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Starting a different kind of bank

Matt Mullenweg details his thoughts about the hypothetical SafeBank. A bank that’s not high-return but therefore rock-solid safe, that offers “amazing white-glove service to the initial customers” to build loyalty, that is completely online to eliminate fixed costs and risk of robbery, with a website that has an “old-time vintage design aesthetic combined with a Google-like simplicity”.

Existing banks couldn’t compete in a traditional way because they have such a sordid history of customer apathy and bad PR. SafeBank wouldn’t be trying to capture their profits, it would largely be destroying them and making much smaller amounts of money in non-traditional bank ways. It would be somewhat like a credit union, but for the masses.

Matt Mullenweg has had big ideas before, of course. One of them was WordPress.