Simple

» see simple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed simple. wrong region, the product required a us social security number to open an account and was settled through a us partner bank. by 2009 when josh reich was founding it in brooklyn i was 25, working in turkey, settling salary through a garanti account. simple's pitch made sense to me as an idea, a bank ui that did the budgeting math for you and told you what you could safely spend after rent plus bills. it was just a product i could not actually open.

josh reich founded the company in december 2009 in brooklyn with shamir karkal as cfo and alex payne on the technical side (the original name was bankSimple). it took until july 2012 to launch publicly. the structural trick was that simple did not have a bank charter. it ran customer accounts through bancorp bank and later through bbva compass, the simple brand on top was a fintech wrapper, the actual deposits sat on a partner balance sheet. that was the move every us neobank since has copied, chime through varo through current through dave. simple was the one that drew the template.

by july 2013 simple had 40,000 customers and over $1 billion in annualized transaction volume. bbva, the spanish bank with a us subsidiary called bbva compass that had been simple's partner bank from 2011 onward, bought the company outright in february 2014 for $117 million. josh reich stayed for a couple of years, shamir karkal went on to other ventures later. alex payne had already left by the acquisition.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the brand simple built between 2012 and 2015 was unusual for a financial product, a clean website plus a clean app, no banner ads, no fee schedules buried in 80-page pdfs. the savings goals feature was the highlight. you set aside money for each commitment, the app showed your safe-to-spend number after subtracting the goals. for the cohort of us 30-somethings who had previously been on mint or had only banked with chase or bank of america, simple felt like the first checking account that had read a software design book.

inside bbva the integration ran cold from the start. the bbva tech stack was running on bbva's compass core banking system in birmingham alabama. simple's tech stack was on aws in portland oregon. by 2017 the integration had become the main work item for the team and the product feature pace had slowed. former employees would later describe the bbva years as a slow conversion of simple from a software company into a bbva digital channel, the original founders had all left by 2018 and 2019.

~ what got buried with it ~

in november 2020 bbva announced it was selling its us subsidiary bbva usa to pnc for $11.6 billion. simple's place in that deal was unclear. on january 7 2021 bbva sent emails to simple customers telling them the brand would be shut, accounts would be migrated to bbva usa checking, and the migration would close by mid-2021. the formal shutdown date was may 8 2021, simple.com was redirected, customers became bbva usa customers and then pnc customers on the deal close.

the broader category that simple invented in the us went on without it. chime had reached around 12 million accounts by 2021 and varo had won its own bank charter the previous year. the template simple had drawn was running at much larger scale on a half-dozen competitors. the lesson simple's death printed was the one the venture-bank-acquisition pattern keeps reprinting, that the value of the brand is not in the founders signing the deal, it is in the operating loop, and after the operating loop is folded into a regional bank's core banking system there is not much brand left to redeem. simple's design language showed up in dozens of fintech apps afterward, the company that wrote it was already gone.

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