.
Years later he got fired for accidentally stabbing a student during a very realistic wagon train history unit.
This guy was really amazing. Before being a teacher apparently he owned a strip club in LA but claimed to be converted by evangelical christian protesters outside his club so he packed up and moved to Erie, PA to become a HS teacher.
This is the kinda guy you want handling your club finances. ;)
Ah, good to know, so you dump liability on the parent(s) heads, which is probably where it belongs anyway. I'm glad you aren't trying to do that yourself, especially remotely!
I'd be very surprised if a public school in the USA didn't offer such things, but I'm sure there is some school somewhere that exists just to prove me wrong! :). But I imagine it's a rare exception. Obviously charter schools and private schools are an entirely different mess, and I can't comment on them.
I know when I was a student (in a 80% people of color school) I had teachers sponsor my random events and things all the time, and it wasn't overly hard. You just have to have a good relationship with A teacher. I found my support in the "technology" dept, i.e. VICA and the other vocational groups. Even though nobody in that dept. did anything with computers, they didn't stop me from doing whatever I wanted. :)
Of course we never phrased the playing games event as playing games it was ... exploring 3d virtual worlds.. I believe we called it. :)
I happen to work in public education (90+% free/reduced lunch, so not a well off area) and I know the people that do the student finance stuff at the district level, they never say no, they just crunch the paperwork. I do know we sponsor all sorts of random stuff, including out of country travel for random things. So if a no is happening in "my" public schools, it must be at the local school/teacher level. But I agree I'm sure it happens. I'll have to go poke at them about that, see what I can do to help them get the local teachers/schools to say yes more often.
Public libraries are also a great way to get someone else to handle all the evil paperwork, but it's generally harder to get them to commit as they are always over-worked and not generally focused on school aged children, but if you happen to get lucky and can convince them your event/etc fits in with whatever their public outreach goals happen to be at the moment, they will do all the heavy lifting for you. Otherwise you can just rent out their space for your event (usually very cheaply) using something like what you do. Schools also rent space very cheaply, usually.
> Overall interesting, except I wonder how they manage to make it legal since basically no jurisdiction anywhere lets anyone under age sign legal contracts
This is a popular myth, but false; most US jurisdictions allow minors to form perfectly valid contracts, whether oral or written or otherwise, though such contracts, while they are still executory (that is, while some required obligation is still outstanding), are generally voidable by the minor until and unless ratified in adulthood.
This would be a real problem if credit cards were provided (though IIRC jurisdictions are mixed as to whether an unpaid financial commitment alone makes a contract executory), it's less of a problem with debit cards.
> Get a teacher at any public school in the USA to sponsor you (i.e. a school club), and suddenly the Public School System will handle ALL of this insanity for you, and ran through the schools bookstore(usually).
Perhaps, but...
> Plus they will eat all of the costs of running it, the insurance problems, the liability issues, etc.
If they agree to sponsor the activity. Which is why schools tend to have policies on the activities school clubs can engage in, based on what they are comfortable and experienced with handling, and which don't have uncomfortable administrative, liability, political, or other burdens.
And also why teachers, who often don't get paid extra to take on the role of club advisor, may not want to take the role on. Sure, if you are lucky you may have a teacher into the idea at your school, who d is willing to. You also may not. Or you may not want the activity to be limited to your school (especially if while there is interest in your area, it isn't concentrated on your school.) Getting a public school club to cover administrative, liability, etc., burdens for an activity not limited to the school’s students gets a lot harder.
You are correct, anyone of any age can sign a contract, but a contract in almost all states with an under-age person means basically nothing, not even the paper it's printed on. So yes, you can sign a contract as an under-age person, but the child is not bound to the contract until they reach an age of majority and also choose to be bound by it. I apologize for not being clearer. Which is why basically no one anywhere tries to get children to sign contracts, as it's generally just a waste of time. I know you said that, but your language wasn't very clear(to me at least), so I thought I'd make it much much clearer: Contracts with under age people in basically all US states are voidable by the child for any reason, at any time.
I.e. If I'm under age, and I get you to loan me $$$ for a computer, I promptly destroy it, return it, and claim I don't owe you any money anymore either, well most states would say it's your fault for being dumb enough to loan a child money and you are out the $$$'s you gave me, with no recourse.
I did say Sponsor. Yes, all schools have limits to what they will cover, and definitely as you say, if it's not limited to the student community (i.e. parents, etc) then it's likely to get scrutinized a lot more before being accepted for sponsorship, but plays, sports, etc are all generally open to the public and are sponsored by the school.
Most schools will also happily rent their space(s) after hours for a generally modest to small fee (say compared to going rate for rent from a business), since public schools can't make money at it.
Mostly unrelated question related to banks, does anyone know of banks that expose an api that owners of consumer checking accounts can use? Specifically to do things like read balance and recent transactions. What banks make this easy and have good documentation?
In the UK, Monzo has a fairly good API for reading your account details, balance and transactions. It's 'private access only' (can only access your account) https://developers.monzo.comhttps://docs.monzo.com
Banks have supported consumer-level API's since the 1990's. At first they were specific to Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money but now they have moved to OFX (Open Financial eXchange).
For your own bank, look to see if they support import into Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money. If they do, you can probably access the API directly yourself.
Note, you may have to pay a service fee to access the API. This will vary depending on the bank.
Haven't looked at this one, but these things usually ask for and store your login details, and then simply scrape the bank's own online banking site to serve it up as an API.
Because what else can they do? They have the same access you do. Unless you don't give them it, which you shouldn't.
Amazing! Young hackers I know have been so blocked by this problem. I don't think most people remember how suffocating it was be a high school student -- this will be a big change for so many young hackers I know.
Congrats guys, great execution! Surely this can and should be applied to all sorts of other school clubs/events down the road, I know it would have been incredibly helpful for the clubs I was in back then. But I’m always a fan of starting small and niche. :)
Most states have laws on the books that forbid you from calling your business a "bank," "pharmacy," or other restricted business unless it actually is. Simply doing so is enough to trigger regulatory intervention. I'm really surprised that they are advertising their services as the "Hacker Club Bank."
Then I finally saw a disclaimer at the bottom of one of the pages: "Hack Club does not directly provide banking services. Banking services provided by Silicon Valley Bank, an FDIC-certified institution."
Seems a little sleazy to me, but still, a neat service.
A college hackathon organizer here (and former high school hackathon organizer). This is so useful. Dealing with high school/university administration takes up an incredible amount of time. When it came to reimbursements, my university took months to pay back student organizers who paid out of their own pocket to buy last minute items.
This is a great example of a niche banking solution which is far better than any traditional bank can provide. I think we'll see a lot more of this as banking APIs become more available.
My company is working on similar problem and solution for youth sports teams and clubs which are also non-profits (formally or informally).
Thats awesome! The debit card solution and 501(c)3 eligibility that hack club presents is genius and so often overlooked in fledgling youth sports and organizations. I hope that ground.work can find a way for fringe sports and teams to also get their organization finances in order as many sports businesses tend to focus only on the main priority sports. (I run an ultimate frisbee organization)
>This is a great example of a niche banking solution which is far better than any traditional bank can provide
Seems to me it is a traditional bank offering the banking services...only in authentic Silicon Valley style its being marketed exactly as you describe, a non traditional bank disrupting the status quo.
> I think we'll see a lot more of this as banking APIs become more available.
Available to whom, though? Companies with millions of dollars of capital or VC money?
I've been asking for, in the past decade, is a read/write API access to my personal account. I can make it work from there myself, and I can do it better than the bank. Hell, even just read-only access would streamline my banking and solve 90% of the use cases I have in mind. But no, it didn't happen, and it's not going to happen.
And I suspect why: because web and mobile apps are first and foremost a way for the bank to upsell financial products.
Keep an eye on Monzo and Starling Bank who offer public APIs :)
Wouldn't that be a 501(c)(7) not type 3?
Even as a college hackathon organizer, bank accounts were a huge hassle that almost sank our event. This is incredible.
Every student should have the opportunity to go to a hackathon.
Infrastructure like this is crucial to increasing access.
Zach is killing it. Me and him had lunch about 3 years ago and to see this grow into something that is empowering hackers is heart warming.
High school hackers are one of the most under-appreciated technological innovators.
Fantastic discussion from 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417593
Congratulations on your launch!
Overall interesting, except I wonder how they manage to make it legal since basically no jurisdiction anywhere lets anyone under age sign legal contracts. So some adult somewhere is legally responsible, and if they are remote as this suggests, that's just asking for trouble.
This doesn't seem to include insurance, liability issues, etc.
Get a teacher at any public school in the USA to sponsor you (i.e. a school club), and suddenly the Public School System will handle ALL of this insanity for you, and ran through the schools bookstore(usually).
Plus they will eat all of the costs of running it, the insurance problems, the liability issues, etc. If you are under 18 and need this stuff, it's probably easier to just find a teacher to sponsor you and let them deal with all these headaches.
I imagine other countries have similar system(s) in place through their schools. It's not like "hackers" suddenly created these problems.
Parents co-sign contracts with students, but our contracts are designed to work elegantly with co-signers, different than similar programs. We're really just a modern fiscal sponsor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_sponsorship) designed for students that has a financial model that is still viable when project budgets are small (i.e. <$5K). We cut costs by writing software to do repetitive work, like producing basic financial reports, instead of hiring humans. You'd be shocked by some of the work fiscal sponsors do manually.
Student organizer teams assume liability for their events with our model, but we equip them with liability releases for attendees and have a relationship with a great insurance broker they can use to acquire insurance if needed.
You're right: some schools offer financial services, but they're often poorly managed due to lack of resources and are usually only available in well-off areas. Even then, most teachers and school administrators are already crushed by the burden of their workload and are hesitant to take on additional work, especially if it involves potential liability issues. There are probably students in this thread who have had that experience of being turned away—it's pretty common.
At my high school the teacher advisor of the school store also taught social studies.
In his class you could buy snacks, passes to get out of homework or pop quizzes, rights to sit on the couch, etc.
He also made us pick stocks and bring in cash so he could buy them for us and said we’d get the $$$ + any profits back when we graduated.
When we were seniors and asked for the cash from all those stock picks he acted like we didn’t know what we were talking about.
Years later he got fired for accidentally stabbing a student during a very realistic wagon train history unit.
This guy was really amazing. Before being a teacher apparently he owned a strip club in LA but claimed to be converted by evangelical christian protesters outside his club so he packed up and moved to Erie, PA to become a HS teacher.
This is the kinda guy you want handling your club finances. ;)
1 reply →
Ah, good to know, so you dump liability on the parent(s) heads, which is probably where it belongs anyway. I'm glad you aren't trying to do that yourself, especially remotely!
I'd be very surprised if a public school in the USA didn't offer such things, but I'm sure there is some school somewhere that exists just to prove me wrong! :). But I imagine it's a rare exception. Obviously charter schools and private schools are an entirely different mess, and I can't comment on them.
I know when I was a student (in a 80% people of color school) I had teachers sponsor my random events and things all the time, and it wasn't overly hard. You just have to have a good relationship with A teacher. I found my support in the "technology" dept, i.e. VICA and the other vocational groups. Even though nobody in that dept. did anything with computers, they didn't stop me from doing whatever I wanted. :)
Of course we never phrased the playing games event as playing games it was ... exploring 3d virtual worlds.. I believe we called it. :)
I happen to work in public education (90+% free/reduced lunch, so not a well off area) and I know the people that do the student finance stuff at the district level, they never say no, they just crunch the paperwork. I do know we sponsor all sorts of random stuff, including out of country travel for random things. So if a no is happening in "my" public schools, it must be at the local school/teacher level. But I agree I'm sure it happens. I'll have to go poke at them about that, see what I can do to help them get the local teachers/schools to say yes more often.
Public libraries are also a great way to get someone else to handle all the evil paperwork, but it's generally harder to get them to commit as they are always over-worked and not generally focused on school aged children, but if you happen to get lucky and can convince them your event/etc fits in with whatever their public outreach goals happen to be at the moment, they will do all the heavy lifting for you. Otherwise you can just rent out their space for your event (usually very cheaply) using something like what you do. Schools also rent space very cheaply, usually.
> Overall interesting, except I wonder how they manage to make it legal since basically no jurisdiction anywhere lets anyone under age sign legal contracts
This is a popular myth, but false; most US jurisdictions allow minors to form perfectly valid contracts, whether oral or written or otherwise, though such contracts, while they are still executory (that is, while some required obligation is still outstanding), are generally voidable by the minor until and unless ratified in adulthood.
This would be a real problem if credit cards were provided (though IIRC jurisdictions are mixed as to whether an unpaid financial commitment alone makes a contract executory), it's less of a problem with debit cards.
> Get a teacher at any public school in the USA to sponsor you (i.e. a school club), and suddenly the Public School System will handle ALL of this insanity for you, and ran through the schools bookstore(usually).
Perhaps, but...
> Plus they will eat all of the costs of running it, the insurance problems, the liability issues, etc.
If they agree to sponsor the activity. Which is why schools tend to have policies on the activities school clubs can engage in, based on what they are comfortable and experienced with handling, and which don't have uncomfortable administrative, liability, political, or other burdens.
And also why teachers, who often don't get paid extra to take on the role of club advisor, may not want to take the role on. Sure, if you are lucky you may have a teacher into the idea at your school, who d is willing to. You also may not. Or you may not want the activity to be limited to your school (especially if while there is interest in your area, it isn't concentrated on your school.) Getting a public school club to cover administrative, liability, etc., burdens for an activity not limited to the school’s students gets a lot harder.
You are correct, anyone of any age can sign a contract, but a contract in almost all states with an under-age person means basically nothing, not even the paper it's printed on. So yes, you can sign a contract as an under-age person, but the child is not bound to the contract until they reach an age of majority and also choose to be bound by it. I apologize for not being clearer. Which is why basically no one anywhere tries to get children to sign contracts, as it's generally just a waste of time. I know you said that, but your language wasn't very clear(to me at least), so I thought I'd make it much much clearer: Contracts with under age people in basically all US states are voidable by the child for any reason, at any time.
I.e. If I'm under age, and I get you to loan me $$$ for a computer, I promptly destroy it, return it, and claim I don't owe you any money anymore either, well most states would say it's your fault for being dumb enough to loan a child money and you are out the $$$'s you gave me, with no recourse.
I did say Sponsor. Yes, all schools have limits to what they will cover, and definitely as you say, if it's not limited to the student community (i.e. parents, etc) then it's likely to get scrutinized a lot more before being accepted for sponsorship, but plays, sports, etc are all generally open to the public and are sponsored by the school.
Most schools will also happily rent their space(s) after hours for a generally modest to small fee (say compared to going rate for rent from a business), since public schools can't make money at it.
2 replies →
Mostly unrelated question related to banks, does anyone know of banks that expose an api that owners of consumer checking accounts can use? Specifically to do things like read balance and recent transactions. What banks make this easy and have good documentation?
In the UK, Monzo has a fairly good API for reading your account details, balance and transactions. It's 'private access only' (can only access your account) https://developers.monzo.com https://docs.monzo.com
+1 for Monzo. The API works with their business accounts (in preview), too.
Worth noting it's opened up to regulated AISPs now too, so it's no longer only available for consumers to use to access their own information.
2 replies →
Banks have supported consumer-level API's since the 1990's. At first they were specific to Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money but now they have moved to OFX (Open Financial eXchange).
A partial list of banks that support OFX is here: https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settin....
For your own bank, look to see if they support import into Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money. If they do, you can probably access the API directly yourself.
Note, you may have to pay a service fee to access the API. This will vary depending on the bank.
Check out plaid.com (I have no affiliation)
It’s an api service that integrates with most major banks.
Haven't looked at this one, but these things usually ask for and store your login details, and then simply scrape the bank's own online banking site to serve it up as an API.
Because what else can they do? They have the same access you do. Unless you don't give them it, which you shouldn't.
1 reply →
Amazing! Young hackers I know have been so blocked by this problem. I don't think most people remember how suffocating it was be a high school student -- this will be a big change for so many young hackers I know.
Congrats on getting this launched Zach! I really enjoyed our talk and the vision. Still hope we can find a way to work together at some point!
Amazing work y'all - this is incredible and no doubt going to impact so many young hackers building things.
Congrats guys, great execution! Surely this can and should be applied to all sorts of other school clubs/events down the road, I know it would have been incredibly helpful for the clubs I was in back then. But I’m always a fan of starting small and niche. :)
Most states have laws on the books that forbid you from calling your business a "bank," "pharmacy," or other restricted business unless it actually is. Simply doing so is enough to trigger regulatory intervention. I'm really surprised that they are advertising their services as the "Hacker Club Bank."
Then I finally saw a disclaimer at the bottom of one of the pages: "Hack Club does not directly provide banking services. Banking services provided by Silicon Valley Bank, an FDIC-certified institution."
Seems a little sleazy to me, but still, a neat service.
Giving hackers bank accounts has a nice ring to it :D
I’m consistently amazed by what the Hack Club team is able to accomplish – amazing launch!
Is using the word bank allowed?
One more step towards youth liberation!