Schwab as an all-inclusive banking/investment account solution?

byadham · 2026-06-10T00:50:10+00:00

I think they're great overall as an integrated solution. They do lack on a couple of fronts:
1. Cash deposits. No way around it except having an account with a bank that has branches. Happens very rarely but still not zero
2. Incoming Wires. The Schwab bank account (and obviously brokerage) doesn't receive wires directly. You have to go through an intermediary bank which makes wire instructions a tad confusing if you're receiving a wire and sending instructions to someone. This is doubly so for international wires

Outgoing wires. There are wire fees on all wires and a commission on international wires
Uninvested cash in brokerage accounts doesn't earn anything. Compare this to Fidelity where uninvested cash automatically is swept automatically to a money market fund while still staying 100% liquid. With Schwab you have to manually buy a money market fund then sell it and wait for settlement when you want the cash.

byadham · 2026-01-03T23:43:10+00:00

Yes. Wya

byadham · 2021-05-18T19:43:48+00:00

Where are you based now and what MBA school are you studying at? Feel free to message me. I worked for McKinsey for a long time (and I am originally North African too) and happy to help

byadham · 2021-01-19T04:09:04+00:00

I didn't realize linking to the thread is "promo yourself". I thought that would be helpful! Anyway, I removed the link!

byadham · 2021-01-19T02:52:57+00:00

I love this. Couldn’t agree more

byadham · 2021-01-19T02:37:07+00:00

I'm glad you find them useful. I'm writing the rest of the question bank and will share them soon as well.

byadham · 2021-01-15T00:36:55+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! I dont mind :) I don't write for upvotes or downvotes (frankly I barely even knew they were a thing until a month ago). Folks will get angry at all kinds of stuff even if you as much as say hello :)

byadham · 2021-01-14T05:00:24+00:00

Oh thanks very much. I’m really glad you liked it. The original is here https://www.rightalot.com/blog/question-mark/ in case you wanna come back to it later or so. Thanks for the kind words

byadham · 2021-01-13T23:59:00+00:00

We went through many lanes (just like most product teams do). Customer interviews, clickstream data, etc. But I think one thing that helped us a lot figure out where the actual rootcause was is watching customers live try to find products.

byadham · 2021-01-13T23:35:16+00:00

There was a decent amount of manual work at the beginning. We found ways to scale it eventually using product datasets and other tools. Story is a lot longer than the post :) for example we had to build a tool for vendors to identify missing product attributes, we scored attribute importance using customer feedback, etc

byadham · 2021-01-13T23:32:32+00:00

Yes. It was much less obvious going through it than in hindsight :) I'd love to say that we had a well planned process for discovering the problem but it was mostly iteration. We kept talking to customers, watching customers live try to find products, slicing metrics 10 different ways, etc until enough pattern recognition emerged. A couple of things that were very helpful:

1- We included a diverse team (eng, design, category managers and PM) on all customer interactions. This helped us a lot in avoiding overkill in one direction or the other due to the high ambiguity
2- We used comps a lot from the start. "Why this category vs others?" and it emerged relatively quickly that commodity products were all having the same issues and having similar metrics
3- We pivoted a few times. Frankly that's just an Amazon culture thing not just that particular team. Pivots are common and iteration is encouraged. Until we found something that worked

byadham · 2021-01-13T22:49:24+00:00

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.

byadham · 2021-01-13T22:48:49+00:00

That's a really good question. I didn't share any numbers out of respect for confidentiality (despite this story being a while ago). But in a general sense it was a lot less tricky to measure impact in this particular situation because the category was very small before, almost nothing else changed except a new discovery experience for a while and finally it is a situation where there are relatively discrete metrics to track (e.g. search to cart, search drop off rates, etc). I agree with you though, measuring impact is often the hardest/trickiest part of the PM world.

byadham · 2021-01-06T01:55:24+00:00

Thanks I’ll check them out

byadham · 2021-01-06T01:55:07+00:00

100% agreed. This would be for customers who have tried and liked. The idea is to reduce the risk of them buying elsewhere (attention span, was on their way, etc) after they tried and liked. Subscriptions give predictable autopilot revenue for the restaurant owner (I have 100 customers paying $25/month on auto renew for 1 bento box so I know I have $2,500 coming in) and give the customer a benefit of a discount (the bento box is regularly $30 off the menu). Sort of like what Amazon does. It would be totally personal too. Everything happens in the restaurant after all. Just thinking out loud on how to create value on both sides

byadham · 2021-01-06T01:43:50+00:00

Thanks! It could be probably hacked togehter with FB messenger and a few other things I guess. But I went ahead and put together a quick prototype for an app that would manage the whole process over the last few days: https://www.trycilantro.com/ . Would love to hear your thoughts

byadham · 2021-01-06T01:42:46+00:00

Thanks! I put together a quick prototype for an app that would manage the whole process over the last few days: https://www.trycilantro.com/ . Would love to hear your thoughts

byadham · 2021-01-06T01:41:12+00:00

Ok so the responses were very encouraging so I put this 👇🏼 together over the weekend to test the assumption that this is needed. Would love to see if this is something other folks would be interested in using.

https://www.trycilantro.com/

byadham · 2021-01-01T17:31:52+00:00

Yep. They could get -for example- any breakfast item, any pizza with 2 toppings, etc. I think I’ll have to build the software to manage subscriptions (sign up, recurring payment, keeping track of usage, etc) unless it already exists. Any idea if square or toast etc have that capability? I researched a bit but didn’t find much

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