andrewdietrich

M, one of the founders of Final here.

We agree there's nothing better than exceptional customer service and experience. We've built Final from the ground up as a new credit card issuer so that we can continue to enhance the technology, service, and experience. We need to make money somehow, and we think an annual fee is the best way to align with our customers.

We've spent 3 years to get to this point. We're now live and actively inviting people from our waitlist to apply for a card.

We talk to our customers often and ask them what they think about us. We will continue building and making it better. Here's what we've heard:

"The few people I’ve showed your service to so far have said “this is what we should have had all along” and I agree."

"Final just solved my XM radio problem. I've been trying to cancel XM for a year. Each month I dispute their charges, Amex credits my money back.. but Amex would never just BAN them from charging me. Generated new final number, added to XM, then froze account. Boom."

"Final is one of the best banking products I've ever used. You guys could have sat back on your haunches and only delivered the cool feature of generating cards, but the well-designed phone app, the card, and your great customer service make every other card I have in my wallet pale in comparison. I reach for the final card to make daily payments not because of rewards points, but because I see the receipt immediately and I'm able to instantly dispute the charge if necessary. I don't know if there's such thing as 'credit card anxiety', but something about that gives me so much peace-of-mind. Thank you for creating a great product!"

And our favorite: "You guys fking killed the UX experience. The site is a pleasure to use."

Lots of issues with dynamic CVV. Dynamic card number makes more sense, which is how we solved at Final (YC W15). Available in the US today: www.getfinal.com

See the bottom of their website - Customers Bank

I think this calls for a planting trees as a service company. Ideally delivered via drones. Talk about efficiently planting the trees needed ;)

Awesome! We hope you'll try us out.

I'm happy to say that we're not vaporware. We're partnering with a bank that provides all of the pieces you mentioned. Our model is similar to that of Simple, which partnered with Bancorp Bank to launch their product.

Absolutely, virtual cards have been around for years. But we've researched the space extensively and did not find a product we like or could use consistently. So we built Final. Some of the better products out there exist for customers outside of the US.

On collections - if you sign an agreement to pay and you don't make a payment, you run the risk of that going to collections. However, many monthly subscriptions have you prepay and charge you without your direct consent. There are many unscrupulous businesses out there, and it's easy to put a simple control over those charges to limit your exposure and the "grey charges" on your statement that are tough to get rid of.

We make money when our customers are happy. Yes, we still make money the traditional way - via transaction fees and interest on debt. But we make a lot more money if we have millions of happy customers - we can't win this market if we treat our customers like every other bank.

We're building this product for ourselves and for our friends first. And many of them are unhappy with how banks treat customers and optimize for fees and increasing debt.

We don't think encouraging conspicuous consumption is the only way to be a successful credit card company.

This is what we've wanted for a while, and exactly the product I'm working on right now. It's called Final. We can deliver one-time use numbers via our mobile app, and pay via NFC or our standard EMV card.

We're working on this exact headache, and we believe it's a killer app. Plastc can't solve this problem for you - the moment your card is swiped or entered into a merchant form, it's vulnerable to being stolen and can't be solved with a "remote wipe." What's needed is the ability to make payments with multiple numbers. To silo your merchant relationships and restrict how a number can be spent. And to also to deactivate your physical card when you're far away from it. Never go through a painful get-a-new-card procedure again. We're called Final, and we're launching tomorrow. We'd love your thoughts.

I've been talking to Visa's tokenization team and several payments experts over the last few weeks about this exact topic. Currently, TSPs are only the card networks. In the future, the big banks and the payment processors will also take on TSP responsibility. It is unlikely that other actors will take on this role, given the requirements and players involved. The role that's more likely to allow for innovation is the Token Requestor role - which virtual wallet providers and e-commerce merchant / merchant processors can play a part. Even this role will require a decent amount of scrutiny in terms of the ability to identify the validity of a transaction, which is ranked on a 0-99 scale. Very interesting future for payments.