You've described a big part of why I hate startup culture. "Let's build cool thing then sell it to a huge company and get rich." I'm never doing it again, such a waste of time and energy.
Simple selling to BBVA was shit. Simple was never my main bank, but it was a nice, simple service. That was free. Then they moved to BBVA, which almost immediately got bought up by PNC, and then PNC started charging monthly fees. Closed my account before the first fees hit.
I still have a Varo account. Surprised that hasn't gotten vacuumed up yet by one of the traditional banks.
Canada has had e-transfer for ages. You can securely transfer cash to anyone in the country using their email address or phone number. If you have auto-deposit enabled it's instant, too.
Oh, and it's free. It only costs money if you use the e-transfer system to request money from someone (for obvious reasons.) And even then, it's only like $1ish.
The US not having a system like that is frankly ridiculous.
Ugh, I miss Simple so much. I was alright with ONE until they stripped the virtual card function from pockets... What is the actual point of Pockets now if I have to transfer the money directly back to my main checking area??
Have you found any other decent online-centric banks to switch to? I've been wanting to switch away from ONE for pretty much the reasons you listed, but through a basic search I didn't see anything else to was too appealing to me.
And the 2FA thing is ridiculous, at one point they didn't actually have the email option (or it was very well hidden) - had a bit of a rough month at some point and wasn't able to pay my phone bill which got it suspended, I also happened to have my card locked and got kicked out of the app so... I couldn't unblock my card to pay the phone bill, which I needed to get the 2FA code to login in... Ended up having to reach out to support and they were able to show me how to request a 2FA code over email.
This wouldn't even be a problem with most sites because I always use TOTP/Webauthn via my Yubikey when I have the option, and for something as critical as my bank account I really do not want SMS/Email to be an option for 2FA (I get why they have it, but I'd like to be able to turn it off for my account).