Grrrr, banks

[pozorvlak]

Why, in this day and age, does it take two working days and £27 to send a few hundred dollars from Britain to the US?

Comments

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

because they can get away with it...

[ryani.livejournal.com]

Clearly you have stumbled upon a business opportunity. Make it better!

[(Anonymous)]

... with science?

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

Lack of competition.

It's a whole lot cheaper and quicker to send via Western Union inside the US or to/from Mexico.

[elvum.livejournal.com]

I have great plans for a geek-friendly bank. (Example: tagging instead of accounts.) All I need now is a few billion to float it.

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for working capital there are a few heavy-metal bearing asteroids, just floating around waiting for someone to claim them.

Of course you'll have to haul the stuff back home for it to be any good.

Unless you can prospect and asaay in situ the material and convince the Powers That Be that having an assayed value of X billion dollars in gold in orbit is just as good as having the same amount socked away in a bank vault.

A 'bank' financed by asteroid gold - now that's geeky.

[azrelle.livejournal.com]

coz banks suck ass

and paypal is more expensive

[green-jedi.livejournal.com]

I have also found that British banks are notoriously bad at dealing with anything outside of Britain. My French bank sucks in many ways, but all I need to do to transfer money anywhere in Europe is send a fax and forty-eight hours and a few Euros later, the money is there. The Germans are even better - most SWIFT/IBAN transfers are free.

[necaris.livejournal.com]

The Belgians are about the same as the French in that respect, although they'll do it over the phone or Internet (with *real* two-factor authentication!) at a vastly reduced charge and faster.

People always talk about how insular the Americans are but the British aren't great in that respect :S

[sable-veins.livejournal.com]

You know full well why.

[(Anonymous)]

You were lucky it was so cheap. Honestly.

It costs about 20 pounds for a transaction from a bank in Glasgow to another one in Glasgow (that's what they charged me 2004). It'd have been much cheaper to send the money from my Swiss bank to Glasgow.

Fortunately the campaign "You deserve a better bank" has stopped. I never knew whether I should cry or laugh whenever I spotted such an advert.

Reputation of a bank is apparently overrated. They can do without.

[andustar.livejournal.com]

I saw this and thought of you.

Someone's evidently put a lot of thought into the science. Try deleting alleles! And working out what all the variables do. I lost hours. Post if you come up with something cool :)