EVE General Discussion

Nope. Has never been attempted. /s

Send be your deposit ($1bn minimum) and I'll send you regular bank statements. /s

It's been attempted several times and always ends in someone running off with the cash. There is no reliable, built-in mechanic for security, therefore you have to rely on something called "trust" which, AFAIK is not an in-game item.

Hm, maybe it needs to be tried again. How hard can it be? You just lend money out at 7% and take deposits for 4%, sort of jobbie, right?

There are very few players in EVE right now who could run a successful bank, and it's due to the trust they have built-up over the last decade or so.

Unless one of those players decides to run a bank, you should just forget about it.

Think about this, too: In order to be profitable, banks need to loan money (you don't make anything holding onto folks' isk and paying interest).

So an honest-looking chap in a moustache comes in and asks for 3Bn isk for his new nullsec production enterprise. You'll need to secure the loan with some sort of collateral. Then begins the arduous task of determining what is sufficient collateral. Has to be something of value equivalent to the loan and interest and has to be something you can liquidate should he or she default.

Banks are more than just ATMs. They are fairly significant property holders. You'll need a significant amount of isk to get started, as you'll likely get more borrowers than savers. If you get low on liquidity, what do you do when more borrowers come knocking? Turn them away for lack of funds? Doesn't sit well with anyone who has isk in your 'bank.' Sell off some of the collateral you're holding to increase liquidity? (Of course, you'll be able to buy a replacement should that borrower come back, right?)

It gets very complicated and messy. Hopefully you already have a job IRL and don't want a second one. It's one thing to run your own in-game business. When you have players expecting 23/7 service it gets to be a headache. After theft, I'm pretty sure burn-out is the next leading cause of failure for such enterprises. Talk to someone who has run a large alliance for awhile.

Even if you're honest, the risk of failure is quite high. And when a bank fails, nobody is happy.

KB

No, I don’t think even this would work. For banking to work you need several things. The first is a culture of trust. That is can you, generally speaking, trust people you interact with? Second you need a legal structure in which to resolve disputes even where both sides thing they are in the right. If you borrow money from a bank and do not pay it back, there is a way for the bank to recoup at least in part some of the money it borrowed. There needs to be an obvious punishment mechanism for those who game the system.

While everyone might trust some of these third parties like Chribba, can he trust everyone else? I would argue no. Second, even if he did trust someone and the deal went south and both sides honestly felt they were in the right there is no mechanism in game for such a dispute to be resolved. And lastly punishment in Eve of financial bad actors is near impossible. Worst case scenario, you suck out all of your Bernie Madoff alt, sell them, biomass Bernie and then create a new character, Ivan Boesky, and inject the unallocated SP and maybe buy some more SP with some of your ill-gotten wealth goods and off you go to your next set of scams. Rinse and repeat with Michael Miliken, Charles Ponzi, and so forth.

No, banking that is not a scam will never, ever be a thing in Eve. Ever. There is just too much systemic risk for anyone person or even a group of people to overcome.

Can we stop posting these threads/can people not use the search function?

Yeah. My bank is legit. No, really. I run it like a regular bank. I pay interest under the inflation rate,
and employ people who make you wonder if we think your money is really ours.

Feel free to open an account any time you like. Believe me. My bank can be trusted.
(You can't trust all these other people's banks!)

Look. I even dress like a space banker. If you could see my wrist you'd see a space Rolex on it, too.

Ricdic was one of the most trusted figures in Eve. Then he wasn't. So it goes.

Hm. I clearly need to work on my forum code.

The problem with banks in-game is that you'd always need collateral from the loan-taker - something they usually do not have or have less of - and if so be prepared to front the difference if the loaner skips the payment.

If you run a back based on people simply getting return on their investments then you better be a good trader, but more likely you'll end up taking it yourself which is why no one will really trust in banks either because there's no protection.

Trust gets you further and there are pilots, like myself, that would have no interest in scamming, but at the same time if I were to run a bank where you'd get like 1% return or something that may work when the invested capital is 10b, but it's not the same as 100b invested and so on.

So small banks could possibly be doable, but that also is a very limited area for the investors because someone earning 10m a month is most likely not worth it.

It would be a whole different deal if there were actually mechanics that allowed me to give a loan to someone with some sort of security.

Seeing as there is no such thing all banks to date have ended up scamming or failing. What is more doable is IPOs or bonds, but ofc that requires collateral to be safe.

/c

Tisi bank offers a very generous 10% monthly return, more if you refer a friend. Mail me and we can get you sorted, open an account. I've been trained by the best in the business, studying under Currin Trading.