[m101]

This is also a common experience in retail banking (not only wise) in the UK.

I put the blame on excessive regulation. Businesses are scared of crossing the regulator for fear of revocation of licence or high fines. Also the regulations themselves impose lengthy delay requirements on doing business.

What I've also found is the large incumbents largely skirt the regulations (HSBC for instance let's payments through whilst revolut spent weeks investigating them). Revolut spends the money, which they don't have, whilst HSBC knows they can pay any fine required. Regulation working precisely as designed.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Asking for KYC is normal. Here, OP is reporting that they're being alternatingly told that:

- they need to provide KYC documents, except the documents they're being asked for are the same they already provided

- everything is fine and no documents are required

That's not "excessive regulation", that's incompetence and insufficient regulation.

[m101]

I had one experience whereby I had to receive some payments from some foreign entity for both HSBC and revolut. I got stuck into weeks of wrangling with with revolut (similar to that of OP), and having been through that next time I used HSBC, who immediately allowed the payment.

Some businesses simply follow the regulation more closely then others. It's just a fact. Businesses are always making the trade off calculation as to fines Vs costs. For revolut a fine could be existential, for HSBC it is not. Therefore they behave differently. Fines are a cost of business and incumbent firms have helped design regulations with regulators in part to defend their market position. Of course, there is always what they say the regulations are for (e.g. money laundering prevention etc), but there is often a further motivation. This concept is not new and you can see it all around us in the multitude of state capture that exists in many places.

[beAbU]

Retail banks have branches. If something happens to my account and I'm locked out I can literally walk from my home to the branch and raise hell.

I, like many in my corner of Europe double-bank, with salaries, loans and mortgages sitting at a brick&mortar bank, and we only send our monthly spending money to revolut, exactly because if revolut decides to close my account for whatever reason, I might have max €2k frozen.

[xtracto]

This reminded me the video of the guy who went to his bank's branch to withdraw some of his money but they won't give it to him .

The only thing you will get by "raising hell" in the branch is to get arrested haha

[lang_agnostic]

How does removing excessive regulation help this scenario?

In what you describe the difference would be that HSBC doesn't get fined and neither HSBC or Revolut does any check. How does that help?

[lmm]

> In what you describe the difference would be that HSBC doesn't get fined and neither HSBC or Revolut does any check. How does that help?

It would mean HSBC and Revolut would compete on a level playing field, and so would their customers, and ordinary businesspeople like OP wouldn't get randomly screwed.

(And sure, maybe a little more "money laundering" would also happen. But at this point the anti-money-laundering-financial-industrial complex has done far more harm to society than money laundering ever did)

[m101]

yes. there exists a culture of "safetyism" that burdens society with excessive costs relative to the benefits achieved. This is, of course, starting from the (dubious) assumption that the stated objective of the regulation is the true purpose, rather than safety merely serving as a convenient, secondary goal.

[m101]

This scenario has happened because of the regulations that banks have to follow. They freeze accounts and check payments more frequently now given the extra scrutiny demanded of them.