[gojomo]

Sibling threads touting banks as paragons of reliability, with any momentary loss-of-access-to-funds as unforgivable, must have been dealing with a different banking system than me.

With major banks like BofA, Citibank, and others, I've had…

• credit cards often disabled for fraud-alert false alarms

• check deposits sometimes subject to mysterious fund-availability delays

• individual ATM clusters or whole ATM networks down for short periods

• account information and ATM withdrawals sometimes unavailable during 'system maintenance' hours (often early Sunday AM)

• a check erroneously bounced by a major bank (BofA) when both available-by-rule funds and enrolled 'overdraft protection' would have each been individually able to cover the check amount

• my ATM card unusable while traveling to the exotic third-world locale of Ottawa, Canada due to some sort of more-than-one-day network security issue

Stuff happens, to banks also. Cut Simple some slack.

[jacquesm]

Errors on individual transactions and reporting being unavailable is not the same as transactions simply not happening at all.

Stuff happens to banks and then people switch to other banks, especially when you're a new player.

If my bank did this to me I'd be gone instantly, I almost did just over their inability to keep telebanking working through a denial of service attack, and then blaming it on the hackers. All my cards (credit, debit across several companies and private accounts) link back to the same bank. If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine.

ATM and pos worked fine during that period, if it had not I'd be gone for sure.

[lsc]

>If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine.

If banking is that important to you, then perhaps you ought to consider redundant providers? I mean, that's what you do with connectivity. you don't rely on one provider with a good sla; no, you get two providers.

[jacquesm]

There are quite a few problems that come with setting up double accounts for every company that I'm involved with. You'd have to spread the funds around in such a way that you could cover any contingency from any account, which in effect would mean that you's need twice the money. It also means a lot more work for the bookkeeper, two two factor auth tokens to keep on me, two account managers to manage, double the contracts and so on.

They deal I have with my bank is simple: they do their work, they get to keep transaction fees, screw me on the interbank interest rates and delay foreign transactions just long enough that they can go play with my cash. In return I expect them to deliver one thing: utter reliability.

If it gets to the point that there is no single bank that gives me the feeling that they can do just that I will indeed have to split assets across several banks. (there are other good reasons to do that, such as the maximum insured balance per account holder).

But the costs of doing so are what is holding me from that.