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I'm not in the US, but can fully appreciate the practice.

If I were to request to move funds in 6-to-7 figures range across institutions, I absolutely would want the receiving outfit require that I visit my current outfit in person first to authorise such a transfer. Making sure that such visits are smooth and efficient is good service.

On a related note, when I got my mortgage in the UK, the issuing bank/lender-arm required me and my wife each to get a Proof Of Being Alive. (I'm not a UK native.) Turns out embassies issue these quite routinely, for a modest fee, and a visit that lasts at most 15 minutes. At the time I found that requirement both confusing and irritating, but in the context of the article, it makes sense. The lender was about to issue a sufficiently large loan to a person with very limited[ß] UK transaction history.

On the upside, more recently that same bank/lender prodded and arranged me to get an early, admittedly pretty good fixed deal on my remortgage - two months before the central banks started to hike their rates. Without that early intervention my current rate would be at least three percentage points higher.

ß: from the viewpoint of a financial institution, who likely measures customer relationship ages in decades.

> I absolutely would want the receiving outfit require that I visit my current outfit in person first to authorise such a transfer.

So, about that… The Medallion Signature Guarantee is often obtained from an entity not involved in the transfer. From [0] on my post:

> We do not provide medallion signature guarantees for assets you're transferring out of a Bank of America or Merrill account (guarantees are typically provided by a third party not involved in the transfer or by the firm receiving the assets).

In a way, that's a good thing: By the time you've initiated this transfer, the receiving entity should have done their KYC. And the losing entity probably would not want to take the cost of the liability. Having a third party—one who has had you as a customer for some time—is a good layer of security.

It’s also not unreasonable to expect that an entity you want to take assets out of will, to the first order of approximatiom, be incentivized to make any process involved in that as protracted and difficult to navigate as possible. (This is also, I expect, why the asset transfer process described in TFA is initiated from the receiving side, why mobile number portability is requested via your new mobile network, etc.) So if the recipient doesn’t want to take on the verification burden because they just met you, falling back to a third party rather than the sender makes sense.

> Fun fact about the Medallion Signature Guarantee: It's not a seal or embossment, like it often is for a notarization. Instead, it's a stamp (like what you see on [0]). It's a big stamp, but it's just a stamp.

As far as I'm aware, a "seal" and a "stamp" are the same thing. In particular, a seal is just a device that impresses ink onto paper. How is that supposed to be different from a stamp?

https://www.japanlivingguide.com/living-in-japan/culture/han...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_Seal_of_the_Realm

(Depending on the documentary technology of the culture, a seal may also be used to make a physical impression in a soft substance, but obviously that is still no different from a "stamp".)

Seal and stamp can both mean several things, but both can be applied to the process of making an ink impression on a document.

Seals also can be impressions left in wax or embossed into a document itself.

Stamps can also be separate paper pasted onto a document (eg a postage stamp, a visa stamp)

The terminology is fuzzy.

Seals can also be used to bind multiple documents together, or to permanently keep a single document intact.

I worked for a bit with a non-profit which was involved in international adoptions. Seeing documents under apostille with elaborate seals wasn't uncommon. eg, a multi-page document attached to a government certificate of authenticity, bound together by a ribbon passed through a drilled hole, with the hole filled with wax.

That's a mostly-unrelated use of the word "seal", a device that's intended to demonstrate that a document hasn't been tampered with.

The use here is to indicate a device that demonstrates that a specific person approved a document. Conceptually, it's a signature.

But what is the scope of the signature ? In cryptography we have encryption and signatures that hash the whole document.

In wax we can seal the envelope so that tampering is detectable

This isn't really compatible with the claim above that "it's not a seal".

Right. I was agreeing and adding context to your post, not trying to refute it.

Weirdly, on [0] it says the following:

"We do not provide medallion signature guarantees for assets you're transferring out of a Bank of America or Merrill account (guarantees are typically provided by a third party not involved in the transfer or by the firm receiving the assets)."

This seems to differ from the article and seems to be a way to make it harder to withdraw assets (why would a third party provide a medallion to insure someone else's assets?)

From my own experience getting a medallion stamp, the losing institution doesn't want to make it easier for you to transfer out. The paperwork is often annoying enough as it is. Certain things "can't be done" online so you have to send in forms and wait. (Always use registered mail, just in case!) If you put enough blockers in place, the customer may just decide to leave the account where it is.

This is already noted and explained in the article. Search for "totally uninvolved".

Says "can in principle be totally uninvolved", not "customarily is totally uninvolved.

The article seemed to imply that the institution transferring the securities would also be in the best position to vouch for the identity of the owner who it had been the custodian for.

But that sending institution may not be incentivized to do so, for the reasons identified earlier in the piece.