Exploring Discord in the context of trying cutting edge apps + my excitement around the FinTech "money routing" platform, Sequence
What is a dollar, but a variable stored in a database you trust, surrounded by a ton of governance rules?
In this issue:
An invitation to join the Full Backlog Discord
Early excitement around the FinTech platform, Sequence
Both of these sections are intended for a technical power-user audience, rather than exclusively a software developer audience. As you’ll see, Sequence is a no-code platform with an API if you want to extend it with code.
An invitation to join the Full Backlog Discord
Are you a Discord user, or like myself, Discord-curious?
Use this link to join the “Eszett” Discord Server, which has a #full-backlog channel:
What is Eszett? It’s the German double-s character “ß” as in “Buße” and also the nascent parent brand over Full Backlog. In this context, you could think of it as an ephemeral design studio.
I will admit that I am still getting used to Discord. It’s very interrupt-driven, and requires me to mute a lot of notifications. But there’s also a ton of great content on Discord servers. Niche communities that at one time would have been found on USENET. How I miss the hey days of rec.toys.lego in the time before the World Wide Web!
At the same time, if you’re digging deep into a new app, platform, or framework — especially if they are practicing “modern” methods of product management & developer engagement — there’s a good chance you’re going to be jumping into a bunch of Discord servers. I don’t hate it, but it can get very overwhelming. At the end of the day, it’s great if you’re curious about something you don’t understand. There is a high chance if you engage on Discord within community norms, you’ll get a lot of help.
Discord also gets a bad rap in the press. Like many open communication platforms, there is often debate around the role of the platform operators as censors of the “speech” on “their” platforms. This gets played out in the popular press, who I don’t think do a good job of differentiating between incel white-supremacists and my daughters who have a three-years-running D&D campaign with their friends. To much of the popular press, “Discord, bad.”
I’m not going to go much deeper on that other than to acknowledge that I try to practice a lot of dialectic thinking, I always try to “separate the art from the artist” and I am a staunch supporter of free speech, and am anti-prior-restraint.
If anyone says they can’t separate the art from the artist, please comment below with your top 10 favorite books, movies, and songs/bands, and let’s have a discussion about that.
The Discord community I’m currently exploring is the one for the FinTech startup, Sequence…
What is Sequence, “the Financial Router”?
It’s like Zapier for money, with some extra features to help navigate the regulatory and security complexities involved.
The direct link to their website is getsequence.io, and here is a $25-to-you/$25-to-me referral link that has 10 invites on it at the time of this posting.
I’m only going to cover at a very high level what Sequence is, because they have good documentation and a zero-signup playground. This video is a great <2 minute explainer:
There’s also an elegant how Sequence works page.
Now, consider this diagram:
See that “💰 10% to Savings”? That’s what Sequence calls a “Pod”:
What are Pods?
Pods are internal checking accounts within Sequence. They are used to separate and collect funds for specific purposes. You can use them to save for your next vacation, set up an emergency fund, or set aside money for taxes. Each Pod has a virtual debit card associated with it, allowing you to spend money directly from your Pod.
Thus, each Pod implicitly creates:
A unique account number with a routing number to Sequence’s partner bank
A (virtual) debit card number
If you are familiar with things like ACH and automatic credit card payments, you might recognize these as ways to get money in and out of a financial system.
What is a dollar, but a variable stored in a database you trust, surrounded by a ton of governance rules?
Sequence solves for input, output, and organized storage of those variables in a way that maintains the underlying literal monetary value of that variable.
Oh yeah, they also have an API.
And of course, a Discord Server.
Why am I so excited by this?
Because I spent a little over two years at Capital One wanting to build this, but we ultimately built something else.
In early 2014 I was recruited to join Capital One as a Digital Product Manager, where I was the first developer evangelist they hired for their just-out-of-the-Lab REST API re-platforming project. That’s a story for another day, but at SXSW in March 2016 we were running a successful internal developer program, had completely reset the developer culture inside the enterprise, and launched the first modern public developer platform for a North American bank — Capital One DevExchange.
At that time we managed to launch with a suite of APIs largely tailored largely toward partner relations — think Rewards/Points balances and faster/more accurate credit card pre-qualification.
We also launched with a Create Savings Account API. I think the reason we went with savings accounts was because the regulatory requirements for account opening were/are slightly less complicated because you can accept the deposits, but unlike a checking account, you don’t have to let the customer take the money back out right way – so you can slow play some of the Know Your Customer and related checks.
That API doesn’t appear to be on the list of APIs currently being offered by CapitalOne.
Internally we were also working on a lot on Money Movement APIs. Given the nature of a bank that had big growth spurts via acquisitions, being able to programmatically move money around the various legal entities was extremely powerful.
What I wanted was Money Movement For the People – and it became apparent to me that is not what my employer wanted to build.
That’s what Sequence is.
If it’s something you have a need for, or are even personally comfortable with, is of course up to you.
Me? I am extremely excited to explore this platform and try out some ideas that until this point have never made it off the back of a napkin! I look forward to sharing more in the future…
Does it spark your curiosity? I’d love to hear what you think! I’m also interested to hear from anyone using other consumer-level money movement platforms.
Love Sequence so much. Thanks for this post Chris