I'm going to re learn the lyrics to Oh Canada and sing them joyously and thankfully... Our banking system gets a lot of ire but dear Gawd.
The benefit of US banking despite lax regulation was that there's a ton of different banks and credit unions to choose from. Some are great and some are shit. Literally hundreds to pick from. Canada there was like 5 big banks, a large credit union, and then depending on your area there was maybe perhaps a small community credit union.
Basically every bank has some kind of "premium customer" program that you qualify for by having enough investments or loans from that bank and magically all your banking fees go away (obviously they just make their money from the services they provide for your investments/loans)
The only fees I pay are a small percentage for management of mutual funds.
Yet we have quite a lot of banks to pick from - around 60 if you include building societies (more if you include private, niche and specialist banks). We also have a fair few new and digital challenger banks like Monzo, Starling, Atom, Revolut and arguably Metro Bank. If anything our banking system seems far more innovative than the US system.
I don't know about Canada, but clearly regulations don't mean that you can't have competition and innovation.
See also regulation about what the incumbent last-mile network provider (Openreach) can charge ISP's to provide services on their lines which has led to a larger number of ISP's available in any one place (unless you're in Hull, because of historical reasons).
as for ISPs, it's hard to do worse than comcast, but at least they don't block a wide range of content by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
And the piracy site blocks are due to high court orders - not a lot an ISP can do in those cases.
There is very nearly zero usefulness to overdraft protection in a real-time authorization world. Nobody charges a fee for a rejected debit authorization.
I suppose merchants might charge a return check fee for a failed ACH payment, but nobody uses ACH payments for anything routine in the US.
Water bill, electric bill, mortgage, and property taxes are all ACH for me. Many people pay rent that way. I don’t think it’s commonly used for day to day interactions but a lot of payments are still ACH
It's more handy for gas pumps, but less transparent. It stops before your tank is completely filled, but doesn't say why. You can hear the difference if you are standing there while it fills, of course, but other than that you may be confused why it slowed down and stopped exactly at a certain amount and won't go any farther.
The way it works in NL is you pay a (high like a creditcard) interest rate for every day the account is below zero. The transaction order doesn't matter it looks at the balance at the end of the day and charges you 1/365th of 13% interest.
The only way banks fuck you over in this system is with the dates. Using a card means a transaction date of "today", getting paid almost always has transaction date tomorrow. So you end up paying 1 day of interest. Much less than a $ 40 overdraft fee and regardless of the number of transactions.