About a year ago, I opened a checking account at Simple.com and made a small deposit. I’d seen a lot of chatter about the new service and its plan to fundamentally change personal banking, and wanted to give it a try.
My experience was so-so.
On the positive side, I really, really appreciated the effort they put into the design of the user experience. They also did some interesting stuff like geo-tracking my debit card transactions. On the negative side, I missed basic things like being able to download monthly statements for reconciliation. And as someone who spends more time outside the US than in, I missed having access to foreign-transaction-free credit cards and fee-free foreign ATM access, like I get from other American banks.
At the end of the day, though, Simple seemed primarily intended as a personal-finance tool, helping people maintain goals and budgets—services I don’t personally need (as I do budget tracking elsewhere).
This week, realizing it’s been months since I’ve even logged into Simple, I decided to close my account. When I logged in, Simple showed my available balance as $5.72. Manually adding up my transactions, though, the balance came to $15.06.
When I emailed customer support, they reported that indeed my balance was $15.06, and speculated that the website is displaying the wrong balance since my account has been inactive for several months.
Hmmm, that doesn’t inspire much confidence!
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