Disqus - Latest Comments for yaron

Re: Why I’m bringing back the Open Angel Forum

Yaron Samid — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 03:27:01 -0000

What happened with this idea? Does it work?

Re: My Nightmare

Yaron Samid — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 10:05:20 -0000

Had you seed invested at $140 pre in the company you were celebrating exiting, would you have been happy?

Re: Meet the 20 fastest-growing mobile startups | VentureBeat

Yaron Samid — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 15:39:37 -0000

Incredible, breathtaking and humbling, in the middle of an all-out sprint just to have @BillGuard listed among these great company's and applications. Priceless emotional capital (EC) for a small personal finance startup trying to do on its own what all the banks should be doing to empower and protect their customers.

- Founder/CEO @ BillGuard

Re: Review: BillGuard – A Simple, Useful, and Elegant Credit Card Spending Tracker for iOS

Yaron Samid — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 05:13:08 -0000

Thanks for the kind words and feedback Jim! This is one of the most thorough product reviews of BillGuard ever. Really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your thoughts. Means the world to us. Your featured request is duly noted. I think you'll love where the app is headed.

Yaron Samid
Founder/CEO, BillGuard

Re: BillGuard launches for iPhone to combat the ‘$14bn’ lost by credit card users to hidden-fees and errors

Yaron Samid — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 04:13:06 -0000

Thats a great suggestion! Most people however find these all-charge alerts to be annoying information overload within a few days of using them, and turn them off. Especially if you have more than one card. BillGuard is a smart inbox that lets you quickly see the noteworthy charges that matter to you, across all your cards, in one place. You teach it with a few swipes and it tailors itself to you. Oh, and its 100% free for 2 cards and you can get more cards free just by sharing BillGuard with a friend. We do this because BillGuard gets better/smarter with each new user that joins the network.

Re: What Would it Look Like if Elon Musk Pitched a VC Today?

Yaron Samid — Thu, 30 May 2013 23:05:58 -0000

I'm man-crushing on so many of the bad asses in this post. Thanks Mark and Dorrian for keeping the conversion and inspiration flowing.

Re: Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by... | Of Consciousness

Yaron Samid — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:27:41 -0000

Thank god.

Re: portrait animations #2 | Guardian #facts

Yaron Samid — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:06:45 -0000

peanut butter jelly time!

Re: Bananas. We love them. | Guardian #facts

Yaron Samid — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:06:04 -0000

not touching this one

Re: FinTech Innovation Lab: December 19th deadline

Yaron Samid — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 02:37:56 -0000

Thanks Rich. Would love to hear what you mean specifically.

Re: Killing Hope: Why Israel Targets Sports in Gaza

Yaron Samid — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:45:51 -0000

How could you miss, or leave out, the simple fact that missiles were fired from the stadium? http://www.algemeiner.com/2...

Re: EdGrapeNutZimm: I wanted to talk to Alex Payne

Yaron Samid — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:26:26 -0000

Thoughtful post Ed, and Alex is the man, therefore we shall not hold it against you that you're using blogger.

Re: BillGuard Will Track Hidden Fees And Billing Errors On Credit Card Bills

Yaron Samid — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:38:07 -0000

Thanks for the insightful post Matt!

You're spot on in recognizing critical factors to beefing up financial fraud and misconduct prevention. You'll be happy to know that BillGuard has developed or is developing solutions in all the three areas that you point out.

1. BillGuard has a built-in system of checks and balances to prevent false positives entered into the system by consumers. A flagged charge from just one user does not automatically trigger alerts for all other users with that charge. The charge enters an escalated analytics process but needs to be validated with other user and machine learning data to become a system-wide alert. Just like eBay, BillGuard is developing metrics for both a merchant and consumer reputation (reliability) score so that the voice of a user found to "cry wolf" will be duly wieghted in the system.

2. Merchant, branch and geo-centric data clustering is one of the most exciting things BillGuard is working on! We've innovated some really breakthrough technology here. This clustering is not only limited to physical locations but to online ecommerce sites and specific charges as well.

3. BillGuard is a hybrid system already, incorporating both crowdsourced data and automated machine learning algorithms!

Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard
www.billguard.com

Re: BillGuard.com: Protect Yourself From Fraud and Scams

Yaron Samid — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:00:02 -0000

Thanks guys for the great post and support!

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:59:08 -0000

Daniel - Got it, so I think what will make the most impact in clarifying this issue is to add a link in the our registration process that goes to a page/pop-up that explains exactly how your log-in credentials are used to give BillGuard read-only access to scan your transactions for bad charges. We will clarify what Yodlee is and how they securely store user credentials. We can add that link to our security page as well. What do you think?

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:42:00 -0000

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for sharing your concerns and feedback. You're obviously very thorough in your understanding of how Internet services work which is great. This feedback is very important and helpful for us. I'm assuming you missed the big "you have our word on it" link in the Security page on our web site that you reference. It links to our "Privacy & Security Policy"page (http://www.billguard.com/pr... ) that clearly states:

"Our partnership with Yodlee:
We've engaged Yodlee Inc., a trusted, industry-standard third party provider to provide us financial account aggregation services. The account credentials of your credit/debit card online statements that you provide us during registration are passed on to Yodlee Inc. and securely stored on their servers. For improved safety, We purposefully do not store any of your credit/debit card account credentials. For more information about Yodlee and to review their privacy policy go to: http://www.yodlee.com/priva..."

Perhaps this isn't clear or prominent enough throughout our site and app so we'll work on that. Thanks again for brining it to our attention!

As for the risk of Yodlee's secure data center getting hacked into, you're correct, there is always a certain risk of that, similarly to your bank getting hacked into. I can tell you that in the 10+ years that Yodlee's banking platform has been in existence, with over 26M card holders that use it directly and indirectly via services like ours, it has never been breached. Not sure your bank can say that. In fact you run a much higher risk of having your credit card number and billing address stolen by shopping online or when handing your card over at a store/restaurant. There's always some risk out there. That's the very premise that gave rise to advanced security services like BillGuard.

Thanks again for your excellent feedback.

Yaron

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:28:13 -0000

Boing Boing rocks.

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:27:31 -0000

Hi Duncan. If you regularly check every line item of every charge on your credit card bills - thats awesome! You're protecting yourself, as you should. Unfortunately, most of us, myself included, are not that disciplined and merchants are taking advantage of that fact. Alone its really hard to catch every hidden charge in the fine print, billing errors, misleading subscriptions, scams and fraud but together we cast a wider net of vigilance. That collective knowledge can protect us all, similarly to how marking an email as spam weeds out bad emails for everyone. If you want the extra layer of protection that BillGuard provides by scouring the web for complaints about charges that appear on your bills, collecting flags from card holders directly in their bills and analyzing millions of transactions from banks, we'd love to have you as a BillGuard user!

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:24:40 -0000

Thanks Microcars, see my answer to Matt above. Sometimes good is true!

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:21:38 -0000

Thanks for the kind words Matt! We've just launched the BillGuard Beta and are well funded but BillGuard plans to make money by providing our advanced card protection services to banks and by providing a certification program for merchants. BillGuard is and will remain free for consumers!

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:43:49 -0000

Yes! BillGuard helps consumers contact merchants directly to resolve disputes directly. The banks would actually like to avoid dealing with these disputes at together if they could. BillGuard helps consumer understand every transaction on their bills and gives merchant contact info for resolution when needed.

Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard
www.billguard.com

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:31:31 -0000

I think there's confusion here about the type of bad charges BillGuard finds. Card fraud, although a $7B/yr crime, is actually relatively rare on a per card basis. About 11M out of 200M American card holders were hit by card fraud last year. The far more common cases that BillGuard finds are "unwanted" charges such as hidden charges, billing errors, misleading subscriptions and scams from legitimate merchants. Cell phone companies are some of the worst perpetrators of these unfair billing practices. See http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/... for example.

We think our early estimates of financial loss due to these unwanted charges might actually be low. We're just getting started.

Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard
www.billguard.com

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:24:47 -0000

Thanks Joshua. See my comment to Damien above about our use of Yodlee's account aggregation service SDK to get read-only access to user credit card transactions.

Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard
www.billguard.com

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:21:09 -0000

This is an excellent idea! It's premature to share the details but let's just say I think you'll be a big fan of our upcoming receipt feature!

Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard
www.billguard.com

Re: BillGuard: We are Smarter than Me

Yaron Samid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:18:20 -0000

Hi Damien, thanks for your important question. There is no magic here. We use a banking industry standard SDK from Yodlee, Inc. (http://www.yodlee.com) to have secure, read-only access to our user's online credit card statements. When you provide your login credentials to BillGuard, we pass them over to Yodlee and never store them on our servers. Scanning your transactions via Yodlee's account aggregation service SDK ensure's that even in the unlikely case that someone would break into your BillGuard account, they could only see your transactions on BillGuard but have no access at all to your credit card account sites. Yodlee is a secure standard used by most banks and personal finance services like Mint, Manilla, Swipely, etc. Check out our Terms of Use page for even more details on our limited use/access to your data and use of Yodlee's SDK. http://www.billguard.com/tos

Hope that helps clear things up!

Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard
www.billguard.com