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Comment by _n_b_ | Hacker News Reader

N26 is also very successful in France, whose banking industry is--I can confirm--very much slow, difficult, and _very_ manually run. They can charge fees for accounts because their fees are still so much lower than the incumbents they're displacing. (And you can do stuff without having to talk to your bank counsellor, at your one specific branch, in person... how novel!)

So I can see how their model wouldn't be very good, or very disruptive, in places with more consumer-friendly banking options.

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> at your one specific branch,

Italy is the same way and it is awful. We signed up for our bank account at one specific branch of a bank in Padova, Italy, and it's impossible to do much besides withdraw some cash at other branches. It's so dumb.

As an Italian, I understand this... but the obvious question is: why didn’t you open it at a branch more convenient for you?

We lived in one place, then moved. We got our mortgage via the one close to us prior to the move. Now we live in the US and it doesn't matter so much as trying to do anything with the bank from here is pretty much impossible. We had asked about having everything moved over to the branch closer to our home, but apparently the logistical requirements are close to those for sending a manned mission to the moon.

I can tell you that, in Italy, there is not a "standard", in the sense that not all banks are the same, and often one that excels in something is terrible in another aspect.

With home-banking these differences are even more marked, some sites have "reasonable" possibilities offered to the customer, some other have next to none (besides checking your account) some have relatively simple workflows some other are so stupidly complex that you give up.

More or less all of them (the sites) have an inane amount of meaningless dashboard/graphics, and very poor tools (as an example to download some data).

However, when it comes to "serious" matters things are seemingly "random" in the way they change from bank to bank, personal anecdata, a few years ago when an old relative died, to access the accounts it took the heirs (with exactly the SAME documentation):

Bank #1: 3 days <- exceptionally fast

Bank #2: 10 days <- I would say "appropriate" or "logical"

Bank #3: 7 months (or 210 days) <- completely "crazy"

Be curious to hear the banks' names.

>Be curious to hear the banks' names.

Ow, come on, you know the saying:

[Italian]

Si dice il peccato e non il peccatore.

[/Italian]

More seriously, as said that is single point anecdata, it is perfectly possible that today a similar test would give completely different results.

They're banks; large corporations. It's not like anyone's naming an employee there or something.

And I do understand that things vary. One time, for instance, I even had a package arrive quickly through Poste Italiane.

In Italy there's also the problem that most banks don't allow you to receive wire transfers from outside the SEPA area. I had a hard time finding a bank that would allow me to receive transfers from the US. Some of them were actually baffled when I called for information at the idea of someone wanting to receive money from oversea.

And let's not even get into keeping an account in another currency. My bank apparently never had to do anything of the sorts, and after digging for information they told me it would cost about 400€ per year just keep the account open.

FWIW, fineco will let you have foreign currency accounts, for free, and with minimal conversion fees, it's pretty convenient.

That's actually very useful to know, thank you for the information!

Do Italians not invest in US securities at all? Seems kind of strange...

I've yet to figure that out. Personally, I'd love to be able to easily invest in a vanguard fund, or even just have the ability to put money every month on index funds, but so far from what I've seen doesn't seem to be possible.

You can easily buy everything you want from Interactive Brokers. You can deposit EUR and do the transactions in other currencies. The interface is old and complicated, but very powerful. You will have to do the taxes yourself though.

Well, you don't strictly need an account in dollars to invest in US securities (but you are more exposed to exchange risks) while it is handy for other kinds of investments in US dollars.

As riffraff said, Fineco is one of the very few banks (maybe the only one) that gives the possibility to have foreign currency accounts (linked to a "main" Euro account) at a "reasonable" cost, which is a good thing to have if you deal a lot with the US (both with receiving US dollars and spending in US dollars), but that is not needed for "normal" activities.

The "conto in divisa estera" (that quite a few banks have) is basically aimed to business entities (like firms doing import/export) and is usually rather expensive, or - to be more accurate - has very high fixed costs.

The alternative in the case of someone receiving US dollars may be some form of accounts with credit/debit cards issuers, but - again generally speaking - they - besides offering less possibilities (and not being "properly" a bank) tend to have low fixed costs but higher commissions/fees on single operations.

I do. I have an account with Interactive Brokers and I can easily deposit EUR. I can buy US stocks and options in USD and IB takes care of all the details (internally, it shows up as a short USD position).

Investing from the banks themselves it's also possible but it involves higher fees. Using IB has the disadvantage that I have to do the taxes myself.

Do people not move in Italy or something?

I've encountered the same thing in Germany, when I log in I use the branch number of where we opened the account? Why? Who gives a shit about that? I certainly don't. But the bank does, for some unfathomable reason.

For each way German banks are better than American ones, it seems like there's a way in which they're backwards or overly conservative.

Not very much, no... we call it ’campanilismo’: the tendency for people to live out their lives within earshot of their town’s church’s bell-tower (campanile).

Side-story: southern Italians who relocated to the industrialising North during the ‘Italian Economic Miracle’ of the 1950s to 1970s referred to the process as ‘emigrating’. Until it was looked down upon by more modern sensitivities, they were referred to as ‘immigrants’, and their offspring referred to as first- and second-generation immigrants.

It really is a rather static society, though now there’s a significant and constant flow of young graduates from the hideously unemployment-afflicted South towards the North, or abroad since the Great Stagnation set in about fifteen years ago.

In Finland, the biggest bank is actually just a group of local banks. So if I sign up for a bank account up north, I am the customer of the bank way up there, which is a separate legal entity from the bank down in the south.

Of course, if you do move and you want to apply for a new credit card, they will mail the card and paper work to any of the locations, so it's not that bad. And all of the banks in the group have an unified online banking system, no branch numbers needed. However, when I switched between the different banks, I had to get new login details for the online bank, which was kinda sucky.

> when I log in I use the branch number of where we opened the account? Why? Who gives a shit about that? I certainly don't. But the bank does, for some unfathomable reason.

In the US and Canada, you’ll have a home branch too. Usually it doesn’t come up in anything day-to-day.

State laws for one thing may apply to accounts opened in a particular state.

But if a bank merges or gets acquired, or fails, and some branches get sold/divested, and not necessarily to one party.

One could find themselves a customer of a bank that is no longer local to them.

Here’s a merger that had a divesture:

https://www.bauerfinancial.com/2019/12/09/its-truist-theres-...

Other than having to enter the branch number, are there are other restrictions based on where you opened the account in Germany?

I ask because in the UK, each bank branch has a six-digit "sort code", which others will need to know in addition to your account number to transfer you money. However, you can open an account at a branch and never step foot in that branch again afterwards, only ever using other branches. Account numbers are only unique for the same sort code.

It's not even a thing "in Germany". There may be some banks that do this, but I would say most don't. But then, most banks are relatively regional, so while you can use any branch of the bank, there won't be any branches of your bank if you travel far enough--and if you are with your local Sparkasse, for example, then that is your bank, the Sparkasse in the next bigger city over has nothing to do with them (well, yeah, they have, but they most definitely are a separate bank).

Yeah, my wife wanted to open a separate account for her new job, and they said she'd have to go visit the original branch.

This is at Deutsche Bank, by the way, not some podunk obscure bank.

What’s the point of branches? It isn’t like computers aren’t a thing.

French banks are slow, but they provide good services. When i lived in the UK, i had only a debit card (maestro). If you wanted a mastercard you needed a credit card account where you needed to manually balance at the end of the month. Mind you this was 10 years ago, when the UK was Just introducing PIN code for every card transaction, a security feature found in France since the 90s. In France you get mastercard as debit card or credit card bound to your current account.

This is pretty standard in the UK these days, most debit cards are Visa/Mastercard - 10 years ago most debit cards were Maestro or Visa Electron, although I still didn't have much difficulty getting a Visa debit card for travelling.

I found it very odd when I was in Germany that this wasn't the case, Visa/Mastercard were entirely considered credit cards, and debit cards used some entirely different system. I couldn't use my debit card to pay for a Berlin subway ticket, as the machines only took German bank cards.

> debit cards used some entirely different system

Maestro is pretty common, but there's also something called EC-card or similar. However, the Berlin subway machines now take visa/mc too.

UK debit cards used to be either Switch/Maestro or Visa Delta/Visa Debit depending on who you banked with. The Switch/Maestro cards were then phased out around 10 years ago and replaced with either Visa Debit or Debit Mastercard. I used to travel frequently to Germany at the time so it was super annoying not to be able to use my card anywhere but a cash machine.

Visa Electron was in a different category with Switch Solo. I think they tended to be issued on accounts with no overdraft facility. (I had a Solo card as a teenager and it was only accepted at a handful of places.)

I remember being really annoyed when my

French banks provide terrible services. To send an international wire, I had to go into the bank to “set up” the service. Online banking requires ever changing pin codes in the name of “security.” In the US, I can interact almost 100% of the time online. The only time I enter my US bank is if I need a physical cashiers check or counter checks. But that’s very rare.

I don't even have a local branch; I use Ally, which has no branches at all and is 100% online. I have no idea why anyone uses physical banks any more unless they need to deposit cash or get cashiers checks. The online banks offer far higher interest rates and low/no fees.

> Mind you this was 10 years ago, when the UK was Just introducing PIN code for every card transaction

Err. C&P was universal by 2006ish from memory, but many venues just didn't accept anything other than cash at all. I suspect you are misremembering.

We started a UK shop 16 years ago and still had counterfoil machines (you put a card in, put a paper slip on it, push a roller over the card to ink an impression of the details, ...). You could definitely still swipe your card then.

Also from memory, I'd guess 10-12 years as the point when chip&pin was required for _every_ card transaction. Now of course we have moved on to also have contactless.

You can still use counterfoil machines if you want to. You just accept all the risk.

A former employer uses one for selling excess stock to staff.

Useless aside: I used to do phone support for retail stores and when the EFTPOS went down I had to guide them through the process of using the counterfoil machine.

No one would know what I was talking about unless I referred to it as the "click-clack" machine.

Now I can only think of them using that name.

French banks are very bad, from my experience at least and I've had 6 different banks over 8 years, got kicked from one because I was working at a startup and the boss gave checks to employees with no money on the company account, so the checks would get rejected a few days / weeks after the salary arrived (which was usually one month late and not at a fixed date which already made it difficult with bills). The catch is, the company account was on the exact same bank as me, in a small village with just a few employees. They kicked me knowing that the company was shady and they were helping the guy. That was just one example I could go on for a while.

Oh yeah, the "received a bad cheque so you're outta here" rule, similar to "you can't get an overdraft on your business account, but if you're a fonctionnaire (civil servant) you can live a -800eu for perpetuity"..

A what card? Credit cards essentially do not exist in France.

Traditional French banks have a penchant for issuing debit cards with monthly fees and low daily, weekly (!) and monthly (!) limits.

I had a HSBC business account where I had to pay 45EU a month to lift the 300EU per week limitation.

Likewise, French banks refuse to issue chargebacks. The last time I tried, I was told to lodge a police complaint for theft to take the unknown entity who hit my card to .. court ..?

N26 etc have been a breath of fresh air in France.

Credit card = Débit différé in France (aka. you pay for everything at the end of the month), it's even written Credit on the card.

And most online banks (e.g., Boursorama, Hello Bank, Fortuneo, etc) do not charge you a monthly fee for a card.

Manually balance? That’s not true.

In the UK you can write “direct debit” in the minimum payment amount on your credit card application and it will be linked to another account to be payed off in full every month. This will avoid interest charges.

This arrangement allows me to run my credit card accounts for free with no monthly charges.

Exactly. I can fully understand how they might be a paradigm shift from that sort of banking ecosystem.

For us it was just a bank that lacked features and had charges, without a memorable brand.

France has had good online banks for years now, with free accounts/cards/transfers and everything managed online.

You just have to choose your bank carefully. Boursorama or Fortuneo are typical decent examples.

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