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Comment by Glawen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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.

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.

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"..

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.

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