Planning to remove requirement to confirm bank account requests

[scooter-dangle]

Some of the original technical motivation for requiring account confirmations is gone (system originally didn't handle well users being both partner and bank users).

We are usually not on top of responding to account requests.

As a result, we're planning to trial allowing account creations without an admin confirmation starting November 20, 2022.

Posting here to see if there are strong objections to that (@seanmarcia, @armahillo, @dorner, @cielf, @awwaiid, @meg-gutshall).

[awwaiid]

Complete side note - "confirm bank account requests" made me think "uhm.... we have people register bank (as in financial institution like checking account) accounts?!"

[edwinthinks]

Yeh, it is a bit challenging in terms of language. @armahillo was talking bit about this in slack here - https://rubyforgood.slack.com/archives/C6WLZL0DD/p1668361672161809?thread_ts=1667830812.644249&cid=C6WLZL0DD

[edwinthinks]

My thoughts are that the problem of people incorrectly creating accounts is a lower-level problem than people not being able to get into the platform at all. Account Request was the first attempt to solve some of these problems but I suspect we can figure out other more clever tactics to avoid incorrect registrations (like partner accidentally registers as an organization/bank).

Here are some other ideas besides Account Requests that could address this without the overhead.

• We now ask for the NDBN number and if provided we can prompt the user to double-check if their organization already has an account.
• Allow people to incorrectly create accounts -- and just allow them to sit in our DB. There is generally no worry of taking up too much space in our DB.
• Redesign the registration flow to add a series of questions to ensure they are sure they want to register for an organization/bank account.

These are just some ideas to address the problems that Account Requests flow tries to address.

[cielf]

Do we care about the things that the manual review is addressing -- what I am doing is: Checking the combination of their description and their website to see if they they are an essentials bank that has partners. In a couple of cases, I've had to reach out and say "this probably isn't the best fit for you".

If we were to cut out the manual portion, we should punch up the wording on the process to make it very clear that it really is only a good solution for that narrowly-defined group.

It's a lot of effort to set up a human essentials organization -- it's a kindness, I think, to make sure that our product is what they need before they put in the work. Because it is time taken away from a) getting a solution that works for them, and from b) directly helping people -- and c) the people running a direct-distribution-only bank are probably volunteers.