Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

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> In the worst case, banks actually don't make it very hard for seniors to reset your password/passkey; just show up at a branch with photo ID, your bank card, and your PIN, and a teller will help you reset your credentials. They do it all the time.

Maybe... I just ran into an annoying scenario where the largest bank in Canada made an administrative error where they mislinked an account belonging to me to my wife's profile.

I went to a physical branch to get it fixed and was told that branches don't have that kind of ability so I'd have to call customer support.

I called customer support and failed the verification questions because the expected answers were wrong, based on their own clerical error. After failing the verification questions, I just got a "we have to end this call, no additional information can be provided, please visit a branch."

I was able to get around it by calling back in and providing the incorrect, but expected answers to pass the verification step - I imagine, however, that this could have turned into a real nightmare for seniors, or anyone who wasn't able to deduce what the expected verification answers were.

> I went to a physical branch to get it fixed and was told that branches don't have that kind of ability so I'd have to call customer support.

What are the branches even for if not customer support?

> What are the branches even for if not customer support?

Lots of physical locations make the bank seem big/safe/reputable.

Beyond that, it's sales and a place to have ATMs. I have sometimes been able to get a replacement card issued at a branch instead of waiting for one to show up in the mail.

Some branches will accommodate special requests like "can I withdraw $200... in two dollar bills" / take coin deposits but that's been increasingly rare.

My local branch has had a sign on the front door "our coin counter is broken, sorry for the inconvenience" for the past 6 months. I refuse to believe they don't have a working coin counter in a bank branch; they just don't want customers bringing in a big jars of coins.

I didnt even realize you could do that - I just assumed you still had to roll your own coins or use a service like Coin Star

A meeting space to discuss business services, and a terminal for people who insist on depositing cash. They are definitely not a customer support terminal.

Sales. They are there to talk you into getting the premium mortgage.

Banks don't want to run physical branches anymore, hence why, at least in the UK all local branches are done. And central branches are all that exist.

They want to close even them because the only services they have now is ingesting cash, which is getting less and less anyway.

But yeah, any time I've gone into a branch, which they made me do a few months ago to "validate" my documents for a mortgage. Which was just scanning and uploading to their internet..., they've made me sit on the phone to their call centre.

This is more a statement of how awful Canadian banks are than anything else. For anyone unaware we have an oligopoly of five identical banks all of which treat their customers like shit and effectively extract tax from the Canadian population while providing nothing.

> while providing nothing.

You forgot about the endless frustration and annoyance.

Ironic given the prime minister's former employment

With advent of ai-based impersonation, I wonder why in-person reset is not the priority right now

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