Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by malanj 3364 days ago
Founder here - let me know if you have any questions! More details at https://root.co.za/
9 comments

Fellow saffer here. I signed up for your beta yesterday and I am quite excited, I think this has the potential to become an absolutely amazing product.

As a developer, do you plan on having a market/app store where I can sell my "apps" to other root users?

Yes, it's definitely part of the plan. As you can imagine there are a few interesting security challenges etc to solve, but we're working hard on it.
Fellow South African here. How do I get in on the closed beta?
You can sign up to the waiting list at https://root.co.za/ We'll be sending more details to people on that list soon.
As a fintech developer super keen to get involved in this, and finally an excuse to learn Javascript. Fingers crossed.
This is great. I will definitely be using this soon. How long will it be before I can accept payments?
The account supports EFT payments already
Are there any mechanisms in place to prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot, e.g. unintentionally allowing access to their sensitive financial information or transferring money to someone because there's a bug in their code?
There are two ways we're dealing with that at the moment. 1) A sandbox mode to test code on, that simulates transactions without moving real money 2) The idea of "pockets", so you can attach code to a specific ring-fenced pool of money
Hi malanj,

Can you point on some use cases this may serve? Is the intention to allow mobile app developers to create e-wallet type apps. for the bank account? Or perhaps hook it up to e-assisstant such as Alexa?

We've actually done an Amazon Echo integration :-) So you can do things like check balance, or send money to a predefined set of contacts etc.

A lot of the use-cases getting interest seem to be related to spending management. E.g. company cards for everyone in a team that integrates with Slack. So when you spend on the card it notifies you, and asks you to submit the payment receipt directly on Slack.

- Hey, Echo, send two thousand rand to Mike

- Ok, sending twenty thousand rand to Mike

- Noooooooo! Two thousand

- Ok, also sending twenty thousand to Nolan

The first thing I thought of when seeing this was giving a card to each team member which allows for small purchases at specific partnered businesses - e.g. expensing lunch outings without most of the paperwork.
hey, this sounds like a really interesting service! I have a question - why did you choose to go for hosted JavaScript instead of an API/webhooks combination?
Hey beaconstudios, (other co-founder here), both are available. The hosted JS is to easily/quickly prototype small solutions without spinning up a separate server. We have webhooks for transactions and RESTful APIs as well :)
oh, brilliant!
I also signed up. I'm pretty excited to try it out. Would you be able to use root as a fully fledged bank account? Or is it not really meant for that?
Is this service available to other countries as well?
Not at the moment unfortunately
I'm with ABSA and FnB. Will it initially be only for Standard Bank customers or will you support other banks?
Hi sgt, Root will be available to all developers in South Africa, not locked to SB clients :)
And for the rest of the world? I always wanted such a kind of service, can't wait to use it.