My startup banking story (2023)

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.

I read the whole story and I'm still struggling to understand what you did wrong here. You indicated many times "I know, that was a mistake" (or similar phrases), but each time I was baffled because I saw no mistakes. It was your business, and you had every right to move around the funds within your account. What gives anyone at Chase the right to say diddly squat about how you manage your business' finances?

I don't think he was trying to imply that he did anything wrong. He was admitting the ignorance regarding how banks and banking work... plus acknowledging that a lot of readers will have had experiences that would make them think "Oh you young fool."

In 2022 I lost my business banking and had to shut down a business that I owned for 20 years because it was related to the adult entertainment industry and, despite being completely legal and aboveboard, a single wire transfer that got a little bit of scrutiny resulted in them asking questions about what we did and, knowing that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, I answered all of their questions truthfully and completely. A few months later I was told that we "fell outside of their risk appetite", our accounts were being closed... and for two months we searched for any bank or credit union in Canada but none would take us.

A lot of industry insiders had that exact reaction: "Are you stupid? Did you not know?! You NEVER admit that you're in this industry you moron!" etc. We even had a very sympathetic branch manager suggest that we re-incorporate, re-brand and hide what we do (a front, in other words). I couldn't do that. And I mean, we had no issues for 20 years. 10 of which were banking as a corporation (was personal accounts before that since we ran it as a proprietorship) and I thought that being in Canada we were pretty progressive. No one I told on a personal or professional level had ever cared. So why would the banks? We were lawful so why should they care?

Chargebacks. Tons of people buy porn on a card then later deny it when their SO finds the bill.

The industry is rife with this kind of fraud, and chargebacks represent tangible risk of financial loss, so banks just blanket ban working with certain industries.

People who sell precious metal jewelry for credit card payments are another.

That's why adult industry merchants are a thing, like CCBill. They have been around for decades and its kind of a non-issue. Can still accept Visa, MC, AMEX, etc.

source: used to run porn websites back in the early 00s.

How does something like CCBill stay in business when the card networks themselves have strict guidelines on chargeback rates that'll get you booted from the network?