The fact that one wants to pay for bank services and agrees on a bank to force them to come (vs having mechanisms for remote access) is something I do not understand.
There is a population which does not have access to Internet, or is computer illiterate. The efforts should go into helping them to learn and legally force banks to make online banking easy.
I think it’s fear of the unknown for many.
Somewhere there was an automatic debit on one my bills for 30-50 US bucks that my bank paid, but since my account was already closed, it basically went into default. When I tried to open a bank account in my new state, I was denied.
It ends up there’s something like the credit reporting agencies, but for banks, and because of my $50 dollar accidental default, I ended up on this system. There are almost no consumer protections on it, so I couldn’t contest it, and I didn’t have any way to pay it or get it removed.
The end result is that I was unable to open a bank account for the next 5 years without a co-signer, even though my credit score was in the 700s and I had a six figure income. I was able to get credit cards, but couldn’t easily pay the bill without an account to write checks from. I had to go to check cashing places to get money orders (most banks won’t give you money orders or cashiers checks without an account), I had to cash my paychecks at the one office my employers bank had in town, and I could only receive checks for banks I could travel to. When I rented my apartment, I paid the security deposit in cash, but then had to drive around town when I got it back after moving out to try and find a branch of my landlords bank while I was on my way out of town. It was a nightmare.
There’s a whole system I fell into that I wasn’t even aware existed until that happened to me, and I consider myself a highly educated consumer compared to your average person. There are plenty of reasons to want cash in our society, even if you are not doing anything illicit or that you want to keep hidden. If, for any reason, banks are not available to you, life gets very difficult very quickly.
Also, you should be able to decide which order payments go in - highest first or lowest first. Highest first can easily result in 4 small overdrafts instead of 1 large overdraft.
Is it? The poorest people are more likely to be primarily cash users, based on what I've read, e.g.:
> "...Seventeen percent of all black households and 14 percent of all Hispanic households had no bank account in 2017, according to a report from the FDIC. Some have poor credit; some work jobs where they’re paid only in cash. Cashlessness isn’t an option for them..."
From https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/cashl...
Right now, the second you use your debit card. It shows up on your account.