I’m not keeping my money with a financial institution that lies to me. End of story. Transfer initiated on my cash, and I’ll deal with moving stocks in the morning.
I know for a fact my bank lies. They've been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for money laundering (it's HSBC). A few years ago I looked in to moving to a more honest bank, but I couldn't find one that also met basic criteria like having access to cash points in the UK and having a half decent mobile banking app. Literally every major bank that operates in the UK has stories of doing frankly awful things.
Since then I've joined Monzo, who do seem to be genuinely above board, but finding an honest financial institution is really hard.
Starlink is the space internet from Musk
Of course I meant Starling, they were the first challenger bank to offer business accounts as well and I’m very happy so far.
Only takes them an hour or so to approve it for you, but it gets pretty old having to do it 3-5x per week.
Couldn't you turn off autocomplete or check what you/it wrote before you hit "reply" button?
Really diversifying your funds across multiple banks is a wise move. I’ve got Halifax, NatWest, Santander and HSBC accounts still.
This is the problem though. I'm still with HSBC because, while HSBC is pretty terrible, the rest of the banks are also terrible.
On the flip side one of the heirs to the Santander empire tried to smuggle a Picasso out of Spain on his yacht, which is kind of cool... https://news.yahoo.com/santander-heir-gets-44m-fine-20351628...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-santanderbank-mortgages-i...
Why refusing to loan money to low-income borrowers is supposed to be discrimination?
If someone has minimal income they are far less likely to repay loan, why this is supposed to be indicator of some discrimination?
If someone earn 30k per year and someone earns 3000k per year then it is not surprising that loan of 200k would be far more likely given to person with higher income.
Banks are typically extremely awful, but why that specific part is supposed be indicator of something wrong? And it seems likely that other statistics mentioned are result of that.
> The bank was founded as an anthroposophical initiative and continues to honor the work of Rudolf Steiner as the inspiration for its approach to banking.
As far as I know they don't routinely bury cow horns to magically improve returns.
For our personal and business banking in UK and NL, we chose:
* UK personal banking - Nationwide for primary current account, Tridos UK as secondary. Left HSBC because service was terrible and they kept on declining our card txns.
* UK business banking - Tried Tide but moved to Starling on discovering Tide didn't support joint account holders. With Starling also have a EUR account. It works seamlessly with the only disadvantage that transfers from the Starling EUR account to NL banks are overnight.
* NL personal banking - Triodos NL, after years with ABN Amro. Triodos is friendly, sustainability focus.
* NL business banking - Knab, which has been good so far. Wanted to use Triodos NL but there is a two month backlog approving new business customers.
Calling their app "decent" is charitable to say the least.
The only good part is the call center, where operators are actively trying to be helpful.
I worked in HSBC for 6 months a few months and their IT systems are scary. It's a patchwork of various international banking systems where each one has different views and funding.
They are completely incapable of coordinating such a political landscape. I made some cash and ran away from that trainwreck as fast as I could.
There are lots of consultancies embedded making good money out of the confusion.
For those in Germany I recommend GLS bank. They have an ethical charter on whom they invest in and their loans are fully backed.
Starling is the only challenger bank that's profitable ATM (and it's only just profitable)
1. revolut - these guys are complete jokers. closed after being asked to provide the proof of funding 3 times in 3 months.
2. hsbc/first direct - somewhat decent. but i only use it to top up my other accounts. i try to avoid them, as they're just too big.
3. starling - simple, no-nonsense banking from a startup.
4. revolut business - had my account closed down by the "bank" because they didn't want my business. no reasons given. again, complete jokers.
5. freetrade - decent investing platform, but very very amateurish.
6. saxo bank - professional investing. they're a huge company, never had issues with them. and yes, they of course accept me buying gme and the like, plus they also support options. unfortunately it costs. a lot.
7. metro bank - what can i say. it feels like a 20th century bank with a nice app. had many issues with them, including a transfer that went missing for 2 weeks, and a EUR account that forced me to go to their branch every time i wanted to do a transfer.
8. ing bank nv - depending on the territory you're opening the account, they might be either really bad or somewhat bad.
9. rabobank - bank was constantly getting hacked and all account ops were blocked while the hacking was happening. also, the hackers managed to empty my account and the bank representative had to use a special card to withdraw some funds so that i could continue living.
later edit:
10. transferwise - very slick, minimal fees, used them from before they were a bank. no issues so far.
11. monzo - i'm not in their target market unfortunately. their features are not useful to me.
I'm an investor in Revolut due to their aggressive growth strategy, but I wouldn't use them personally.
As for Monzo, I like their app but missing features like being able to view your full CVV number in app, or link the app to all your other bank accounts on the free tier, basically prevent me from using them as my primary bank
I use them for some of my overseas customers, my only challenge with them is the limited number of currencies they support e.g. had to open a Revolut account to get payment from a Canadian customer
With a bank you have up to £85,000 insured and guaranteed e.g. if the bank fails
Edit: I'd like to add that revolut was very helpful after most of my valuables were stolen in 2019. While my other bank took three weeks to deliver a new debit card, a virtual card issued by revolut worked immediately via NFC.
and again, for me revolut was a disaster and i will not recommend them.
Customer support, features roll out, chargebacks etc - all way better experience than the local banks.
They singlehandedly forced all the banks in my country to implement apple pay / google wallet. For years nobody bothered, the moment Revolut entered the market, with apple pay support, the banks scrambled to add it themselves.
One time I even had my card stolen while traveling abroad - got a new card within two days, global delivery. I was very pleasantly surprised.
But I also understand the risks and don’t really use them for long term asset management for now. Just as a front for all of my expenses - their analytics are just awesome.
for trading/investments it really depends on your situation and location.
(for example: some countries offer 0% taxes on capital gains for trading if done using special products, but not all available platforms will have them...)
Starling, however, has been magic. I swapped my primary banking over to them and the only issue I've had is their dislike of rooted phones. That's only a minor inconvenience every few months when I forget to upgrade Magisk before the Starling app, though.
Transferwise I've used many times to transfer money for larger purchases in Europe. No complaints, but haven't tried the banking side of it.
If you can find a cooperative bank, I would definitely advised that you try them.
Often their loan rates are generous, their fees low, and perhaps most importantly, they do not join into the blacklists that commercial banks use which prevent people from ever using a bank at all.
If you can qualify for a credit union I would definitely recommend that you try them.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2qS0HM6nBkcPMx0W8t...
[1] https://www.resolver.co.uk/freeadvice/companies/monzo-compla...
Absolutely demented. Apart from that they refused to send me a machine-readable copy of their response to a DPA request for my records and the support team behind their app literally ghosted me when I kept politely pointing out the inconsistencies in their arguments.
Bonus: when I complained they used someone else's name when responding to it. When I complained again they sent me their response to _a totally different person's complaint about a totally different thing_.
Eventually I went back to First Direct (which is owned by HSBC). Avoid Monzo like the plague.
This is true of basically any financial institution.
Of course, it is a problem that Monzo had a bug that caused your account to get flagged for this.
Ended up going with Nationwide, who are a bit behind tech-wise (they do this weird thing where they ask for 3 digits of a 6-digit PIN I'm supposed to memorize, which seems far less secure than a long random password in my password manager), but generally have been great. I tried to sign up for their student account, got told no and redirected to their no-credit-check account with no issues. (That's probably also an indication of what went wrong with Monzo.)
I "bank" with them. Sensible. Reliable. Well run. That's preferable to the latest flashy technology when you are talking about people's hard-earned and long-saved money.
I sense a common theme coming.
Last year you saw both that banks were 'forced' to withhold dividends and they were perfectly capitalised. Both cant be true of course.
If they hide it from you your money and everyones money is safe. If they tell the truth everyone loses, so it is actually the best outcome for you and everyone else. The fractional reserve system relies on not everyone withdrawing their money at once.
I've been using a brokerage account for banking for years.
The online P2P lending boom here in the UK from financial crisis onward gave people this opportunity.
The end result, 10+ years in, has been subdued returns (relative to e.g. stocks) and crippling illiquidity, as you are exposed to all those late payments, defaults, and have no access to a functional secondary market.
Honestly you're lucky if you can get most people to even use a separate savings account. I know many people who keep 100% of their savings in their current (checking) account.
I've never considered that a lie, because I've never encountered a bank the claims to be holding all the money. They merely claim that I will be able to withdraw my money, and that's on average true.
I consider that claim to be in the same category as the grocery store claiming I'll be able to buy toilet paper today. Sure, unless there's a pandemic. But usually? No pandemic.
So you're keeping cash under the mattress then i assume?
It's turtles all the way down. You could say trust emerges when people agree to believe in a shared lie.
Robinhood has proven its intentions by its actions all the other things they say is just marketing and PR bullshit
I already know when it comes to volatility, they are going to choose IBKR over my account which is good because usually "my account" is fine but its the others who are doing really crazy things.
I know IBKR will be around in the morning. That's why I love them.
https://gdcdyn.interactivebrokers.com/Universal/servlet/Regi...
There is a fixed amount that is deposited into a varaiety of accounts, let's say the total is T and individual accounts are T_i.
There are also consistent monthly inflows into a variety of T_i's that are dwarfed by T. These mostly go into scheduled investments (ETFs, etc). Call these TM_i.
The majority of T is invested and not traded. The total amount available for short term trades is T_t which is perhaps (in my estimation) 20% of T. That's still a large amount. Howver, this 20% sets the price. Everything happens at the margins.
Trading is the act of taking from one T_i into another T_i. That's it.
That's the job of clearinghouses. Each broker has to settle up at some point but also has to have collateral deposited in order to make sure that they can settle up. This collateral fluctuates depending on volatility.
The worry was that given the obscene run, brokers would not be able to settle up.
IBKR did the right thing to keep a catastrophic problem from developing.
Of course, shorting 130% of a stocks float is a problem that needs to be resolved as well as this is the root cause. If it were just 20-30% then this would never have happened.
So where was IBKR when people were shorting 130% of stocks?
Your guess is as good as mine but my guess is that _their_ risk management, which is very good, handled this reasonably well in their little bubble and they could have potentially been punished by the actions of other people and decided that this was not a risk they were willing to take.
Tough thing to resolve but by talking about it, I think it can be resolved well.
Root cause: somehow, you can short more than the float.
I suspect they lost you as a customer either way.
yes
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050515/what-...
I am not even joking.
And it's the same for transactions or your bank balance. The bank doesn't keep your money and give it back to you. At least, for banks, they are backed by the government and IMF. For stocks and gift card balance, I am not so sure.
If that takes several weeks or months in a highly volatile market its basically life or doing a flip.
Unfortunately, there is no way to check if the stocks are really there. RH showed you some pixels on the screen saying they hold stocks for you. If RH maliciously or by mistake lost them or never bought them, then there is no third party that will make you whole.