- OUCH! British Airways Massively Devalues Partner Award Pricing Without Warning For The 2nd Time In Half A Year, Here Is The New Hidden Award Chart And A Workaround For Lower Pricing by Dans Deals.
- What Happens When Your Bank Isn’t Really a Bank and Your Money Disappears? by NYT. FDIC is changing the rules so these institutions can’t advertise FDIC insurance but that doesn’t go into effect until 2025.
- JetBlue Plans “Mini Mint” First Class Throughout Fleet by OMaaT.
- InterContinental Ambassador price is increasing in October 2024. Will cost $225 or 45,000 points.
Deals starting/expiring at the end of today or starting today (view the full deal calendar here):
- [NH, FL, MA, RI, CT, DE, NY, NJ, or PA, In Branch] Santander $500 Business Checking Bonus
- Fandango: Free Ticket To See Movie Touch (2024) With Promo Code TOUCH
- Kroger: Purchase Two $100 Visa/Mastercard Giftcards & Get $8 Discount
Deals starting/expiring at end of tomorrow:
Popular posts from yesterday:
Want to workaround the BA devaluation w/ QR, but their website is all sorts of broken. Can’t even get past the “verify your email” step. What a joke
The NYTimes article is paywalled. What banks are at risk??
British Airways, not Bank of America.
The NYTimes article is about the second item about “banks that aren’t really banks”, not about the first item about British Airways.
The British Airways article is at Dan’s Deals (not paywalled), not at NYTimes.
I’m 99% sure this relates to some fintech “banks” that tell you your money is in trad banks but they’re the ones that distribute your money as a middleman. There’s plenty of news lately on people with no access to their funds with various fintechs.
If you’re going direct to a bank with funds, probably no issues or concerns, but fintechs offer that sweet, sweet higher APY in plenty of cases.
So would something like Robinhood be the equivalent?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/business/synapse-bankruptcy-fintech-fdic-insurance.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6E0.qNGS.Ef-QJnpc8Qrw&smid=url-share
Unlocked link…
My take: The online companies having issues r not true banks. These r online companies (fintecs?) that are ‘banking alternatives’ that take your money and supposedly manages/puts them in a variety of real fdic banks for you, like maybe chasing the highest yields. Because ur $ supposedly gets deposited into a real fdic bank eventually, these companies advertise FDIC protection. In this story, these pseudo bank companies like Yotta hired a middleman company Synapse to do all the bank managing/bank shuffling for them. So 2 layers of middlemen between a customer & the final real fdic bank. But Synapse declared bankruptcy, and perhaps misappropriated 100mil of funds they were supposed to deposit in real banks for customers. FDIC protection does not apply because no FDIC banks went bankrupt — just a middleman who was supposed to deposit customer funds into FDIC banks for you. So the customers have lost their $: the original pseudo bank companies like Yotta(the 1st middleman) says not their fault, they gave $ to Synapse to be deposited; Synapse(the 2nd middleman) went bankrupt; and the end FDIC bank(s) (like Evolve) said they don’t have/weren’t given the customers’ $.
Bottomline: make sure the ‘bank’ u put ur $ in is a real bank, not a company that purports to put ur money into a variety of fdic banks to get higher interest rates, etc. This ‘bank’ is not regulated or insured, and is like giving a random stranger on the street $ to deposit into a real bank for you. These r all online companies. But real brick & mortar banks do still have online banking, and real online-only FDIC banks do exist too (Ally, CIT, Synchrony, etc), so it’s not an ‘online banking is fraud/evil’ thing. Do ur own due diligence. Cut out the middlemen & deposit straight into a real fdic bank, be it brick & mortar or online-only.
Sounds like the fidelity cash management account. They just put the money in Citi and other banks to get the fdic insurance. Doubt fidelity will crash and burn though.
Fidelity is a big financial firm. I think they are federally regulated, have all kinds of fiduciary requirements, and also potentially carry insurance in case there are any Fidelity bad actors. I believe they deposit customer funds themselves into FDIC banks — they don’t give customer funds to a (questionable?) middleman to invest into FDIC banks for them. Fidelity is probably fine.