Rant- It’s 2022, and my bank just told me it’ll cost 1% of the cheque’s value for us to bank in an oversea cheque, and it’ll take 30 days to process the remittance. Oh, and I must be there physically at the bank branch where we opened the account.

Cryptocurrencies is already changing the remittance processes in the world. I have my boss’ maid using USDT & USDC to transfer their monies out of the country and back to their hometown. Coincidentally, I’m handling a foreign bank account. Guess what?

The foreign bank account requires one of the directors to literally be there a thousand miles away to ‘activate the online transfer capabilities’. The local bank requires over 75 pages of document for us to open a domestic foreign currency account. Heck, we had to airflown some documents from different parts of the world to open this account. Even if we receive a foreign country cheque, they want 1% of processing fees and it’ll take 30 days!

I wonder if they considered this when they calculated the ‘energy used per transaction’ calculation.

The worst part is definitely the fact that we cannot operate our foreign country’s bank account without some rigid and yet conventional confirmation by SMS for banking transaction.

It’s 2022 and banks are still stuck on technologies such as cheques, physical pen-to-paper signatures, and the inevitable visit to your bank branch and no other ways around it. No wonder people are jumping into crypto. I could’ve just transferred the balance on a whim- after a test transaction of course.

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26 thoughts on “Rant- It’s 2022, and my bank just told me it’ll cost 1% of the cheque’s value for us to bank in an oversea cheque, and it’ll take 30 days to process the remittance. Oh, and I must be there physically at the bank branch where we opened the account.”

  1. The existence of cheques is ridiculous. Apart from the elderly I guess. My gran wouldn’t be without her chequebook. Would still like to withdraw pension from the post office in cash if they allowed it.

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  2. Yawn…..

    I’d suggest that the company paying you stops using cheques (really, in this day and age) and does a bank transfer instead. Almost all international banks can provide INSTANTANEOUS transfers.

    fyi, I worked in IT for an international bank.

    I haven’t used a chequebook in 30 years, or visited a bank branch in 20 years.

    If your customer is sending you cheques they are taking the piss.

    Banks are not stuck with old technologies, but some customers STILL insist on using them. Best guess as to why, your customer is just trying to delay payment and hang on to the cash for longer.

    p.s. The cheques in the post. 😉

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  3. Depends on bank. Wise.com is able to make cross-border transfers cheaper than come crypto. They have no branches everything can be done through app/web interface.

    This to me seams like cherry picking data. Yes this is terrible but it’s not like you can’t change bank to have better options. Because this would be bank changing experience for me.

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  4. I’m pro crypto but I can’t see that this is a problem that I solved by crypto. Bank transfers already exist. I haven’t seen a cheque in about 15 years. I’ve been making international election payments since I started needing to do them. Never known any different.

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  5. The problem you describe is already solved with normal banking in most of the developed world. Crypto won’t help here, since crypto is often more expensive and unsafe, compared to normal banks.

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  6. Legacy banks are just awful all around. They’ve been feeding off regular people’s work for so long, they’re like a tick that’s so full and round that it’s tiny legs can’t even touch the ground anymore.

    They *will* be replaced if they don’t adapt, and I won’t shed any tears about it

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  7. Crypto is the future. It’s here to stay, & banks are scrambling to keep up w/ their outdated, cumbersome, time consuming “we keep banker hours” nonsense.

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  8. 1% of the value of cashing a cheque in one currency into an account with a different currency.

    How would crypto help this? Send BTC to an ETH address and it could cost 100%. 1% doesn’t sound so bad.

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  9. Many countries are already changing their currency to USDT . This is a real salvation for many citizens. Banks have long been impudent

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  10. no one in the world besides the US uses cheques. i’ve literally not seen a cheque in the last 25 years here in europe. it speaks for the banks that they can even process something like this at all.

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  11. I honestly haven’t even seen a cheque since the early 2010s. To be fair we have PAYID in Australia where transfers are almost instant (10-30 seconds)

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  12. Banks centralization, terrible interest rates, and vague oversight pisses me off, but this specifically is why I’m bullish on crypto.

    I can transfer crypto in seconds to minutes for the same if not better fees any day of the week.

    To transfer money from one savings account to another savings account with a different bank in takes 3-5 days not including the weekends depending on what point of the process they’re at.

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  13. What a rip off. Sucks that people can still make profit off of these ridiculous and archaic methods of money transfer. Sorry for your experience.

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