The US has a 3rd world banking system and I had just about enough of it. These mega mergers and deregulations don't help.
- Some banks charge more than $60 USD for an international wire which is beyond reasonable. Plus you have to go into the bank fill out a form. Why can't I do this online?
- The US does not use IBAN instead it uses a system which is setup for middle banks to take a stake out of transfers.
- Core of US banking is done with paper checks like in the middle ages. Sending money to someone in many cases actually gets a check printed (the check printer is another 3rd party taking their stake out of the system).
- Bank employees are underpaid and under-skilled workers who don't give a damn (why would they?). Don't expect good service unless you are at a expensive private bank.
- You constantly have to check your accounts to make sure there isn't all of a sudden a large amount missing because a check was cleared wrong or some new fee has been added.
The system is so broken that even people who want to fix it (e.g. Bank Simple) where unable and are now just another online bank.
Just a note: Don't format your posts that way. It's too hard to read.
Here it is reformatted:
- Some banks charge more than $60 USD for an international wire which is beyond reasonable. Plus you have to go into the bank fill out a form. Why can't I do this online?
- The US does not use IBAN instead it uses a system which is setup for middle banks to take a stake out of transfers.
- Core of US banking is done with paper checks like in the middle ages. Sending money to someone in many cases actually gets a check printed (the check printer is another 3rd party taking their stake out of the system).
- Bank employees are underpaid and under-skilled workers who don't give a damn (why would they?). Don't expect good service unless you are at a expensive private bank.
- You constantly have to check your accounts to make sure there isn't all of a sudden a large amount missing because a check was cleared wrong or some new fee has been added.
Come on, pretty much everyone in EU can send money abroad from their internetbank. It does offer one more opportunity for thieves to launder your money if your account is breached (aside from, say, withdrawing in an ATM or buying stuff online), but this is not a meaningful reason to make someone come to a bank physically.
Do people go to banks in USA regularly? I have been to my bank 3 times in the last 3 years, and two of those were because I was getting a mortgage. A physical visit is expensive both to you and the bank, so everyone has a motivation to reduce them to absolute minimum - everything can be done online, except for verifying identity at account opening or large amount/notarized realestate transactions.
I think the reason it took a while in the UK and has not happened in the US is that there is no incentive for the banking system to introduce such a system - as a business why would you want to provide a free instant service when you could provide an expensive one? The change has to be forced by the government at it was in the UK.
Also a lot of "mainframes" are actually virtual machines running on modern physical hardware. I've also seen companies who have the console output sent to a webapp and commands returned the same way, thus making these 1980s relics seem almost "modern" (as, for example, you can utilise them from an iPad/Smartphone without an app).
I remember being very surprised when I discovered that mainframe capacity is sold in units of MIPS (millions of instructions per second). Like, you literally buy capacity off IBM by the megahertz. They don't really get faster because there are so few suppliers of this kind of exotic hardware nowadays, and it's hard for the banks to port it all to more modern platforms because the original code is often so obscure and only understood by people who are retired/laid off.
And that's the best case. I've heard of at least one bank that has a job running on their mainframe where nobody can find the source and nobody knows what it does, but they're too afraid to shut it down in case it breaks something.
hsbc charges zero dollars to transfer money between countries you have account with them.
and recently they had to pay a billion because they facilitated drug money laundry, even city bank being mentioned in the same report facilitating larger amounts and getting no penalty for whatever reason. im almost sure the system is corrupt to the core.
anyway, back on topic, this move is to remove power form migrants because now that the US is past its little depression, we don't want them sticking around. and if you don't understand this, I'm happy for you. keep the good live going in affluent san francisco. only neighborhood problems are buses driving property prices down or some other shenanigan.
>hsbc charges zero dollars to transfer money between countries you have account with them.
Only if you have one of their "rich people" accounts. You have to have something like $100k in your current account or a half million dollar mortgage. Something like that.
Needless to say, agricultural day laborers sending remittances don't qualify. They have to pay up.
>recently they had to pay a billion because they facilitated drug money laundry
I wouldn't mind betting that's the main reason "many big banks are abandoning the business of transferring money from the United States to other countries"
I mean if you were running a low cost service would you want to risk that?
