[HN Gopher] A short conversation with a bank
___________________________________________________________________
A short conversation with a bank
Author : fremden
Score : 351 points
Date : 2022-03-10 20:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.danhon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.danhon.com)
| eweise wrote:
| Try Chime. Its not a bank.
| civilized wrote:
| This is very, very much the vibe of my entire experience living
| on this planet as an adult, dealing with financial services and
| tech:
|
| "No we won't do the one thing you need us to do, even though it
| is extremely simple and easy"
|
| "Hey would you like to try this thing we spent a billion dollars
| on, you definitely don't need it but it's very trendy"
| dmje wrote:
| It's beyond tech and fin stuff IMO. The drive for profit has
| just driven customer service through the floor across pretty
| much every industry. If I think about all the services I use -
| banks, energy, SAAS, trains, internet... I don't think any one
| of them would provide me with a customer service email or phone
| number that would end me up in a conversation with a real,
| intelligent, English speaking, non-cribsheet following human
| being. Every single one would give me a chat bot, a generic
| email form, a number to ring that I'd have to sit on for a long
| time and an end result that was far from what I'd consider
| good, considerate customer service.
|
| Strikes me that there is potential here for businesses to
| genuinely make customer service their focus, at the expense of
| profit or maybe by offering their services at a slightly higher
| premium. The Groundhog Day cycle of doom that we all feel all
| the time is deeply damaging to everyone concerned apart from
| shareholders. It'd be a breath of fresh air if companies went
| back to focusing on their customers first and foremost.
| bombcar wrote:
| My experiences with Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and Vanguard
| have all had that level of service, including talking to a
| human immediately the few times I've needed to.
|
| Note that they're all primarily investment brokers that
| sometimes offer banking like services.
| tzs wrote:
| > with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt
| data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it
| doesn't actually include what I bought because Amazon are
| terrified you'll use that data to profile me and sell more ads
|
| I'm curious if Amazon uses different formatting depending on the
| recipient's email address?
|
| I use Fastmail and checked my order confirmation (not sure if
| that is the same as a recipt) from a recent order, and it does
| not list the item I bought. However, at the bottom it _does_ have
| a "Customers Who Bought Items In Your Order Also Bought" section
| which lists a couple similar items to mine.
|
| Do they still have that on the ones send to gmail?
| tsycho wrote:
| This one annoys me a lot, and I blame Amazon. They seem to
| think that my purchase data is a monopoly for them to sell me
| ads on. And to be anti competitive, they have completely
| screwed up the UX for customers.
|
| "Hi, it's Amazon. We have shipped your order #udid. But you
| need to sign in to the app on your phone, and click through
| multiple screens, to figure out which item it is. Because you
| know, it's a $35 billion ad business for us."
|
| What happened to Amazon always being consumer first?
|
| Update: If Amazon offered a setting ("display item details in
| email?"), I would have no complaints. They can default to opt-
| out, and give it some self serving Apple-esque bullshit name
| like "Protect your data from third parties", I would be okay
| with all that.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Let me FTFY
|
| Amazon are 'obsessed' with (their milking of) the customer
| (and anyone else they can).
| boppo1 wrote:
| >What happened to Amazon always being consumer first?
|
| It worked
| cafemachiavelli wrote:
| I know this is the kind of flattering in-group humor aimed at
| people like me, but I still found it hilarious.
|
| Also, considering that I'm listening to a talk about the
| computational complexity of economic planning on the side, the
| "we should recreate the entire financial system from first
| principles" part felt like a rude yet completely deserved
| callout.
| pinko wrote:
| > I'm listening to a talk about the computational complexity of
| economic planning
|
| Ooo, sounds interesting! Link?
| cafemachiavelli wrote:
| https://youtu.be/soDlyercgOo
|
| Fwiw, I don't think economic planning is or was the main
| problem of socialism, more the information gathering that
| precedes it or the mechanism design that comes after, but I
| have a soft spot in my heart for anyone engaging productively
| with alternatives to capitalism, even if they aren't
| particularly fleshed out.
| mathattack wrote:
| Every time I try to do something slightly beyond the ordinary
| with my bank, I get reminded that it's mainframes all the way
| down underneath. Mainframes that IT leaders are afraid to change,
| update or reboot. Yet they still figure out a way to chisel you
| every which way.
| gyulai wrote:
| "It's just that all of us have so little agency in this world
| now." ...made my day.
| hooby wrote:
| So...
|
| do I laugh or cry now?
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Not directly related to the title, but further in the article:
|
| > newly minted MBA ex-consultant who's just started working at
| Dropbox as a product manager: and here is my presentation about
| why it is imperative for us to expand from file synchronization
| and, for some reason, password management, into financial service
| integration through our automated financial information archival
| tool, and then ultimately into financial services, which will
| strengthen our moat against competition from other file
| synchronization services
|
| I think this is largely part of why modern web services are
| getting more annoying and aggressive about monetization strategy
| -- a _massive_ proportion of people in product these days seem to
| not be the sort of nerds-solving-real-world-problems who founded
| Dropbox, but someone coming from big consulting companies where
| the main output seems to be 300-slide presentations. It does not
| seem like they have much of an exposure to the more human-centric
| style of building a good product, but rely mostly on buzzwords
| and spreadsheets, because that ties in closely to what they did
| before.
|
| I'd like to hear a counterargument from any ex-consulting product
| managers, or people who hire them though :)
|
| That being said, the password management seems...okay to me?
| Services like 1Password _already_ used Dropbox as a backend, so
| if you 're paying Dropbox, it seems like a fair feature expansion
| for them to give you further reasons to keep using them since the
| space overhead is presumably trivial. You probably have a decent
| amount of sensitive data in there as well.
| xiaosun wrote:
| Well, I suppose the devil's advocate argument is once you get
| to this stage (publicly traded company), the company's priority
| is no longer just "do things to get traction", but also "do
| things to support share price". You could argue the ex
| consultant MBA type product manager is better suited to solve a
| problem that institutional investors run by ex finance MBA
| types have.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| That's exactly the problem - that's why things are so broken
| as per the article.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| self-referential gravity pull into financial services churn
| -- agree with disdain
| danhon wrote:
| IIRC 1Password doesn't let you use Dropbox as a syncing/backing
| store anymore, and if it still does, it's being deprecated.
| zoom6628 wrote:
| Hilarious. Some things haven't really changed in 40+ years I've
| been dealing with banks. Looking forward to a "short conversation
| with YouTube about my account" version.
| cuu508 wrote:
| I've recently been going through my password manager and closing
| inactive accounts. 9 out of 10 websites don't have a "close
| account" function, you have to talk to the support. Unfortunately
| these conversations are often similar to the ones in the article.
| You get to talk to 5 different agents, you receive a confirmation
| your account is closed but your login credentials still work,
| eventually your login credentials become invalid but they still
| send promotional email to your email address, and so on.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| If it's a service that is not blocked in the EU you can often
| send a GDPR request to have your data deleted.
| https://www.datarequests.org/generator/
| Nextgrid wrote:
| In practice, a lot of companies lie and may not actually have
| functionality to delete accounts. A UK fintech claimed they
| closed my account, while in reality they changed the email to
| <username>VOID@<domain> and presumably suspended future
| logins, but guess what, all the data is internally still
| there including the foreign key relationships which by
| themselves are unique enough and can be used to reidentify me
| and/or correlate my activity across other services.
| immibis wrote:
| ... does it happen to be your own domain with a wildcard
| email inbox?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Yes - that's how I found out. A company that was supposed
| to delete my data as per the GDPR (or at the very least
| retain the minimum amount of data required for legal
| purposes) was sending me all kinds of emails to the
| "VOID" address, clearly suggesting they just changed it
| but otherwise left my account intact, most likely because
| they didn't actually design the system to support being
| able to delete user accounts.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If it's a service that is not blocked in the EU you can
| often send a GDPR request to have your data
| deleted.https://www.datarequests.org/generator/_
|
| The sorts of companies that don't have an online mechanism to
| delete your account are the same kinds of companies that have
| never heard of, or don't care about the the GDPR.
| salawat wrote:
| Actually, it's exceedingly common with typical RDBMS that
| deletes are highly deleterious and time costly transactions
| to process die to locking database tables for a copious
| amount of time, bringing the system to a screeching halt.
| This is why general practice is to modify the the data in
| place and leave it there in an OLTP system.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I mean, technically speaking, actually deleting data without
| physically destroying the drive is pretty hard, especially
| with transistor-based dead storage !
|
| I've always wondered whether GDPR just closed their eyes on
| that, or if it was so that the process of later restoring
| data was flagrant enough that it would be hard to hide upon
| inspection...
| avg_dev wrote:
| that was beautiful.
|
| > bank: sir this conversation is recorded but I blinked my eyes
| very slowly twice
|
| I laughed out loud at that.
|
| Edit: Also, I never realized why Amazon stopped putting the name
| of the thing I purchased on the email receipt. Now it makes
| sense.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Now it makes sense.
|
| Can you enlighten me? Why don't they include that in the email
| receipt?
| nkurz wrote:
| To prevent Google from tracking purchases. Google scans all
| email that passes through its servers and parses out who
| bought what. If the information isn't in the email, it makes
| it harder for Google to do this. Presumably Amazon wants to
| keep this information for its own competitive advantage.
| Further reading: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-
| gmail-tracks-purchase...
|
| Also, your comments seem to be auto-dead for the last couple
| days. Glancing at your comment history, I'm not sure why. I
| vouched to recover this one. You might want to check in with
| Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and ask him what's up.
| robocat wrote:
| Google parses purchases for that feature, but it looks like
| Google denies using it for targeted advertising.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653102
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > bank: instead you can get all your transaction data as a csv,
| an xlsx, or an ofx or whatever Quicken or Microsoft Money thing
|
| I don't even know why is this a thing (i.e. who had to sacrifice
| himself to the gods of IT interoperability so that a lot of banks
| offered this) , but all of these formats are actually very well
| documented these days. It's a GOD. SEND. that even the most
| terrible of banks seems to offer this, double plus good when no
| one at the bank even knows what "Quicken" is.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Best part: "but did you write it in rust?"
|
| Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank
| branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all
| that storefront real estate that could be used for _real_
| businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?
| "
|
| A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business
| there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible
| display of what we can do with all those excessive fees we charge
| you."
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Dutch banks:
|
| Q: Well, at least I can still withdraw and deposit money there,
| right?
|
| A: Actually, if you want to deposit coinage, we've outsourced
| that to home improvement stores instead.
| krallja wrote:
| I'm assuming there is an option to turn it into
| cryptocurrency too?
|
| (At least, that's what Coinstar in the US has become.)
| chrisdave wrote:
| That's not true, they maintain them as a backup in case you
| corner a customer service representative on the phone and they
| are about to have to do what you asked. That's when they tell
| you you need to visit a branch.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Branches are equally powerless.
|
| See: Bank of America's policy on two-party "and" checks.
|
| I walk in, having had a checking account with them for
| decades: "Hi, I need to deposit a two-party check into my
| account here. This is the other party with me, and we're
| happy to show ID."
|
| Door greeter / agent: "Sure, I can do that for you."
| _{Proceeds to verify my information and set up deposit on her
| tablet}_ "Hmm." _{Walks over to her manager, discusses}_
|
| Manager: "Hello. I'm sorry, we only allow two-party checks to
| be deposited into joint accounts that list both parties."
|
| Me: "I have the other party standing right here, with ID."
|
| Manager: "That's our policy. Even if I pushed it through, the
| central system would kick it back out."
|
| ... which is a policy they can have. But the annoyance to me,
| is that it's a policy they _choose_ to have, rather than a
| policy they 're _required_ to have. Corrections welcome, but
| there 's no law that mandates this handling of two-party
| "and" checks. It's just risk mitigation on BoA's part.
|
| Which, if a multi-decade relationship with your customer
| doesn't facilitate taking additional risk (over a <$1k check)
| in the interest of customer satisfaction... why would I do
| business with you?
|
| Needless to say, I closed my BoA accounts.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Needless to say, I closed my BoA accounts._
|
| I've read a number of BoA horror stories on HN, and didn't
| think anything of them. I just assumed there were a lot
| because BoA is big in California.
|
| Then, recently, I tried to deal with BoA customer service.
|
| - I'm saving up a few thousand dollars for a Christmas
| present, but don't want my wife to see the money in our
| joint account at another bank.
|
| - Since I have BoA credit card with almost nothing on it,
| and a BoA next door, I decided to open a savings account.
|
| - End of the month, I go online to pay my BoA credit card,
| and I can't. There is no way on the web site to pay with
| anything other than the savings account, and no way to re-
| add my previous external account that I've used with BoA
| for the last 10 years.
|
| - Call customer service. Wait on hold for _three hours_ ,
| getting transferred twice.
|
| - Finally get someone at BoA to tell me that because I
| added the savings account, my status changed and I have to
| add new payment accounts all over.
|
| - Explain _again_ that there is no way to add an external
| payment account.
|
| - Two more transfers, and someone confirms that the web
| site is screwed up. Hold on while I transfer you to that
| department.
|
| - 20 minutes later, someone comes on the line to tell me
| that tech customer service doesn't work on Saturdays
| anymore and to check back in a few days and maybe it will
| magically fix itself.
|
| - I decide to go to the branch. Open BoA app to check its
| hours, and it's marked "Temporarily closed." So is the next
| closest BoA. And the one after that. The nearest BoA that
| is going to be open on Monday is two hours away, according
| to the app.
|
| - Monday I go out for coffee, which takes me past the BoA
| branch next door. It's open. People inside. Everything
| looks normal, contrary to the app telling me it's supposed
| to be closed.
|
| - I go into the branch, pay off my BoA card, empty the
| savings account, close both accounts.
|
| Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as the
| bank of America. It should be called the Bank of Dipshits.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| Even before phone apps and internet banking BofA was
| godawful. They'd process debits first, issue overdraft
| fees, then process credits at the end of the day. As a
| poor college student in the mid 2000's I got screwed over
| twice before I closed my accounts there and haven't used
| them since.
|
| Then at one point I was between jobs and filed for
| unemployment - which _conveniently_ came on a BofA debit
| card. 10 years later and I still get an email about some
| kind of monthly statement for the $0.43 on there. I tried
| to close out the account and gave up after several
| attempts, and just marked it as spam.
| drdec wrote:
| Respectfully, you are doing it wrong. :-)
|
| Don't set up a payment option on the credit card's
| website. Use the bill pay ability at the web site of the
| bank where your checking account lives. Now all your
| payment information is in one place and, more
| importantly, under your control via pushing payments from
| your checking to whomever instead of allowing a bunch of
| companies to pull money from your account.
| _jal wrote:
| > Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as
| the bank of America
|
| Oh, this story is quintessential US Americana, right down
| to the name.
|
| I've long maintained that one of the biggest gifts to US
| corporations is how few of their customers visit other
| countries. If more of them ever saw functional banking
| (or humane healthcare, or competitive telephony and
| broadband, or a number of other things), a lot of rents
| would evaporate.
| b3morales wrote:
| It is, indeed. BofA is only as big as it is because it
| was allowed to Kirby up dozens of regional banks in the
| late 90s/early 00s. It did nothing to earn its position
| and has done nothing but exploit it since. It is a poster
| child for anti-customer consolidation.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Me and my wife have an account for IRS checks exclusively
| due to this, otherwise we have our own accounts.
|
| Funny thing is she was able to open the account without
| input from me so I'm not sure what this policy is actually
| doing.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I have found that, as long as your name is on the check,
| they will allow you to deposit a two-party check via the
| BofA app.
| vageli wrote:
| I've deposited checks that were not even signed and made
| out to another (and the person who gave me the check
| didn't sign it over either!) on mobile banking apps. I
| never sign the check for mobile or check the box on the
| check if there is one.
| bombcar wrote:
| Our credit onion mobile deposit is obviously checked by a
| human and they've actually bounced a check back as
| needing both signatures.
| dmoy wrote:
| It's not supposed to, but it does go through sometimes
|
| Incidentally a BoA teller just told me yesterday that the
| phone all is not supposed to accept two party checks at
| _all_.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's not supposed to, but it does go through sometimes_
|
| Actually, it _is_ supposed to.
|
| The 1990's-era legislation that made phone deposits
| possible shifted the liability and some other regulatory
| details a bit to make it possible. The verification and
| liability is less strict with an online deposit than an
| in-person deposit.
|
| At the time, it was a big news story. The rule change was
| originally intended to allow businesses to deposit checks
| from their offices with a device over a modem for speed
| and security.
|
| When it was in the news, people were up in arms because
| it shifted the liability for certain types of fraud onto
| the consumer, and away from the banks. Consumer advocates
| saw it as a big money-grab by the evil mustache-twirling
| bankers.
|
| The result is that now when you get something like a
| random unexpected electric company refund check in the
| mail, you can deposit it with your phone.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yeah, and then in the branch they call the customer service
| line, and hand you the phone.
| dstroot wrote:
| OMG I've had that experience! It was ... weird.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same here. It's not weird, it's abuse.
|
| The only time you get any service is when you are looking
| to saddle yourself with debt or they have to comply due
| to regulations.
| lazide wrote:
| Yup. I was so fed up with Bank of America's crappy
| service I tried to close my account with them. It took _4
| months_ to do so, and at least 8 hrs of back and forth
| between phone reps, online reps, and in person reps.
|
| First I was told to withdraw the remaining funds to get
| the balance to zero. Before I did that, I asked them if
| doing so would automatically close the account without
| incurring some kinds of fees? _crickets_
|
| Then I was promised when I got ahold of their specific
| account closing department that I would be sent a small
| cashiers check for the small balance I kept in there to
| avoid incurring fees. Never arrived.
|
| Then I kept getting calls for someone with a different
| name from the bank. I eventually figured out they were
| trying to call about this issue, but literally has a
| completely different name that made no sense.
|
| When I called them back anojt it to close the account
| again, I was told I needed to go to a branch. Well, all
| branches are closed due to Covid. Then I have to call
| again, well, there is a specific branch that is open -
| great! Too bad I couldn't find it via the branch locator
| the first time.
|
| Go to that specific branch - closing an account requires
| an appointment.
|
| Me: Ok, when is the next appointment?
|
| Them: since you're closing an account, you need a
| specific kind of rep. The soonest appointment is a week
| from now.
|
| Them: but you can close the account by withdrawing funds
| to zero
|
| Me: will that actually close the account without
| incurring some kind of negative balance due to fees?
|
| Them: _looks nervous_ uh no
|
| Me: I see, it's almost like you all are trying to get me
| to not actually close my account due to some incentive
| structure and tack on fees. I'm about _this close_ from
| suing you in small claims court for not actually letting
| me close my account.
|
| Them: _look at each other super nervously_ ehem, I can
| book that appointment for you.
|
| Me: ok
|
| And somehow, when I get home after this, I get a text
| that my account has _actually been closed_ and the
| cashiers check gets in my hand _through the mail_ before
| the actual appointment they scheduled me.
|
| It's just adding bullshit process to provide friction to
| keep some metric up near as I can tell.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion
| bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on
| all that storefront real estate that could be used for real
| businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or
| whatever?"
|
| > A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any
| business there...
|
| This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular
| credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on
| Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's
| a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU
| is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since
| their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.
|
| Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over
| town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.
|
| (I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)
| moltke wrote:
| I've had my bank close my account and send all the money in it as
| a cashier's check to my sister's house. They never told me and
| let me keep depositing money (at one point I had ~$5k in there.)
| The only way I was able to figure it out was when payments
| stopped working and I physically went in to try to withdraw the
| money I needed.
|
| Crypto has issues but banks are worse.
| bityard wrote:
| One thing that really needs to start taking hold in the public
| consciousness is that credit unions are far superior to banks in
| almost every way.
|
| They usually offer 100% of the same services but with lower (or
| no) fees, and with far less bullshit. I've been a member of
| multiple CUs and every time I've had a problem, I just walked in,
| described the situation, and they just fixed it. If I call, I
| don't get bounced around to 3 departments, at worst I end up
| being transferred to a manager who actually has the power to fix
| the problem.
|
| Every time I decided to try a bank instead of a credit union, I
| have regretted it.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| This seems very US centric?
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Every time I hear this I try a different credit union around
| me. Sometimes they have arcane rules like "oh you don't
| actually have dollars in this account. You have 500 shares. At
| this time you may sell shares back to the credit union at a
| rate of $1/share". Or recently a credit union in my area
| emailed me my password after I signed up, and then they kept
| sending me it in the mail as a reminder that I hadn't activated
| my account yet. There's a credit union at my local health foods
| store run by a professor who self-hosts their website out of
| there and customer service is just his office hours, so I think
| that'll be fun to try next.
| immibis wrote:
| FWIW this is how banks work. You always have shares.
| Sometimes they just pretend they are dollars.
|
| I am not a customer of one, but I assume that using a CU
| instead of a bank is like using Linux on your desktop instead
| of Windows.
| leetcrew wrote:
| what kinds of services do you get from a bank/CU that cost
| money? I've been using schwab for a few years, and the only
| thing I've ever had to pay them for was the privilege of
| throwing away my money on a couple stock options. I've only
| ever had to contact their support for help with problems caused
| by a different financial institution, and I was speaking with a
| human within one or two minutes.
| pinko wrote:
| This is still true of small credit unions, but over the last 30
| years has become less true of giant credit unions in my
| experience. Large credit unions have have morphed into
| institutions that are nearly indistinguishable from banks, are
| run by the same executives (who move laterally back and forth
| between them), with the same culture, norms, and attitude
| towards customers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmembers.
|
| And, unfortunately, small credit unions are finding it harder
| and harder to compete given the necessary investments to keep
| current technologically and meet new regulations.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I want this to be true, but when looking at both home and auto
| loans, the CUs around me were not remotely competitive on
| rates.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most credit onions just resell the loans anyway (ours doesn't
| if it has a term 10 years or less, which got us some decent
| rates).
| yial wrote:
| Two anecdotal-
|
| I will say simple was a joy to work with, even for things that
| were old. I would never have closed on my house in time if not
| for them. Sadly- it seems that since BBVA -> PNC ... everything
| historic for that account is gone.
|
| Unrelated to banks:
|
| Me: I'm calling because I got a notice that you're cancelling my
| healthcare due to non payment of my premium?
|
| Healthcare service line: yes. You had a responsibility to pay it
| and you didn't so we cancelled it and we can't change that
| decision for 12 months.
|
| Me: but I have a confirmation of the payment from your digital
| pay system, and a bank statement that shows you have taken
| payments each month for the last several months.
|
| Healthcare service line: I don't see those on my end. You should
| have called to verify we received them. Maybe your credit card or
| checking account was stolen.
|
| Me: but I can login to your website and it has the payment
| history.
|
| Healthcare service line: hangs up.
| immibis wrote:
| Time for small claims court!
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I miss Simple. I liked it ever since finding it in a sponsored
| content slot on the new Digg. I cobbled together something like
| the Goals feature with spreadsheets, but it's not the same.
|
| As for BBVA->PNC, I had to get the CFPB involved just to get
| confirmation that my account was closed.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/BBVABank/comments/pypk87/good_news_...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/BBVABank/comments/r53cjt/it_was_ano...
|
| The "courtesy" waiver of the fee for the opt-out paper
| statement not one Simple abductee asked for ends in April, so
| we'll see how that goes.
| yial wrote:
| I had issues closing my PNC account as well, but eventually I
| was able to successfully do so. Something had been migrated
| strangely where I was getting statements and things mailed,
| but in branch or on the phone they couldn't pull me up, nor
| could I login to online banking.
|
| Eventually something happened that triggered a fee, which
| after two cycles put the account negative, at which point
| they were able to close the account and I paid the fees. (The
| balance had been very low as I had planned to close it but
| hadn't before the BBVA->PNC transition!)
|
| I'm Sorry you had to go through all that. It sounds
| incredibly frustrating.
|
| But I miss simple so much as well. I miss how easy everything
| was. Even with my local credit union... who I would rank as
| okay, it took 10+ days and over a dozen emails to setup
| online banking.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| > _with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt
| data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it
| doesn't actually include what I bought_
|
| Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed
| receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early
| 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change
| other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed
| purchase history. Thank you Amazon, I guess.
| [deleted]
| code_duck wrote:
| This also enables Amazon to claim you purchased a different
| item than you did, or charge a different price. The only way to
| obtain documentation of a purchase is to take a screenshot of
| every transaction.
|
| I bought some lightbulbs from Amazon recently. I am quite sure
| I purchased some 7-8 watt LED candle bulbs. I received a
| package of 50 watt incandescents, which was definitely not what
| I wanted. I went to my Amazon account and it showed I had
| purchased the incandescents. I looked at my email receipt, and
| all contained was is a list of links to Amazon, which led to
| their site, showing I had purchased the incandescents. The lack
| of text in the email meant I had no way to determine what I
| actually purchased and whether the mistake was on my end,
| Amazon's or the third party vendor.
| fjert wrote:
| I had a very similar thing happen to me. I bought some AirPod
| Pros on sale and received normal AirPods and the Amazon order
| history indicated I ordered them when I know for a fact I had
| not. I was able to exchange them and all, but it was super
| frustrating.
| breakingcups wrote:
| You probably unintentionally got caught in a review
| whitewashing scheme, where a well-rated product gets renamed
| and its specification and pictures updated to an entirely
| unrelated (or in your case, somewhat related) product so the
| seller doesn't have to start from 0 reputation.
| bduerst wrote:
| Nah, Amazon just figured out they could get you to buy more by
| getting you to click back into the website.
|
| Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a
| decade now. Someone at Amazon took dark-pattern _customer
| engagement_ 101.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Maybe this is a U.S. thing or I don't understand what you mean
| by 'receipt' but in the U.K. I get an 'order confirmation'
| which contains the things I ordered as well as various delivery
| updates.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| I find it pretty annoying that the product info isn't in the
| receipts, shipment notification, or delivery notification. A
| less charitable interpretation of Amazon's motivation is that
| it forces you to click back to Amazon where they are trying to
| sell more to you.
| [deleted]
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| Another plausible explanation is that omitting the items you
| bought means that you have to log back into Amazon and look at
| your purchase history to see what you ordered. That gives
| amazon several more touch points to get you to buy more things,
| including the "buy it again" button that they put on the page
| for particular items. It also makes it more difficult for you
| to search for the name of something you bought in the past to
| order it from a different retailer.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Seems incompatible. Making you log-in to advertise is a far
| less effective option than the ability to advertise products
| to you _while you voluntarily_ use another service, i.e. your
| email. They could easily do the same adverts and quick order
| links from your email, but targeted adverts in your inbox is
| useful information to Google, maybe even better than purchase
| history since the recommendation work is already completed.
| danuker wrote:
| Once you're logged in, the credit card is ready to go.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Cannot reproduce - my emails from Amazon have the subject "Your
| order of X" and contain a link to X.
| bityard wrote:
| It must vary by customer, none of my emails about my Amazon
| orders EVER contain any information about the items ordered,
| they just have a status and the order number.
|
| I once talked to their customer service to ask how to stop
| getting the emails since they're basically entirely useless
| and they told me there's no way to do that.
| vetinari wrote:
| Not only that; it seems even your chosen language has an
| impact.
|
| The mails from Amazon.de in German do not contain any
| information about ordered items. From the same Amazon.de,
| to the same mail address, but in Czech, they do.
| lostlogin wrote:
| This sort of solution belongs in the article.
| bombcar wrote:
| My _order_ receipts have what I ordered but the shipment and
| delivery notifications no longer do.
| Jabbles wrote:
| I have:
|
| - Your order of X (confirmation)
|
| - Your order of X has been dispatched
|
| - Arriving today: X
|
| - Delivered: Order number N
|
| Only the last does not contain the product name X.
| robocat wrote:
| > with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt
| data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it
| doesn't actually include what I bought
|
| Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining
| receipt data for advertising?
|
| One refutation https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-
| purchases-priv... said in 2019 that Google's Purchase's page
| said "Google won't sell the [Purchases] information or use it
| to choose which ads you see"; however I did just log into
| Google and looked at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and
| couldn't find that text now, so who knows if that is still
| true.
|
| Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 refers to a
| second refutation from 2017 - "Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail
| for Ad Targeting".
|
| Edit: I did read an article talking about other companies
| scanning receipts to target advertising, so that could be a
| motivation of Amazon's.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You seem to be equating "mining" with "selling to third
| parties", I don't think it's the common use (I understand it
| as "gathering data").
|
| Also there's many ways to exploit the purchase data without
| ever selling it outside the company, including using it in
| aggregate for ad targeting without exposing specifics to the
| ad buyer.
| skybrian wrote:
| Another possibility is that email is sometimes unencrypted,
| email clients vary in how secure they are, and some regulation
| says they have to care about this because privacy.
|
| But who knows, making stuff up like you and I did isn't
| evidence. At best it gives you an idea of the range of
| possibilities.
| lelandfe wrote:
| There is precedent of weaponizing email data against the
| company sending the emails, though.[0] This definitely seems
| like a move that's in Amazon's best interest.
|
| I have not heard about regulations like what you're
| describing.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-
| data-...
| nly wrote:
| I don't see this.
|
| I ordered something from Amazon today and a full description of
| the item I bought, including size and price, is in purchase
| confirmation email...
| hooksfordays wrote:
| Another explanation I'm predisposed to, due to personal
| involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was
| transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package
| tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app
| access to read your emails, we'd scan for tracking #s but also
| parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you
| ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything
| from one place. Shortly after Shop started gaining major
| traction in late 2019/early 2020, Amazon started pulling more
| and more details from their order confirmation emails, and we
| were less and less able to provide actionable info on your
| Amazon orders until they finally put the entire order behind a
| login, and all we could tell you in the Shop app was you had
| placed an order at Amazon.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-
| tracker/id1...
| hooksfordays wrote:
| Slightly unrelated, we noticed this happening _before_ we
| renamed the app in the App Store from Arrive to Shop, but
| after the rename happened in, I think, March of 2020,
| negative reviews about the missing Amazon data started
| flooding in. People associated the name/design change with
| the degraded experience, when really the experience had
| already been degraded for a couple months by that point. The
| initial rebrand only changed mostly superficial things, like
| colours and the name!
| tomcatfish wrote:
| That's interesting and completely changes my views on
| Amazon's actions.
|
| I thought they were blocking an action that is kind of "opt
| out" and you're saying they might be blocking an "opt in"
| action. Neat to hear this before I got too confident in my
| position.
| ripe wrote:
| "So now everyone can recreate your statements."... "remember us?
| We're a verb now."
|
| Hahahaha!
|
| I wish this weren't true.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| We're a verb now, we've never had a profitable quarter, and
| we're still trying to come up with a business model.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| What is this reference, CashApp?
| krallja wrote:
| Venmo
| TillE wrote:
| The disappearing statements / transaction history is especially
| annoying.
|
| A few years ago I had to review transactions for tax purposes,
| but I couldn't because they only let me go back 12 months. Even
| now my bank only goes back 3 years, while Amazon still has my
| order history from 1999.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Amazing to me that cryptocurrency isn't even mentioned on this
| page of comments, even though it is the type of technology
| required to replace banks, which everyone agrees are horrible.
| Nullinker wrote:
| My wife wanted to close her US bank account:
|
| Customer: I don't live in the US anymore, how can I close my bank
| account?
|
| 1 week later...
|
| Bank: Sorry for the delay, we were unable to answer your question
| in time but assume that you have found the answer already and
| closed the ticket.
|
| Customer: Repeats the question.
|
| Bank: To close an account you need to come in person to one of
| our branches that are only in a few states in the USA.
|
| She still has the back account.
| redisman wrote:
| I closed my bank account by being abroad for many years and not
| updating my KYC info when they asked for it
| jacobkg wrote:
| "customer service agent: would you be able to participate in a
| customer satisfaction survey to provide feedback on how we did
| after this call?
|
| you: if I don't give you a good rating in this survey will you
| get fired?
|
| customer service agent: yes"
|
| This particular aspect of modern society really bothers me
| datavirtue wrote:
| If I do those I just give glaring reviews so as to possibly
| relieve some small bit of human suffering.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| If you agree to the survey, do you get bumped higher in the
| queue? I've always wondered.
| salawat wrote:
| Nope. You don't.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I think you mean glowing
| RhysU wrote:
| Fidelity is great. I don't work for Fidelity.
|
| For example, this week I needed some cost basis information on a
| transfer between accounts with unlike registration. Couldn't get
| it online. I emailed them. They responded via secure message with
| exactly what I wanted in 2 business days.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a joke, or a serious attempt at telling
| us how good a company is by someone that drank the kool-aid.
|
| 2 days to receive answer to a simple question? Responded via
| secure message? What does that entail?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Email is unencrypted by default, and although private secure
| message systems like this are annoying to work with, they do
| avoid that problem.
| pinko wrote:
| Agreed; an ugly but reasonable solution to a real problem.
| However! I wish they'd put a URL in the email which brought
| you _directly_ to the message in question once you logged
| in, rather than forcing you to navigate through the whole
| web UI and messaging system to find it. They never do that.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Probably means the internal messaging system on Fidelity's
| page.
|
| FWIW, I also think Fidelity has fantastic customer service,
| especially in-person. It's their differentiator and
| competitive advantage. Wouldn't be surprised if OPs question
| was not simple at all.
| simonblack wrote:
| Banks are not in the business of giving you services. Banks are
| in the business of selling you money. And they like charging as
| much as possible for the money they sell you.
| 542458 wrote:
| Sure, but my local hardware store is also trying to sell me
| stuff and is trying to charge as much as possible for it, yet I
| don't have to jump through opaque and frustrating procedures
| and barely functional web systems to buy a 2x4.
|
| The author's issue comes down to banks being apparently
| uninterested in attracting business by solving actual customer
| pain points. Instead of solving real problems (terrible UX
| around a lack of statements, a malicious USB stick can drain
| your bank account, etc) the banks mostly just appear to trend
| chase (chat app! Crypto!).
| pc86 wrote:
| The bar to open a hardware store next door is much lower than
| the bar to open a bank (I am not arguing for more bank
| deregulation). And the bar for the customer to switch from
| one hardware store to another is much lower than the bar for
| a customer to move all their accounts, direct deposit,
| mortgage, etc. from one bank to another.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Never had these problems with my CU (LMCU), and honestly Cap1
| bank has been doing a pretty bang up job with my CC's. I'm
| considering trying them for banking.
| nym112358 wrote:
| Capital One CC and Capital One Bank (360) are completely
| different creatures, with a shared web interface. I've
| accumulated a bunch of experience with the major online
| banks, for my personal use as well as settling an estate.
| My "main account" is at Ally, but due to the possibilities
| of account lockout I still have accounts at all three in
| addition to a local CU (for cash withdrawals,
| notary/medallion stamps).
|
| Discover customer service is fantastic, with friendly
| interactive humans. I feel bad that Discover is not my main
| bank - I was going that way until a binding arbitration
| clause (with unreasonably short opt-out period) derailed
| the relationship. Ally is adequate, with the "standard"
| humans emulating robots relying on a case system. They will
| promise to call/email you back but never will, so you have
| to poll. Capital One 360 is at or below Ally - I had a poor
| experience with them settling an IRA, but they're ending
| their IRA business so who knows.
|
| Unfortunately the Discover web / app is the worst of the
| three (although they support OFX Direct Connect last time I
| checked). Ally and Cap1 are nice (although there are some
| things you cannot do through the Cap1 web interface until
| you find a hidden link to the old web interface, which is
| still partially active). One standout feature of Cap1 is
| that you can open a reasonable line of credit for overdraft
| protection, if you don't generally have enough cash sitting
| around in an adjacent savings account.
|
| P.S. I tried Alliant CU but was not impressed by their web
| interface or the hoops required to login to the app.
| Customer service seemed okay. Maybe in a different life.
|
| P.P.S. Ally Invest is a completely separate creature from
| Ally Bank. I've had two different _horrendous_ experiences
| with Ally Invest, and urge everyone to steer clear. The
| reps sound like they know what they 're talking about
| (holdovers from TradeKing I presume), but are completely
| disconnected from the back office's procedures or
| activities.
| creeble wrote:
| Do NOT use Cap1 for banking!
|
| I too was satisfied with my Cap1 cc account(s), tried their
| banking, and it was a total disaster. I eventually got my
| money out (through two systems that had been deprecated and
| closed down, with no apparen't notice to me), and left $10
| in one account that still has paper statements - but no
| ability to sign in to the account any more.
|
| I leave it alone to spite them.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _honestly Cap1 bank has been doing a pretty bang up job
| with my CC 's_
|
| What a coincidence.
|
| Last month, my wife called Cap1 to close two department
| store credit card accounts she hasn't used in years.
|
| This morning, I'm doing the bills and in the letters are
| two from Cap1 welcoming her to her _new_ department store
| credit cards, here are all the terms and rates, and here 's
| your first bill for $0. Happy spending!
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >google product manager: also a chat app
|
| This may be the best line I've read all year.
| mdb31 wrote:
| Yeah, this is why I don't miss living in the US, like, at all.
| Sure, you can make mad cash and all, but the overall
| infrastructure is just way-below-third-world.
|
| My particular moment of truth was when I noticed that my Pacific
| Bell cell phone bills stopped arriving. The first month, the USPS
| could possibly be to blame, but the second month, I called
| Customer Service to figure out what was going on.
|
| So, first question, last 4 digits of your SSN. Answer, as ever:
| 1234. Eh, no, WRONG, try again!? Eh, yes, my SSN ends in 1234?!
| No, sorry, it does not, I cannot talk to you, bye!
|
| Eh, yes, okay... So, try again the next day, hopefully that agent
| will be more clued in? Nope, no way, disconnected again.
|
| So, visited the PacBell store near my office. Same thing, the
| person in the store is, like, visibly shaken after checking my
| account. can't do anything to help me, can't tell me what is
| wrong.
|
| TL;DR: my cell phone got disconnected (most likely for
| nonpayment) after another month or so. Tried to sign up with
| AT&T, but got denied, because my 'nonpayment' was already
| recorded on my credit file, so, yeah.
|
| Ended up calling every number in the PacBell SoCal range, and
| finally got through to someone who took pity on me and was
| willing to listen to me, and got my account and credit restored.
|
| A few months later, PacBell drained my account by issuing
| hundreds of direct debit orders for my monthly cellphone bill.
| They eventually stopped doing that, but never reimbursed me for
| any overdraft fees. I was almost evicted due to bounced checks
| because of this, but nobody cared.
|
| I've lived most of my life therefore and after in the EU, and
| while life here definitely is not perfect, I've NEVER had trivial
| issues like the above almost cause me to be homeless. So, I guess
| there's a startup idea in there somewhere? /s
| swayvil wrote:
| Add to that :
|
| Governmental policy dictated by social media forces controlled by
| herds of solipsists I wouldn't trust to scratch their own arses.
|
| With the power of distributed censorship. All of the dystopia but
| with nobody personally responsible for "being the hitler".
|
| With fun tools like "shadowbanning". Which censors you without
| telling you why you were censored. Or even that you were
| censored.
|
| And secret forbidden word lists!
|
| We're augmenting the powers of insects with digital technology.
| This only creates giant insects.
|
| https://youtu.be/G8R9OoQh4q0
| nly wrote:
| I've been trying to get my energy provider to change the
| electricity meter serial number on my account for 4 months. The
| meter was changed 2 years ago, hence reset to zero, and I now
| can't provide them with readings because the current readings are
| lower than the last.
|
| 4 months, 3 separate calls, 5 separate email threads.
|
| Even getting them to understand the problem is a huge challenge.
|
| It's just a fucking database entry for godsake. 30 years in to
| the IT revolution and most businesses are still hopeless.
| [deleted]
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I've been very happy with my credit union. Just saying.
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| The electronic statements are a blessing - just download and keep
| a copy. Exactly same as with paper ones, but with fewer steps.
|
| All systems have their limits, but the current electronic ones
| are much better than the mortar and paper of yesteryear. I just
| finished renewing tags for my cars in 5 minutes from the comfort
| of my home, as compared to 2 hour Tag Office visit 20 years ago.
| (Happy bday to me!).
| pwg wrote:
| > Exactly same as with paper ones, but with fewer steps.
|
| Actually with more steps.
|
| Paper statements:
|
| Bank generates paper statement on appointed day (work/time
| input by bank)
|
| Bank packages paper statement in envelope and mails it
| (work/time input by bank)
|
| Postal service delivers paper statement to my mailbox
| (work/time input by postal service)
|
| I open paper statement (work/time input by me)
|
| I scan paper statement (work/time input by me) (also can be
| optional if one prefers simply filing paper statements)
|
| Electronic statement PDF's on bank website:
|
| Bank (maybe) sends an email saying "your statement is ready"
|
| I receive the email
|
| I have to now open my password manager (work/time by me)
|
| I have to log into bank website (work/time input by me)
|
| I have to navigate to the "download your statement area" (which
| was designed to make the process of accessing the electronic
| statement as obtuse as possible) (work/time input by me)
|
| I have to download the pdf (hopefully one click for me, but
| still a bit of work/time by me)
|
| I have to rename the downloaded pdf to fit my filing convention
| (since, at best, it downloads as "statement.pdf" from the bank)
|
| The major time input on my part with paper statements is the
| "scan" part, all the rest happens without any involvement of
| time, energy, or remembering it is "time" on my part.
|
| The electronic statement download requires I actively expend
| time and effort to "go to their website, log in, find the
| download section, find the statement, and initiate the
| download".
|
| What I want to see, but no bank offers it, is exactly the same
| flow as the paper/postal service, but substituting "email" for
| "postal service" and "pdf" for "paper". I upload a GPG public
| key, bank does the work of encrypting the pdf using my key and
| emailing me a copy (which makes "electronic statement" the same
| as paper, they do the work of remembering it is time and
| initiating the transmission). Then I save the pdf attachment
| from the email, decrypt it, and file it (saving the "scan" step
| from the paper copy flow).
| djrockstar1 wrote:
| On the bright side, now that you have step by step
| instructions for what needs to be done, you can hack together
| a script that will take you more time than doing that process
| manually would have for the rest of your life, but once you
| do you won't have to do it ever again.*
|
| *unless the bank changes something about their
| email/website/pdf and that breaks the script
| jjnoakes wrote:
| Or, perhaps more likely, a third party "security"
| department contacted by the bank implements some AI-backed
| system that notices your program scraping data and freezes
| your account.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Find and use a local credit union. They will always have better
| customer service.
|
| Avoid national and multi-national banks at all costs. You are
| nothing to those banks and they will treat you like it.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I have all my loans now through credit unions. On purpose.
| There are no drawbacks.
| re wrote:
| > someone on at a place in which you will never find a more
| wretched hive of disruption and innovation, but also called
| hacker news: hey we should found a startup that automatically
| logs into peoples' bank accounts and downloads their statements
| and then stores them on amazon s3 in a badly configured bucket
| that's ultimately publicly accessible to the entire world and
| then when that happens blame amazon for an opaque and insecure
| management tool but instead it's obviously our fault for moving
| fast and breaking things
|
| Is this a reference to something specific (like the Venmo
| reference later on), or just to poor security practices and data
| exposures in general?
| [deleted]
| xcambar wrote:
| I only skimmed, but all of it vividly brought back memories I
| thought were securely hidden from consciousness, for sanity
| purposes.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > someone from the UK: haha, you live in America
|
| Excellent, my job here is done.
|
| I also love the absolute nailing of startup/tech culture.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _you: if I don't give you a good rating in this survey will you
| get fired?_
|
| > _customer service agent: yes_
|
| you: if I give negative feedback on the survey will any bank
| procedures change?
|
| customer service agent: no
|
| /me gives good marks because the agent was friendly, despite
| having no ability to accomplish things and the effective memory
| of a goldfish with a ticket system.
|
| This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but to the sound
| of hold music.
| pards wrote:
| > just stay in your fucking lane
|
| This, a thousand times. It irks me when companies insist on
| fucking with a product that was good enough already.
|
| At that point, they should scale down, sell it to an income fund
| and move on.
|
| But no. The growth-hungry VCs ruin the product and alienate their
| previously-loyal customers.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Regarding financial institutions, AmEx is basically the only one
| I enjoy dealing with.
|
| I've never had any issues with them.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Capital One is pretty solid in that you don't have to deal with
| them because they have sane tech. It's the only bank that has
| ever really helped me when I was in poverty.
| darod wrote:
| that wasn't a short conversation at all.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| A short conversation with Blue Shield of California last month:
|
| BS: Have a question? Ask us via this very useful secure messaging
| form!
|
| Me: Great! Can you explain the difference between these two
| arcane out-of-pocket limits that you display that are un-
| Googleable and nowhere in your documentation that I can never
| find anyway?
|
| BS: Sure! We will wait two days and then send you an email
| suggestively titled "a response to your inquiry" that really just
| contains an attached PDF with a link to a completely different
| portal where you have to register a new account to download an
| image of a scanned fax that tells you to call customer service
| where you can wait on hold forever to answer whatever question it
| was you had that we also don't remember! Yay secure messaging!
|
| Me: Wow such technology! I now very understand the difference
| between "out of pocket max" and "max out of pocket max"! I feel
| much secure that I won't go bankrupt the next time I have an
| incident and get treated by the wrong doctor at the right
| hospital! Thanks, 2022!
|
| Fin.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I heard somewhere that telegraph is a legitimate form of
| communication for some official routes - unless they aren't
| specifically prohibited. Has anyone tried this? I would
| _reallt_ like to force my bank to respond to my telegraphs...
| or pony express letters
| dan-robertson wrote:
| At my university there was a rumour that you were still
| allowed to submit your thesis in Latin. I think some people
| were tempted to try it but I'm not aware of anyone who did
| (or who pored over the regulations to find out if it was
| true)
| buttocks wrote:
| In the US, telegram service ended in 2006!
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna11147506
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Generally, anything not-for-profit and older than 40 years is a
| technological shit-show.
|
| There's neither the individual or management will to
| successfully migrate or upgrade at the pace required.
| Consequently, _everything_ is held together with duct tape and
| person-hours.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Generally, anything not-for-profit and older than 40 years
| is a technological shit-show.
|
| Everything new is the same. Because everything has to be
| disruptive innovative hockey stick growth bullshit.
|
| Here's a screenshot of tha app for a Swedish bank, Klarna: ht
| tps://pbs.twimg.com/media/FHXG5bPX0AIC1oe?format=jpg&name=...
| . They are a bank. They offer credit cards, and fast online
| credit payments.
|
| And no, "Payments" isn't a list of your payments you've done
| throught them, that's behind two or three clicks now. It's
| what you owe them.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| I worked for a 80+ year old non-profit. Their tech was
| definitely a shit show before I turned it around. I won't be
| surprised if it ends up degrades into a shit show again in a
| decade or so.
| professoretc wrote:
| > get treated by the wrong doctor at the right hospital!
|
| In California, this shouldn't happen. If you go to an in-
| network hospital, all care providers you see are required to
| bill you at the in-network rate.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I don't actually live in California.
| bfdm wrote:
| Great, now just do the same thing for making all hospitals in
| the state (and later the nation) forced to bill at "in
| network" rates. then with a final step of capping the
| premiums paid according to income with the rest automatically
| covered by social programs, the USA might finally get to
| something sort of like a sane healthcare system.
| salawat wrote:
| Oh wow. Blue Cross hosed that?
|
| Max Out of Pocket: This is the yearly maximum accumulation that
| an insured individual must pay before the insurer takes on full
| financial responsibility for subsequent claims. This comes in
| generally one of two flavors: a family or individual.
|
| The individual is straightforward. If you have a MOOP of $1000,
| and you've paid out $1000 in copays or coinsurance after
| meeting your deductible on just you, you no longer owe any
| contribution on claims for you, for that year. However, someone
| else in your family on your insurance will have to have their
| copays/coinsurance paid until either their individual MOOP is
| hit, or between the two of you you accunulate enough for the
| family MOOP to kick in, which depending on the nature of the
| plan, will start covering expenses for everyone else in the
| family unit.
|
| Out_of_pocket_max is likely the individual MOOP.
| Max_out_of_pocket_max is probably a terribly named family or
| Group MOOP. These should not be confused with policy or
| lifetime maximums, which are caps to the amount of a specific
| benefit the insurer is willing to pay out for you as an
| individual period.
|
| I know for a fact places screw that all up. I spend a large
| chunk of time making sure things like that do not stick around.
| pinko wrote:
| This is almost true: you will, in fact, be forever on the
| hook for any medical expenses charged which exceed the
| "reasonable" limits your insurer has set for each given
| service, even after you've exceeded your MOOP. So if your
| physical therapist charges $150/hour and your insurer
| reimburses $120/hour, you'll still owe $60 OOP for two hours
| of therapy even if you've exceeded your MOOP. Ask me how I
| know.
| salawat wrote:
| Ah, but I bet if you look carefully, it's probably hidden
| in the EOB or benefit booklet somewhere, if not, somebody
| has dome writing to do. Even then, that is not a byproduct
| of the insurance, but of the "Consent to be treated and
| statement of patient financial responsibility" form that
| you almost certainly signed when you went to the doctor.
| That 120 dollars was still paid without coinsurance or
| copay from you after MOOP was attained, your physician is
| just falling back on what you signed to make up the
| difference.
|
| I hate medical billing to the point I dove in to try to
| figure out how it all works.
|
| Can you tell?
| monktastic1 wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/t7M2RGv
|
| When I called, I was told that it's there to show that the
| OOP max for in-network and out-of-network providers isn't
| _summed_ to get my total OOP max; instead it 's just _equal_
| to my OON OOP max. (Of course, this plan makes it hard to go
| bankrupt, unlike all ACA plans. That was a bit of literary
| liberty.)
| salawat wrote:
| Ah... So they're differentiating MOOP levels they'll honor
| based on the provider in question.
|
| I'm guessing they probably have some funneling arrangement
| that recoups the extra spend they'd incur from the
| potentially more frequent MOOP attainment in network.
|
| Cute, but it really kinda sidesteps the concept of "Max out
| of pocket". I sense an MBA at work.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Excuse me -- your yearly deductible is $10,000? Here I
| thought EUR385 was a lot...
| monktastic1 wrote:
| No, the deductible is much lower. This is the maximum I
| can spend out of pocket in a year. But most ACA
| ("Obamacare") plans have no maximum for our of network
| providers.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I have 8 numbers (well... 6 and 2 'no max)...
|
| DED-INN/OON
|
| Me: $7k/$35k
|
| Fam: $14k/$70k
|
| OOP Max-INN/OON
|
| Me: $7k/no max
|
| Fam: $14k/no max
|
| I regret leaving my grandfathered plan from 2010 - every
| year I got a threat saying it would be gone next year,
| then magically one more 'extension' with a threat that it
| would be gone next year again. And the price kept going
| up. Switched to ACA plan and... I missed this 'no max'
| stuff. Fingers crossed I don't need healthcare if I'm ...
| you know, outside whatever 'network' might happen to take
| me in for care.
| akomtu wrote:
| You probably pay way more in taxes. If I was given a
| choice between (1) an additional 20% income tax and free
| healthcare, or (2) crazy $10k/year out of pocket maximum,
| I'll choose 2 without a blink.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| At the risk of turning this into a political debate --
| yes, you pay more taxes if you earn more, and less taxes
| if you earn less.
|
| That's how a society is supposed to work: you don't leave
| people to suffer because they aren't rich.
| sneak wrote:
| We don't use tax money to bulk buy food, or auto repair,
| or fuel, or computers, or phones, or banking, or any
| other modern good or service that is essential and
| required for every member of society.
|
| Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance?
| If the justification is "everyone needs it and you will
| die without it" then shouldn't farms and supermarkets
| also be public utilities? The line seems entirely
| arbitrary to me. Water yes, but food no? Why education
| and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
|
| The added benefit of letting people arrange it
| individually is that those with a higher risk appetite
| are not forced into it (at significant personal expense)
| against their will/consent, too.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| And at some point, perhaps you'll still get reasonable
| health care without it being tied to some employment
| (whether or not you were/are highly paid). Much harder to
| rely on that in the US.
| Swizec wrote:
| > go bankrupt /../ the wrong doctor at the right hospital
|
| This is the real problem. If we could solve _that_ , none of
| the rest would be an issue.
| Antipode wrote:
| I thought that was already solved by the No Surprises Act
| that went into effect this January.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >I thought that was already solved by the No Surprises Act
| that went into effect this January.
|
| Are you serious? Is this a real act? We need an act of
| congress to not be surprised by health care?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| It seems that it is indeed real, but I suspect it will
| take a while before it's common knowledge and actually
| has teeth (but I'm a bit cynical).
| alasdair_ wrote:
| This sounds exactly like my kids school district. They send an
| email telling you you have a "secure message" and you need to
| log in to see it. So you try to sign up to see the message, but
| can't because you don't have the password. So you try calling
| them and they say they will reply via email. What they mean is
| that they will send you a secure message about your inability
| to receive secure messages. So you call again and they transfer
| you to a number that is only open between 9am and 4pm on
| weekdays. So you call back on Monday and, because this is the
| start of term, can't get through, like, at all, ever. So
| eventually on Wednesday you get through and they transfer you
| again, only this time you manage to invoke XKCD 806 and get a
| real person who knows how to "reset" the password you never set
| in the first place. So you finally manage to log in to the
| secure messaging portal and look at the email. Oh, it's a PDF
| download. You download the PDF and see it's a physical letter
| that has been scanned in to the system manually (seriously!).
| The letter? The reason you went to all this trouble? It's a
| welcome letter to the new "secure messaging" platform, with
| instructions about how to reset your password...
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Banking, health insurance, education
|
| I see a trend!
| yarky wrote:
| Next time just fill out the "forgot your password" form.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| The one that asks for an email address and then tells you
| that email address isn't in the system despite the same
| system sending you email? Yeah, I did. Many times.
| thereticent wrote:
| It's hard to recover from the memories of wasted time,
| effort, and frustration when the schools when distance-
| learning only in 2020.
|
| "We will start using Google Classroom for all communication,
| class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades"
|
| Sure. Good. Come grade time:
|
| "Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a
| week."
|
| Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on
| Google Classroom.
|
| "Your child has already completed x."
|
| It was marked missing on Google Classroom.
|
| "Please refer to Infinite Campus to see which assignments are
| missing."
|
| Ok...I signed up for Infinite Campus, and I don't see
| anything.
|
| "Did you use the user/pass we automatically created for each
| parent?"
|
| What? No.
|
| "Sir, we sent out this information weeks ago."
|
| Search...search...manual search...I don't see it on Google
| Classroom.
|
| "Oh, we sent it through ClassDojo."
|
| ---
|
| This is very simplified. Google Classroom required teacher-
| provided codes to join "classes" for each subject, provided
| through...school email! School email is an unused morass for
| Google Classroom notification emails for every action your
| child or their teacher makes. Get a teacher message on
| ClassDojo? Sorry, can't tell if it was a mass message or
| directed at you, so you have to clarify whether it applies to
| your kid given their IEP. Got two parents using Dojo? Sorry,
| can't see if the other parent has already responded to a
| teacher message. Completed an assignment on Classroom but
| didn't click "Turn in"? Missing. Can't find where to enter
| answers? Oops, your child knows to use
| ImagineMathExploreLinkConnect to get to that material.
| Completed on that fourth-party platform, but didn't go back
| to Classroom to click "Turn in?" Missing. Triple checked
| everything but still a bunch of missing assignments in
| Infinite Campus? Teacher is behind on grading, and there's no
| way to know that, either from Infinite Campus or Google
| Classroom, but it was in the class newsletter we emailed to
| your child.
|
| Maybe not all employers, but at least mine does not realize
| quite how much further parents fell behind that year than
| those without school-age kids, on balance.
|
| When schools excitedly announce a new platform for learning
| anything, I want to punch myself in the face.
| corey_moncure wrote:
| I hear you man. For me the most frustrating part about all
| of this is each platform comes with its own algorithmic
| placement system that has to learn your kid's level. My
| eldest kid has high-IQ exceptional needs, and by the time
| the algorithms would learn her level and place her
| accurately where she would make some progress, the
| classroom had already moved on to the next platform. I
| think I counted five different platforms for math in the
| past year, sometimes with multiple different logins on the
| same platform. It's a travesty and her growth has come to a
| complete halt since I stopped teaching her and gave her
| back to the school. My heart breaks but what can you do. As
| a kindergartener she was factorizing numbers in the bathtub
| and now as a third grader "Xtra Math" is asking her to
| identify whether a shape is a triangle or a circle.
| [deleted]
| dpcx wrote:
| Anybody got a link to that github repo that the article alluded
| to? ... asking for a friend :)
| thrawaybanksup wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work in a bank and have worked closely with the
| customer support team.
|
| Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and
| customer support is expensive.
|
| If you are someone who routinely calls your bank then your long-
| term value (LTV) is going to take a huge hit, so, of course banks
| want to keep everything as "low-touch" as possible.
|
| A small anecdote: there were plenty of elderly people who were
| calling customer support every day to ask for their balance,
| because they did not trust the digital app. At some point, their
| calls started being routed to some chat-bot.
|
| Customer support is also "embarrassingly outsource-able". The
| first layer of contact is usually done by someone who does not,
| in fact, work for "The Bank". They are actually employed by some
| huge contact center company who happens to have access to the
| bank's Salesforce CRM, and are instructed on how to solve most of
| complaints. It's only when they are faced with a very specific
| issue, that the ticket is then escalated to the in-bank
| operations team.
|
| IIRC, we actually divide tickets in four categories: "L1, L2, L3
| and L4". L1 and L2 are done by outsourced teams, L3 is usually
| the bank's operations squad, and L4 is the tech team with read-
| access to the database.
| immibis wrote:
| > Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low
| and customer support is expensive.
|
| Is this because banks don't need retail money any more, since
| instead of acting as intermediaries between savers and
| borrowers, they now act as intermediaries between the Federal
| Reserve and borrowers, and only take savings because they're
| required to by law?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Banking has shifted from low-volume high-profit (read: A
| bunch of rich people) to high-volume low-profit (read: normal
| folk and some poor people).
|
| The reason why margin is low... is because _you_ are the
| customer. I know many people feel "poor people are unbanked"
| and the industry is going in the direction to support them,
| but it also means banks have to find ways to get money from
| poor people and reduce costs _everywhere_ possible.
|
| Source: I used to work at a top 10 bank
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous.
|
| The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it
| applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with
| these days.
|
| The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing
| a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you
| get to talk to a human.
|
| The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race
| to the bottom situation, and it's a societal problem, companies
| do it to compete.
|
| But if your competition didn't do this hostile user
| gaslighting, then you wouldn't either. Or if instead of wasting
| 30 minutes average time before talking to someone with agency,
| the time was reduced to 5, or even 10 minutes.
|
| I think the answer is regulation, that the mean or median
| average for time to speak to a live human should be no more
| than x (I propose 10 minutes), combined with an ombusdman to
| report companies that hide behind automated systems instead of
| do support, and if the average response time goes over allowed
| limit, or more than y percent of users report a company for not
| having a way to address their actual problem, then that company
| should pay a financial penalty, to it's users pro-rata. If the
| penalty is balanced, this way companies would actually share
| the cost of the people's time they are wasting.
| zippergz wrote:
| One problem I've observed first hand is that the head of
| customer service is measured on (among other things) the
| amount of money being spent on customer service (and other
| closely-related metrics like average contacts per order,
| agent time spent per customer, etc.). These executives have
| no direct control over the product, so they can't actually
| solve the problems that are causing people to contact
| customer service. For example, they aren't in charge of the
| warehouses, so if for example a ton of people are calling in
| because they are getting the wrong item in the orders, the CS
| leader is getting dinged in their metrics but can't address
| the root cause.
|
| This leads them to do things like those being discussed,
| where they take measures to reduce contacts without solving
| any real problems. Maybe if "customer satisfaction" were a
| more important metric than "CS budget," this would be better,
| but customer satisfaction is very hard to actually measure
| (how many of us even bother filling out surveys, and of those
| who do, how many are honest?).
|
| I guess a lot of this boils down to "big company syndrome"
| where the customer experience is controlled by a series of
| interlocking factors, but the humans who control those
| factors are siloed and disincentivized to work together to
| improve things. My experience is that in most of these
| situations, people actually do have good intentions overall.
| You wouldn't believe the ways I've heard CS executives twist
| themselves into knots to convince people that outsourced or
| automated customer service is actually better for the
| customer (and I think they truly did believe it, or at least
| had fooled themselves into believing it). But the end result
| is bad for everyone.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Which is why we need regulation tied to actual financial
| performance of the business.
|
| So that when they try to externalize the costs they end up
| paying for it instead, enough to influence the business to
| change, to fix the root cause of the problem.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| This is funny, but also not funny because of its truth.
| blibble wrote:
| the existence of a terrible bank doesn't mean they're all awful
|
| like any market, there are competently run companies and there
| are terrible ones (e.g. HSBC)
| 4pkjai wrote:
| I run a website that converts PDF bank statements into CSV
| files. HSBC customers are a big source of revenue. They only
| provide PDFs.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Can you please name for me any that you think _are_ good?
| gravypod wrote:
| There are quite a few local credit unions that I've heard
| good things about. Some are run in a way that all the profits
| are equally divided by the account holders (after expenses
| like comp for the employees). Some also offer credit cards
| and mortgages.
|
| Credit Unions are usually hyper-local or for special interest
| groups so you'd need to look around by you.
| treis wrote:
| Charles Schwab has been great for me. Specifically for the
| stuff in the article, statements back to when I opened it in
| 2012 are available in my portal and their bill pay worked
| flawlessly for me. On top of that, they have US based
| customer support, they refund atm fees, and their fees are
| about the lowest out there.
|
| The only downside that I've run into is that they don't have
| branches that take cash deposits.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Capital One. Only bank that actually ever helped me when I
| had nothing.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yep. And the good ones tend to be smaller or regional chains.
|
| At a certain size you just become too big to be competent, and
| the incentives get FUBAR. After that they don't really care
| about customer satisfaction because they're really focused on
| investors or the next 1mm corporate customers.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| If you're looking for good technical support and features
| you're not going to get it with your local credit union,
| they're even worse than the major banks.
| b3morales wrote:
| If my local credit union has an accessible branch office
| where I can speak to a human who can assist me, I have no
| need for technical support. Which is the way I prefer it
| anyways. Most financial corp tech that I've had to deal
| with has been trapped in an uncanny valley, doing a
| horrifying ineffective mimicry of secure services and
| account management. If they're incapable of crossing the
| divide to being actually good, I'd rather they'd just stay
| on the no-tech side.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Eh, the bigger banks I use have slicker websites, but not
| necessarily more functional websites.
|
| Of course, we're talking about thousands of small
| institutions, they're going to vary wildly.
| antsar wrote:
| > there are competently run companies
|
| You're just gonna leave us hanging like that?
| blibble wrote:
| I thought about it but I don't want to reveal who I bank with
|
| sorry :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Then why even bother? Really? You bank with some one that
| you feel like is good, but you won't tell people the name?
| Fine, you think that reveals TMI. Then don't tell us who
| you bank with, but tell us what bank you feel is good and
| the maybe some supporting reasons. You could do that
| without, "that's who I bank with".
|
| Otherwise, this was a completely wasted/pointless use of
| electrons.
| tbihl wrote:
| The question, though: is that to avoid more targeted
| attacks against you (like not telling people you own gold
| or bitcoin) or to avoid your bank becoming so successful
| that they can use their market position to become abusive
| to customers (like not telling people where you get your
| news on the off chance that you have a trustworthy source
| of news)?
| blibble wrote:
| former
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| As someone trying to get pre-approved for a mortgage with
| effectively no credit history, I'm really feeling the lack of old
| account statements.
| layer8 wrote:
| Man, today's world (I hesitate to call it "modern") is so
| depressing in so many ways, and there are just no improvements in
| sight... humor is the only refuge.
| mprovost wrote:
| also a chat app
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I've had this conversation only there was a lot more inarticulate
| screaming because going through stress related issues on other
| things that the bank was just the thinnest layer of icing on.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| It's so eldritch. I've found dealing with the healthcare system
| is similar. Any business that you need more than they need you,
| this happens. There really should be consumer protections about
| this but I have no idea how that would even be implemented.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I was just about to comment the same.
|
| I recently needed to make several medical appointments with a
| large healthcare provider. They had FOUR different online
| portals to "manage" my appointments and information. Navigating
| that was the exact same experience as the article, just without
| an actual person.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Banks, of course, can be awful.
|
| However, if you can develop an in-person face-to-face rapport
| with someone at a bank, you'll find that they can bypass,
| sometimes, much of the infuriating petty bureaucracy.
|
| I once had a bank employee print almost a ream of statements on
| the spot for me. I was almost in tears from the generosity of
| their time and effort. This was after going to a different branch
| an being told it would cost hundreds of dollars and take weeks
| because it was a "back-office" job.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Always ALWAYS _ALWAYS_ be nice to service people.
|
| You never know when you might need them.
|
| Also, ALWAYS be nice to janitors, maids, maintenance staff,
| front desk people, security guards, etc.
|
| You should make anyone with access to a set of keys your
| friend.
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