Rant alert!
This is a story both about how banks continue to steal from us, and evidence that the EU is nowhere near as powerful as eurosceptics maintain.
I need to transfer £40,000 from the UK to the Czech Republic. If I were to do it in the other direction, one internet transfer, and a fee of about £20, would do it. But from the UK? Oh, no. I am with HSBC here. The first problem is that HSBC allows you to transfer no more than £10,000 of your own money per day. Allegedly for our own security. Never mind that no such limit exists at Virgin Money from where I transferred the money to HSBC in one easy operation. So to transfer 40k I have to make four transactions on consecutive days, and HSBC charge me £17 each time, total £68.
Now where the EU comes in is that in theory HSBC offers "SEPA" payments. They only charge £9 for one. But I couldn't use it, because HSBC have a limit of only £2,000 for SEPA payments. So what is SEPA? As I now know, it stands for Single Euro Payment Area, and has been created by the European Commission to make all cross border electronic transactions as easy (and cheap) as domestic ones. And what's not to like about that?. It is backed by the Payment Services Directive, one of those nasty European laws from Brussels. Except that -take note Len - many big businesses stick their fingers up to such directives, and challenge consumers to do something about it (another example is the one year goods guarantee in the UK, which is two years in the rest of the EU). So HSBC's £2,000 limit is a totally arbitrary piss-take. There is nothing in SEPA that justifies it, let alone calls for it. It is HSBC's way of claiming to comply, while not really complying. And we get ripped off.
After half an hour on the phone, during which HSBC tried to claim that the £2k SEPA limit was mandatory, until I started quoting from the EU website, we reached a compromise whereby they would refund me £38 for making 4x £10k payments, bringing the fee down to £30. I'll give HSBC credit for at least allowing their call-centre people to cut such deals; and I know it is not the fault of these little people, and I always tell them I know they are not personally responsible. The person responsible is presumably one of the 200 HSBC managers people whom we learnt today earn a basic of more than £1m. Before bonuses. Which of course today George Osborne went, in our name,to Brussels, to try and stop the EU from limiting.
It is another example of how fundamentally corrupt the management culture of banking is. And since they are huge international businesses, it takes an international effort to fight them. But while they have a twonk like George Osborne in their pocket, even the EU can't save British customers from being ripped off.
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Move your account to, say, Citibank. (There's a branch, I know, in Prague.) They do loads of stuff at no charge including SEPA payments for me to Germany.
However, I don't know about relatively large transfers - maybe alright to your own account in another country? Otherwise the Banks are very concerned indeed and rightly so about accounts getting cleared out by unauthorised withdrawals from fraudsters.
Citibank, for example, send a text authorisation code to a mobile (previously registered with them) for an on-line withdrawal to a new payee and you have to input the code before a transfer will be concluded.
Red Pete. I think all the big banks are equally shite. And my guess is that their real money isn't made on the likes of us. Forced separation of the retail sector seems to me the way to go.
£9.00 for a same day transfer or £5.00 for a SEPA payment.
You can trade over the phone or be set up online where you can book your own fx deal to purchase CZK and set up your payments online too.
Fully FSA regulated etc etc and alongside travelex are the biggest fx brokers - 'Trusted Foreign exchange since 1979' as our marketing blurb says.
sorry if this turned out to be a bit of an advert !!!
I also blame those who lent stupid money out to those who had no chance of paying it back, and those who went into hock for luxuries because they felt they were 'worth it, and you only live once anyway'!
Sorry to be so parsimonious and superior here, but I used to save up for things, still do, and the only holiday I have had in the last seven years is three days in blimmin Cromer. However living within my personal means now adds up to jack chite, because I also have to take the range of austerity hits to pay for the extravagance of others.
Grrrrr
This is from the House of Commons Library:
"In 2011, financial and insurance services contributed £125.4 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the UK economy, 9.4% of the UK’s total GVA. London accounted for 45.8% of the total financial and insurance sector GVA in the UK in 2009. The sector’s contribution to UK jobs is around 3.6%. Trade in financial services makes up a substantial proportion of the UK’s trade surplus in services. In 2010-11 the banking sector alone contributed £21.0 billion to UK tax receipts in corporation tax, income tax and national insurance."
I have emboldened the bit about tax receipts from the banking industry because they are on-going receipts year in year out. Please do not confuse how much the Government has used to bail-out the banks, much of which will be recoverable in due course with how much the Government has actually lost. Loses currently stand at around $111bn some of which is in respect of the difference between the price paid for Lloyds/RBS shares and what they are now worth. But around £50bn is down the toilet on Bradford & Bingley & Northern Rock. Neither of which were world famous for paying out huge bonuses or running vast amries of investment bankers: they just had a very bad business model.
In any event, bank's taxation receipts will have paid for the bail-out in five years or so. The added value they bring to the UK economy paid for the bail-out in one single year.
Are you really saying you would have prefered the british banking sector to have disintegrated? It would, you know, have taken our economy and the value of many, many pension funds with it.
What is even more annoying in my case is that I have a Raiffeissen e-Konto account. It allows you to keep five sub-accounts in different currencies under one account number, and switch between currencies with no fee. So I wasn't even looking for a transfer with a currency exchange, it was GBP-GBP.
Loads of senior level bank executives have earned huge bonuses for things like exceeding targets on sales of PPI. Instead of getting bonuses a lot of them should be doing time. As Simon Jenkins, hardly a leftie, argues here , these bonuses are actually money that should have been returned to shareholders. They can **** off to Dubai if they want. A lot of that talk is bluff anyway.
One-Lung, you promised my next transaction free, right ?
However my simplistic view is shared by many who vote, 'taxes for bankers, cuts for hospitals', and it will be notions such as this that will influence them at the ballot box. The recent elections in Italy, the unrest in Greece and elsewhere, the power of the internet, and simplistic notions such as mine; these elements are very likely to combine to create a very different political landscape in Europe.
http://www.standard.co.uk/business/markets/anthony-hilton-bonus-row-is-a-matter-of-trading-places-8521021.html
As an "old-fashioned" bank manager in Barclays, looking after clients from £8m to £1bn turnover, I know that myself and many of my colleagues have not seen pay rises or bonuses for several years. Not great, but also not something to moan about. We still have a job at the moment, which many don't as a result of the last few years turmoil.
I appreciate that you noted above that it isn't the general banking people who have benefitted from exorbitant salaries/bonuses...a lot of us have been here for many years looking after clients who have become friends and are a little hacked off at being lumped in with cowboys. Some of us are in it together.