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by stevekemp 2869 days ago
Interesting how a lot of these problems don't seem to exist in Europe. (I lived in Scotland, then moved to Finland. Of course I appreciate "Europe" is full of diverse companies, regulations, and facilities. Still I think it would be wierd to find people in Europe paying rent by mailing physical checks, etc.)

Specifically "ATM Fees" are something I've never had to deal with, fast transfers were the norm, simple analytics were common-place. (Things like pie-charts showing where your money had been spent from your "checking account".)

The only thing that has always been missing from companies I've used has been easy-to-automate-exports of data. You could login and export manually to CSV, etc, but you couldn't easily script that. That seems to be changing at the moment, and EU-wide there are provisions being made for exporting and API-usage (though I suspect it'll all be terrible.)

The Nordea bank I use in Finland has a very nice little mobile app for showing my my accounts, mortgages, and investments. It also lets me schedule appointments, or call customer-support.

Customer service is hard though; much like delivery companies there are only so many banks to choose from. Name any name and ten people will say "Worst. Bank. Ever". I've used maybe five banks in my life-time, and none were terrible, even if some were better than average.

1 comments

> "ATM Fees" are something I've never had to deal with

Really? There are lots of little independent ATMs around the UK that charge a fee, and if you use a UK card abroad, there's a fee. They're not huge, but they're not zero.

When I was in the UK I used the link network, and to the best of my knowledge never paid a fee to withdraw money.

You're right about using UK-cards abroad, which I guess I'd forgotten about, though!

Only the little grey ‘liquor store ATMs’. Most ATMs are run by banks, and it doesn’t matter which bank owns the ATM, you can get cash without a fee.
Right. I avoid the corner shop ATMs when i can, but i can't always, because there aren't proper cash machines everywhere. I'd be surprised if someone else had a different experience.