On Friday I sat in a bank

You take a photo of your cheques for rent and utilities and send them to the company. They will then photoshop new info onto the cheques every month and make sure your stuff is paid for a small fee.

Essentially you pay somebody to do cheque fraud on your behalf. And that's a thing that works in the US.

Honestly, every time I hear anything about the US banking system I get goosebumps. It's frightening. Like, for instance, Mint can get to all your bank info with just username/password. No RSA certificates required for logging in.

Scary.

> * No chip and pin. You still sign credit card slips.

Well, there's "just PIN," but yeah.

> * You have to interact with the branch where you set up your account for a bewildering array of things.

I opened my last two bank (checking and savings) accounts entirely online, one with an online-focused bank (USAA) and one as brick and mortar (technically, a credit union, but same basic concept), no visit necessary.

> * Sending a wire transfer overseas involves sitting in a branch and filling in reams of paper work.

Chase let me send a wire transfer internationally (to a foreign government, no less) entirely through their online banking system. The "privilege" cost me $40 (damn) but it did work.

> * Bank account numbers are treated as secret information - they are starred out in the online banking interface! Apparently, it I know your bank account number I can take your money?

Yep, unfortunately. That goes along with:

> * No obvious equivalent to the UK direct debit system for automatic bill payments.

I can give my routing number and bank account number to a biller and they can cheerfully slurp as much money as they like from my account. Hopefully it's the correct amount. If it isn't, there's a regulation that allows me to fix it but it takes a few days and phone calls.

> * People still use cheques for things! Which you have to pay extra for (you actually buy cheques from your bank). And "electronic banking" incorporates mobile apps that scan cheques.

I buy checks from Checks-in-the-Mail, a third-party reseller, for a few bucks every couple of years because...

> * As a general rule, paying someone some money (for rent, for example) is fraught with difficulty, especially if you hold a non-US bank account.

I write checks for my rent. My apartment building has an online payment system but charges $4.95 for the "privilege" of paying electronically or $39.95 (holy cow) to pay by debit or credit card. Sadly, paying by sliding a check under the door of the management office is still free, so I do that.

I can't speak for Europe, but in Australia I believe EFT is "trivial" because the risks are low.

To open an account you must prove your identity with 100 points of identifying documents. In practice you need to show one of a passport or a driver's licence, plus some other soft ID like a bank card, a bill to your residential address, a student card and so on.

In practice this means that banks have relatively high assurance of who the money is coming from and who it is going to. That makes fraudulent transfers very difficult and so there is no risk-managing requirement for a multi-day clearance procedure for interbank EFT (to give time for a cheque to come up solid).

As time has gone on, banks have progressively moved from overnight batch consolidation of transfers to having what having mostly-same-day transfers. I don't know if they're running multiple batches or if some banks have set up direct connections outside of the old clearing house framework and I don't much care. It's just nice that I can pay a bill the day before it is due and know with confidence that it has been paid.

And I like even more that I can receive invoice payments on a Thursday and spend it no later than Friday.

When a payment date goes past, I can ring the next day to inquire about it and nobody is going to give me the cheque's-in-the-mail story.

* No chip and PIN. Yep, same here.

* You have to interact with your branch for EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. Not your bank. Your branch.

* The banking websites are all uniformly atrocious. Every single one looks like they designed it back in 2002 and just stopped and said, "meh, this is good enough."

* You pay for everything. Want to withdraw money from an ATM - your bank's ATM! - 1.76 ILS. You want to withdraw cash from a teller? 10 ILS. You wrote a check? 1.80 ILS. You thought about the bank on your way to work? 2.40 ILS.

* Checks can not be stopped. In fact it is illegal to issue a stop-payment on a check.

* The bank scrutinizes EVERY CHECK YOU WRITE. If the signature doesn't match the signature they have on file -- even a little bit because you were in a rush -- they reject the check. Oh, yeah, and they examine it by hand, not by machine. Oh and when they reject your check for technical reasons? 9 ILS.

* Direct debit... ok, actually, they've got this one covered. It's super easy. Except you still have to fill out a form that authorizes said payee to debit your account.

* You pay a monthly fee to the bank for the privilege of banking there. Not all banks have a monthly fee necessarily, but they all have surcharges so it all amounts to the same thing at the end of the day.

Oh gosh, don't even get me started on just how awful and inefficient the system is here. It is ripe for disruption except that the government has pretty strict controls around everything that goes on in the banking sector.

We switched to Ally (online only bank) a while ago which fixes some of the issues. At least now I can deposit cheques by awkwardly photographing them with my phone and new chequebooks are free...

I was in the SF area, pitching a product, for a few weeks last summer.

You can imagine my utter elation when somehow the mag strip on the only viable credit card I had with me ripped half off, and _nowhere_ did they accept chip and PIN.

I was lucky I wasn't travelling alone.

> * No chip and pin. You still sign credit card slips.

There are two systems at work here, the credit system and the ATM system. The latter uses a PIN (no chip, so basically online verification) but the primary difference is related to chargebacks and fraud. Like in the UK, in a PIN system if I know your PIN and get your card I can loot your account and you are SOL. In the US a credit card transaction with a signature but no PIN means that the merchant is on the hook for fraud. If I get your card number and go on a spending spree you are not going to take a hit for any of the charges, the merchants are.

> * You have to interact with the branch where you set up your account for a bewildering array of things.

You can, but you seldom need to. I have several online-only accounts that I still maintain for making US payments and except for cases where I was taking out a loan to buy a house or car I think that I did not actually step inside my bank (any branch) for over ten years.[]

OTOH, I have needed to note down the exact UK branch in which I opened my account in on at least five different occasions in the last month as I opened various business relationships or established services. In the US no one ever asked for the name of my bank let alone the specific branch.

> Bank account numbers are treated as secret information - they are starred out in the online banking interface! Apparently, it I know your bank account number I can take your money?

ACH (automated check handling) is the pseudo direct-payment system we have over here. It kind of sucks, but it is basically an electronic form of the silly checques that you mention later. With the bank routing number and your account number I can write a check on your behalf. OTOH, with a couple of clicks online I can also order paper checks for your account and start making payments. They will eventually (and hopefully pretty quickly...) fail out as fraud, but when you get things set up between your account and companies you deal with on a regular basis there is a fairly seamless flow from your paycheck direct-deposit to your rent/mortgage and utilities, etc. It is just a crufty legacy system that gets tweaks every decade or two but will lumber on for a while because there is so much infrastructure built around it.

> * As a general rule, paying someone some money (for rent, for example) is fraught with difficulty, especially if you hold a non-US bank account.

And why should the system optimize for non-US bank accounts when the percentage of people a merchant will interact with who fit in this category are 0%? Part of the thing to consider here is that the US retail/merchant payments and banking system does not need to interact with anyone outside of the US; yes, there are some exceptions but they are so dwarfed by the internal transaction volume that they effectively do not exist and if you do need that rare service you can use a third-party like western union or the admittedly onerous wire transfer process. The goal is to make internal transactions easy and limit the exposure to fraud (except when it conflicts with the first goal) with the bonus of all operations being under what is for all intents and purposes a single legal jurisdiction.

Everyone has thoughts on how to fix the system or what cool ideas should be applied from other countries but most of these people fail to grasp the concept that for most people the system is not broken and so you are fighting consumer indifference and an entrenched incumbent that makes telcos look like pushovers.

[*] One interesting thing about US banking is that the local branch interactions that you complain about are actually one of the few things that most bank customers want more of. Specifically, if you press people on what is wrong with retail banking it is that there were a huge set of mergers in the past twenty years that effectively eliminated the local retail bank where people knew who you were, cared about you, and looked after you in a way that is simply not possible in a modern world of retail banking giants.

I lived in the US in the early 2000s and I found all these things to be incredibly backwards then. Imagine now!

My favorite was people using cheques to pay for utilities using regular mail. It was all baffling to me.

* no chip and pin - still largely true, they experiment every so often with chips but it never really catches on. I suspect we'll eventually leap frog this when something better comes out

* branch - usually the local bank can handle everything for you

* wire xfer - we usually just use Western Union for sending money back to my wife's family. It's a simple form, and it takes all of 3 minutes.

* staff on your side - banks here do keep playing at bizarre account fee BS, there's no end to it

* bank account # - it's weird. If I have your account # I can deposit and withdrawal money (it's how we do automatic deposit and bill pay). I think the banks try and watch for wire fraud. But it's hopelessly insecure.

* checks - pretty much just old people at this point. I think the last time I wrote a check for anything was 8 years ago when I needed to move lots of money around to buy my house.

* non-US, cash is always good

* direct bill - very common here, you just have to set them up with each service using your account #. Like I said, we haven't had to write a check in years.

I don't sign them, I just move the pen in a wiggle. It's gotten to the point that many stores don't even ask for a signature at all. If you use the debit card network then you have a pin. The difference between mag-strip and chip isn't that large in practice.

> You have to interact with the branch where you set up your account for a bewildering array of things.

I haven't been in a physical bank in over a decade.

> Sending a wire transfer overseas involves sitting in a branch and filling in reams of paper work.

No it doesn't. You can do it online and it takes just a few minutes.

> Wells Fargo...

Sorry, don't know what this situation is.

> Bank account numbers are treated as secret information - they are starred out in the online banking interface! Apparently, it I know your bank account number I can take your money?

Sort of, but your account number is printed on every check, so it's not really secret. And anyway it's not really that easy to take money that way - you have to be a validated organization.

> People still use cheques for things! Which you have to pay extra for (you actually buy cheques from your bank). And "electronic banking" incorporates mobile apps that scan cheques.

We don't use cheques, we use checks. :) Depending on the bank you may get them for free, and they are pretty cheap from 3rd parties (you don't have to buy them from the bank). Legally you can even print your own - especially if you get magnetic toner. Or just write one on a piece of paper.

But people with checks are becoming less common - people use online bill pay which will print and mail a check for you for free. (And convert the check to an electronic deposit if they know the account number of the recipient.)

> As a general rule, paying someone some money (for rent, for example) is fraught with difficulty, especially if you hold a non-US bank account.

Bill pay. It's free (usually) and very easy. A non-US bank account is a big problem though (but one very very few people experience).

> No obvious equivalent to the UK direct debit system for automatic bill payments.

Bill pay again.

> Coming from Europe, It all feels decidedly third rate. I don't think the solution is bitcoin, I think the solution is fixing regular banking.

Don't go to a physical bank. Online banking is where it's at now.

ACH ("direct debit") transfers take 1-3 business days to come in, and can only clear on business/banking days, and only after the bank opens, at 9 AM! That means someone is actually sitting there and clearing the transactions manually! WTF? Is this 1954?

When my UK friends initiate a transfer from Paypal to their bank, it hits their bank instantly, any time! 3 AM on Sunday morning? No problem. As I understand it, the same is true throughout much of Western Europe. Only I'm stuck broke until the bank opens on Tuesday so my "electronic" transfer can "clear".

Yes, I'm aware of the fact that they probably realise substantial profits on the interest-free floats. I don't really care about the reasoning for it; the fact is, it's absolutely absurd.

Transfer money? Just log in via browser or on your phone, put in their bank account number and the amount, done! Cost: €0. Happens instantly with same bank, next business day with another bank (or faster). No possibility of bouncing anything.

Two-factor authentication has been around for a while, and is required for sending money. Either via a PIN challenge-response device or an SMS. People can't charge you money without your consent, or forge checks.

Recurring transactions can be set up easily, so the rent goes out every month... Some service providers can also send an invoice to your financial inbox (online banking) where you can view / pay them.

No signatures. You use your pin-code for transactions with your card, or online banking.

International wiring can also be done online, easily.

One negative (maybe) is that credit cards are taken almost nowhere, since the normal payment system is so good. Dutch people don't spend money they don't have (since they can't), which might be a pro, but can be annoying for visiting tourists.

Wow. Thanks for pointing that out. It's frustrating to be manipulated like that. I used that syntax with purpose.

My vernacular is lazily eclectic at times. Added your edit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler's_cheque

These days, you can buy prepaid travelling credit cards. I picked up one recently ahead of a trip to the USA. They actually send two cards, a primary and a secondary, so that you have a backup if the primary is lost or stolen.