Hey guys

I am seriously considering a Square Account Manager SMB role
Three things I wanted to know
By fully remote, does this mean you can leave your country and still work, as long as you work at the right times?
Also, is this role going to be safe for the next year or two? I know they had massive layoffs elsewhere in the company
Also, if you excel in this role, is the promotion timeline good? In particular could you get a shot at an AE role?

Thanks any info is appreciated

When people think about payment issues, they often imagine a full system outage.

Everything down. No transactions going through.

But in reality, payment systems rarely fail like that.

Instead, they fail in more subtle ways — and those can be even harder to deal with.

1. Partial Failures Are More Common Than Full Outages

Most payment issues are not total breakdowns.

They look more like:

• Some transactions going through, others failing
• Specific banks or regions experiencing higher declines
• Certain payment methods underperforming

From the outside, everything seems “mostly fine” — but performance is inconsistent.

2. These Issues Are Harder to Detect

A complete outage is obvious.

But partial issues can go unnoticed for longer because:

• There’s no clear “system down” signal
• Transactions are still being processed
• Problems appear scattered rather than centralized

This makes diagnosis more complex.

3. Customers Experience Inconsistency

From a user perspective, inconsistent behavior creates confusion:

• One payment works, another fails
• Retrying sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t
• Different payment methods behave differently

This unpredictability can reduce trust more than a clear failure.

4. Modern Payment Methods Add More Variables

With multiple payment options available, including:

• Credit and debit cards
• Digital wallets such as Apple Pay
• Mobile payments like Google Pay

there are more moving parts in the system.

Each layer introduces potential points of variation in performance.

Final Thoughts

Payment systems are designed for resilience, which is why complete failures are relatively rare.

But that resilience also means issues often show up as partial, inconsistent problems rather than clear outages.

And in many cases, those subtle issues can have a bigger long-term impact on customer experience and business performance.

Discussion

Curious to hear from others:

Do you think partial payment failures are harder to manage than full outages, or easier because the system is still running?

시장 변동성이 급증할 때 캐시아웃 API가 호출되면 계산된 기대 수익과 실시간 배당 간의 미세한 데이터 불일치 현상이 관찰되곤 합니다. 이는 과거 베팅 시점의 고정 값과 실시간 스트리밍 데이터가 연산되는 과정에서 발생하는 I/O 병목과 동기화 시차 때문입니다.

일반적으로 인메모리 DB와 스트림 프로세싱을 통해 최신 호가를 즉각 반영하지만, 찰나의 순간에 자산 가치가 변하는 환경에서는 근본적인 해결책이 필요합니다. 저희는 최근 루믹스 솔루션의 실시간 데이터 정합성 엔진을 도입하여 연산 오차를 최소화하고 있는데, 여러분은 데이터 무결성과 처리 속도 중 무엇이 더 본질적인 해결책이라고 보시나요? 실제 운영 환경에서 가장 효과적이었던 아키텍처 패턴이 있다면 공유 부탁드립니다.

Pretty much title lol.

My company has been doing pretty decent in our organic marketing the last year. AI overviews have wrecked us overnight and it's no longer just a blip in our analytics since the decline is steady. So, it's time to hire our first SEO agency!

Problem is, it's our first SEO agency and we are completely overwhelmed at the amount of options. You google something like "SEO agency" and 60 million companies are thrown at you.

So I figured maybe a better route would be asking this subreddit for suggestions. I'm looking for REAL suggestions. No one cares about your tacky grassroots reddit marketing. So please don't message me because those aren't even going to be read. But please keep in mind that an SEO agency with a direct fintech background is a massive desire. Just not sure if that exist how I think it does.

Appreciate your time!

Hey everyone

I'm validating an idea before building it. Need your honest feedback.

The Problem:

If you're building a budgeting app, expense tracker, or any fintech tool, you need to categorize messy bank transactions:

"AMZN MKTP US*2H4GP" → Shopping

"UBER *EATS" → Dining

"SHELL OIL 57441" → Transportation

Current options suck for indie developers:

• Plaid: Pay-per-API-call (pricing hidden until sales call, costs scale unpredictably)

• Ntropy: Enterprise sales process, custom pricing

• DIY with LLMs: Weeks of prompt engineering, ongoing maintenance, accuracy issues

What I'm Thinking of Building:

A simple, focused API that does ONE thing really well:

- Transaction categorization only (not a full banking platform)

- Flat $20/month for unlimited categorizations (predictable costs, no surprises)

- Stateless & privacy-first – your transaction text never gets stored

(you send → we categorize → we instantly forget)

- Fast & simple – REST API, JSON in/out, <200ms response

- 15+ smart categories – handles weird formats, ambiguous merchants, edge cases

 Why Flat Pricing?

Monthly Calls	Plaid (est.)	This API
500	~$15	$20
2,000	~$60	$20
10,000	~$300	$20

At scale, flat pricing makes way more sense. Plus you can budget accurately from day one.

 

Questions for You:

I need to validate if this is actually useful or if I'm solving a problem that doesn't exist.

1. Would you actually use this? (Yes/No/Maybe)

2. What's your use case?

(Personal finance app? B2B expense tool? Accounting software? Something else?)

3. What accuracy would you need to trust it?

(80%? 90%? 95%? 99%?)

4. Flat $20/month vs pay-per-call – which do you prefer and why?

5. What countries/banks do you need supported? (US? UK? EU? India? Global?)

6. Dealbreakers?

(What would make this useless to you? What features are non-negotiable?)

 

Be Brutally Honest:

- If this solves a real pain point for you → tell me

- If you'd switch from your current solution → tell me what you're using now

- If $20/month is too expensive for your volume → tell me what price works

- If this is a dumb idea → tell me why so I don't waste months building it

I'm NOT selling anything yet. Just trying to figure out if this is worth building.

If there's genuine interest (10+ people saying "I'd pay for this"), I'll build a working MVP and offer early access at 50% off for the first 50 users.

Thanks for your time! 🙏

 

Hi everyone, I’m hoping to get some real-world insight from folks who have worked in partnership, business development, or issuer relations teams at American Express or other major card schemes.

Quick background: I recently joined a Series B fintech and we’ve been trying to establish a partnership with a major card scheme for almost two years. Despite being well above the qualification thresholds for our region and having a very strong use case. Our requests keep getting passed around, delayed, or quietly ignored. We previously had a meeting with the head of the region but even that meeting was unproductive. I’m new to fintechs as a whole but i would guess this is due to politics, especially our key competitor has a great relationship with amex. I’d love to hear from people who have actually sat on the other side of the table or other startups that have experienced the same problem as us. How did you break this barrier down then?

A few specific questions:

• What does the partnership/issuer relations process actually look like inside Amex (or other schemes)?
• How do partnership teams prioritize or deprioritize fintechs?
• Are there common “unspoken rules” or internal barriers that make it hard for even qualified companies to get traction?
• Any practical advice on how to actually break through and get a real conversation started?

Thank you so much!

Every conference, every LinkedIn post, every announcement is AI this, AI that. But most fintech companies I see are still struggling with basic ops, bad onboarding, and integrations that barely hold together... Are we solving real problems or just chasing a trend?

I already had my interview yesterday and I was informed that I will be having a face to face interview in Makati. Just want to ask for advice what would it be like and how should I prepare for the face to face interview. Honestly I'm really nervous as this will be my first time having an interview that is face to face and I tend be all over the place when I got nervous. Really appreciate any advice for this upcoming interview.

Also, how was the working with Temenos now? What are the benefits provided? I read a positive and bad reviews online so I'm in 50 50 if I should go to Manila for this.

I’ve been realizing that a lot of stock research tools are good at giving you information, but not always good at helping you actually think through it.

You can pull up charts, ratios, analyst opinions, earnings updates, and now AI summaries everywhere, but a lot of it still feels disconnected. You see the data, but it does not always help you answer the bigger question of whether the business itself is actually strong.

For the people here who spend time doing real research, what do you feel most investing tools still do a bad job of helping you understand?

I’m not really talking about broker apps or trading features. More the actual research side and how you form conviction.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a small side project to improve my own research process around insider transactions and wanted to get some feedback from this community. The web app (called Shadow Insider) pulls recent insider trades from SEC filings and organizes them by company, insider, and transaction type. The goal is not to turn insider activity into a standalone signal, but to use it as a starting point for fundamental work – for example, noticing when management is buying into weakness and then digging into the underlying thesis.

It’s completely free to use and you don’t need an account to access the data; an optional login is only there if someone wants to save filters or favorites.

I’d really appreciate honest feedback from value‑oriented investors on whether a tool like this actually adds value to your research process, how you would integrate insider data into your workflow, and what you would change or improve to make it more useful for serious fundamental analysis.

If this sort of post is not appropriate here, I’m happy for the mods to remove it – my intention is to improve the tool based on the input of experienced investors, not to sell anything.

I am trying to build a fintech website related to credit cards and want to use real credit images but I cannot find the process to go about getting permission for using official images. does anyone have any idea about the process ?

Working through a case where a client switched bank accounts partway through the year, and it’s created a gap in the transaction history.

From a record-keeping/audit perspective, how are people handling this to keep things consistent?

Do you just stitch both accounts together in reporting, or is there a cleaner way to maintain continuity without creating confusion later?

The fintech sector markets itself around freedom and modern usability, yet the irony is clear - established users still face limitations that belong to traditional banking logic. Revolut implements static limits “for protection,” Wise follows complex compliance flow, while Keytom apparently designs dynamic limit management that learns from prior payments. It’s fascinating from a risk-model perspective but disappointing from user experience. In 2026, transaction flexibility should be standard for verified profiles. Developers talk about financial inclusion but hesitate to implement allowance logic realistically. Maybe fintech has matured in speed but not in real trust engineering.

How do others in this space see the solution to this balance between regulation and usability?

Building an agentic investment platform connecting global investors and the African diaspora to African capital markets (1,000+ waitlist users, zero paid CAC).

Pre-seed, no revenue yet.

I’ve been doing outreach for a few months and I’d love honest feedback on what’s actually working for people at this stage — not the generic “warm intros are king” advice, but the tactical stuff.

What I’ve tried:

∙	Warm intros through mutual connections (hit or miss — depends heavily on the connector’s relationship with the target)

∙	Cold emails with a very specific hook tied to the investor’s portfolio thesis

∙	Accelerator applications as a forcing function to get in front of funds

What I’m running into:

∙	Most angels with emerging market exposure are either too early-stage skeptical or too focused on the operator side (infrastructure, payments)

∙	VCs with emerging markets thesis often don’t have fintech conviction, and vice versa

∙	Regulatory chicken-and-egg: investors ask about licenses before committing capital, but licenses require capital

Genuine questions:

1.	For those who’ve raised pre-seed in niche/emerging market verticals — how did you frame the regulatory risk without killing the conversation?

2.	Is there a meaningful difference in conversion between cold LinkedIn vs cold email at this stage?

3.	Any communities or forums where angels with Africa/diaspora focus are actually active?

Based in Paris (Station F), incorporated in Delaware — building for a global diaspora with real investment appetite and no clean way to access these markets today.

Not looking to drop a pitch here — genuinely curious what’s worked (or failed badly) for others.

Been speaking with a number of fintech founders across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia about adding US stock trading to their platforms. The question that keeps coming up: build the brokerage infrastructure yourself vs partner with an existing SEC-registered broker-dealer.

Building it: 18+ months, $2M+, FINRA membership, net capital requirements, most teams underestimate this badly or partner wrong!

Partnering: faster, but you're dependent on someone else's reliability and support. We work on the partnership side at ChoiceTrade (registered BD), so obviously biased, but genuinely curious what others in this space are seeing. Is the partnership model gaining traction, or are more platforms trying to go direct?

Sure there were zip zaps (knuckle busters) for getting the card data, but then how was this data actually sent to the processor to the acquiring and issuing bank? Also, when did the payment processors start being the ones to issue the cards?