Funny to see this pop up again (I'm the author). The year is now 2025 and I still use Chase as a personal bank and I'm now discovering new funny banking behaviors. I'll use this as a chance to share. :)

My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.

As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.

Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.

Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.

This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.

I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.

Once upon a time my wife went to close a bank account in Italy.

She went to the post office which is also a bank in Rome. She asked to closed her account. She was told that she needed to go to the branch where she opened her account in Florence.

We rented a car and drove to Florence.

When we arrived at the bank in Florence, the teller informed us that we would have to come back “domani” which is Italian for tomorrow because the only person who could help us was the banker who had originally opened the account for my wife when she was a student many moons ago.

We came back the next day and met the banker who immediately recognized my wife including recanting that she was an artist. He informed her that he could not close her account, she would have to speak to the Director of the bank.

We waited in line for the director of the bank but we were told it was too close to the end of the day and the bank was out of money so we’d have to come back… Domani.

Domani arrived and my wife again waited. The Director willfully ignored her for 2 hours and it wasn’t until my wife began to cry that the Director finally called her over and allowed her to close her account.

This for €2500. That was a balance that meant a lot to us at the time.

I will never forget banking in Italy.

During COVID, I took a major haircut in my day job, and ended up doing a lot of side work to stay solvent. All my banking was with Chase; I setup a new checking account for my side work. One day they just took about $900. No matter who I spoke to, they bounced me around and never gave me an answer why. I can only guess there was a fraud trigger or something, but to this day, I've never gotten the money back or even gotten an answer as to what happened. I'm fortunate enough in life that $900 isn't a big deal, but at the time, it was HUGE. As a result, I will never, never do business with Chase again (and it would be very convenient, given how many branches I have around me)

When I was an American PhD student in Zurich, none of the Swiss banks would accept me—except the official post office bank. This was due to the stringent FATCA laws, which made U.S. citizens too burdensome for the traditionally privacy-centric Swiss banks.

Within the first few months, I accumulated around 40K CHF in salary that the university owed me (technically from the Swiss government, since researchers were federal employees). Eventually, the university emailed me to ask if I’d like to pick up my money in cash (Bargeld). Apparently, this wasn’t uncommon.

One day I went to the office to collect it. They asked which denomination I preferred (I assumed 20s or 100s). I asked for a mix, and they handed me several envelopes filled with 1,000 CHF notes and smaller bills. I distinctly remember carrying multiple envelopes. At one point, as I walked back to my office on top overlooking Zurich, a gust of wind blew behind me. I turned around and saw colorful 200 CHF and 1,000 CHF notes scattered along the road. I calmly walked back and picked them up.

For a few months, I paid my rent and groceries entirely in cash. The Swiss didn’t think anything of it—in fact, it was fairly common. Eventually, I was able to open an account and received a yellow two-factor authentication device that looked like an old calculator. I deposited the rest of the money and, for the remainder of my studies, used the “yellow calculator” to pay bills online by debit. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQhylNX...

I never did receive an official Swiss credit card which was fine. However, I did accumulate funds a Swiss 401K which is another story unto itself.

Amusing to read this and think back on GitHub's seed round ($100M). At the time we just had a small business account from Bank of America... going from relatively thin cushion in the account over the previous few years to suddenly dropping in $100M was pretty amusing. I believe we moved to a more sophisticated setup quickly thereafter.

> Ultimately, there was no long term negative impact of the events that transpired (except maybe for Alex, but I truly don't know) and I can now look back on it with amusement.

So a software guy who didn't understand people or banking opens an account at Chase. And a guy from Chase who didn't understand people or software calls him-- repeatedly over years-- and fails to ever connect on any human level whatsoever. Now when first guy withdraws millions from Chase, he unwittingly causes the second guy to lose his job. This means the the second guy isn't around to help the first guy when he needs him the most-- to help him navigate banking fraud on that same account.

This just seems tragic. Second guy's success as a banker and first guy's ease of mind as a customer were inextricably linked. Yet neither of them knew how to form the simple social bond of two 4 year-olds playing in the same sandbox.

Seriously-- how did Chase not hand the account to someone who could connect with this guy? For a multi-million dollar account this just doesn't pass the smell test.

> I never told them what my business does or what I'd use the money for.

This stuck out to me. I'm in the process of opening a bank account in Singapore for a newly registered company, and boy is it difficult.

Hour-long KYC interview. Details of what the business does. Anything remotely controversial could be a red flag. They want to hear about boring B2B services. They want to see evidence of customer communications or contracts, so they can see you're a legit business and not a shell company. This is very difficult for a company that hasn't started operating yet. Why would I start operating without banking? How can I show business activity before commencing operating?

By comparison, I've opened business accounts in both AU and the US without hassle.

I also don't understand banking. "Do you need help?" when I'm making a deposit, or when my investments are set a certain way?

Here's a better idea, guys. Tell me your value proposition. How can I get access to your luxury box? Will you lend me money at ultra-low rates? How about a free toaster? Anything?

The author imagines that all readers obviously know why his actions were so wrong.

My understanding of banks is much like his naive version. So what's the more enlightened understanding?

Whenever I move significant sums into my bank account, I guarantee that my bank is going to do an "Alex" call. I can also guarantee that there is no freaking way I am going to do a call with some rando not already in my contacts to discuss my financials. I really don't know why banks don't understand this.

Chase is not the only offender but they are unhilariously, shockingly bad at this: if you do a large transfer, they will sometimes cancel it unilaterally and without warning because of their fraud detection. And then they'll call you, but the dude speaking won't know anything about your account and ask you about what you just did. "We are clean on opsec" is very much not the vibe.

Lest this be just me moaning, Fidelity gets it right. When you log on you can see who your banker is and how to reach them. A real human with a phone! And that person is the one who calls you, emails you, and you can set up a call/mtg with, so you don't have these random calling you.

Discussed at the time:

My startup banking story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157959 - March 2023 (257 comments)

I had the same experience at Citibank. We started at a small branch in downtown LA with our Series Seed round check for $3M. Even then we barely got any attention, and dealt with just a local branch manager. Later we closed $7.5M, still no attention; except this time due to consolidation we were kicked to a regional team that handled our account as a team. In fact we never had a dedicated banker, we were just handled like so many SMB by calling a banking center. Over the years we asked for things like corporate credit cards and the like, but it always seemed we were just a little too small (I guess with Fortune 50 clients, we were small to them). Anyway we eventually moved to a smaller independent bank for different reasons.

Semi-interesting, but it felt like it was leading up to something big or interesting knowledge all the way up to the end.

Seems like it could have been way shorter, the plot is essentially "Deposited more and more money into a local Chase branch, made some guy named Alex a rising star. They called once in awhile, not sure why. Moving lots of money around isn't super straightforward."

Chase sucks so bad, I would spend a lifetime encouraging anyone to bank elsewhere. I know Mitch is nice enough to say Chase wasn't the problem, but their "controls" are so archaic it makes doing business with them a chore and not a pleasure.

Would have been interesting to read what the author would have done differently with what he learned.

You create a startup -> Do you need to do anything special with regard to the bank you chose?

Chase Bank Story time -

We sold our company in 2020. Anticipating the wire I decided I needed to upgrade to a big boy bank from my small regional bank that I've been using since I was 16.

What finer institution is there than J.P. Morgan Chase? I opened an account with them. I called them telling them there was going to be a larger than average transfer. I put in $500 to "warm up" the account (stupid in retrospect).

Acquisition goes through. Champagne for everyone. I try to login to look at the funds and my account has been closed. I call Chase and ask them "wtf?"

They say there's been fraud in the account. We've closed it. We will mail the check to your address. So I'm thinking they're going to mail me my acquisition funds over check?? FML. 24 agonizing hours and 10 calls to them later (all leading nowhere), I eventually got the funds to be wired to my original regional bank lmao. No thanks to Chase, this was all because of PNC who was in charge of the acquisition.

This is probably my fault for using a new account like this (I think someone told me to use a large bank or something I don't remember), but I will forever hold a grudge against Chase.

P.S. I never got back my $500 that they stole from me

Favourite part of this story is how the casually realise there's $1M in funds sent from customers that they didnt notice.

Quite happy with Mercury. I had really terrible experiences with Chase and will never give them my money again.

Great read - as a young startup with Chase, this is an interesting story. As Mitch says, this isn't inherently an issue with Chase, but interesting bank behavior. I'll be sure to keep this story in mind, if we ever get to these amounts of cash!

So let's say a startup was funded through a Chase bank account and now everyone on this thread is saying "yeah don't do that"...

Let's say that a friend of mine has a startup funded account at Chase, and where should they go?

I'm not sure I understand why there's anything wrong, strange or embarrassing about what the author did?

Can some finance person tell me why the author feel they did did in not smart ways and maybe made some mistakes?

One of the more frustrating things in life are cleaning up novice mistakes from people who should know better.

I wonder why the investors didn't at least do some due diligence into where the money was being stored?

This was a super-interesting read, but I'm disappointed there isn't a description of what, exactly, was wrong about what he did, and what one should do instead. The only thing that comes to mind is the obvious one: you don't want more than the FDIC limit in a single bank account.

I’m curious why this company raised money, only to park it in a bank account? What was the raise for?

Would never thought there is so much money to be made in cloud services.

One man run on the bank!

What banks are recommended for startups if not chase?

I too have a “Chase is pathological and untrustworthy” business banking story.

https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/

I finally just closed all my accounts there. It feels great. Fuck Chase.

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