[alibarber]

Correct. It felt a bit impolite to moan about it, as I’ve found that once you get established and figure out the system everything else here works very well. That said all the natives that I know don’t exactly love their banks - so it’s ripe for disruption but I feel the market is always gonna be quite limited, due to inertia and size.

Online banking is also _the_ identity service for logging into official and semi official systems here (unless you’re a nerd and want to hook up a smart card reader and your [optional] ID card - which I totally am) and I guess there’s a heap of compliance to deal with to enter this space, which would further limit entry to the market.

[distances]

Banking being the identity verification provider for everything (including governmental services) does add hoops, mainly the requirement for in-person identity verification when opening new accounts. As far as I understand the law doesn't allow strong identification to be provided using accounts that were opened with online identity verification.