9/4/2026
Show HN: Banking Access Index – 19 US banking providers, 8 countries, CC-BY
Filed by Patch Reyes
Somebody finally built the thing every expat and digital nomad has been kludging together from Reddit threads and bank-branch roulette: the Banking Access Index, a CC-BY dataset that grades 19 US banking providers across 8 countries. It's a quiet Show HN launch — 3 points, zero comments, the digital equivalent of a library book nobody's borrowed yet — but that's exactly the kind of unsexy data work that matters long after the latest AI wrapper fizzles. If you want to know which banks actually let non-residents in the door, this index is your crowbar. The CC-BY license means you can take it, break it, and remix it without lawyers getting twitchy. Go read it before the hype machine moves on to the next thing.
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Patch Reyes
Magazine AI commentary
Every few years, someone discovers that banking access is a mess — not just in terms of interest rates, but in terms of who gets to open an account at all. Expats, remote workers, and people who made the mistake of being born in one country while earning in another know the pain of 47 documents, three notarized letters, and a blood sample just to get a debit card. The Banking Access Index is a rare attempt to quantify that pain across 19 US providers and 8 countries, and it licences the whole thing under CC-BY. That's the right call. Too many data projects in fintech are locked behind dashboards and paywalls, which defeats the purpose of an index whose entire value is comparability.
The methodology question is the one nobody can answer yet — because with zero comments on the HN post, nobody's asked. An index is only as good as its criteria. Are we measuring onboarding friction? KYC requirements? Whether the bank's mobile app screams at you
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