The most important service: instant money transfer (mostly) irrespective of physical location.
I had one use-case this week where paypal would not work. I needed to withdraw the amount I was to be paid by my client and paypal has a $400/day ATM limit. So I asked the client to see if he can pay directly to my bank.
The obvious solution is wire. Of course, my client happens to be in a state that didn't have his business bank so wire was a no go. You have to visit a bank to wire.
In order for him to send me money he had to write a check from his business account to his personal BOA account, then withdraw from his BOA account and then run to a Wachovia and deposit into my wachovia account--all before 2pm cuz' after that the funds wouldn't be available until the next day for me.
After I got the money, I was to deposit it into a friend's account. I couldn't do it online through my bank's interface even though we share the same bank. I ran few blocks to Wells Fargo to withdraw cash I just received from my client and transfer to my buddy.
My story is probably one of the extreme cases in terms of urgency but it does point out all the hoops you have to jump to do a simple bank-to-bank money transfer just within the US.
American banks are really terrible with this, and I just don't understand why.
I live in Sweden, but I get paid for work I do for a U.S. company. Both my employer and I have Bank of America accounts in the states, and my employer sending a wire to my BoA account takes longer to process than me sending a wire from my BoA account to my Swedish bank.
So it takes longer to send a wire WITHIN THE SAME BANK thank it does to send internationally halfway around the globe. There's really something truly deeply wrong with U.S. banking.
Meanwhile, here in Sweden, cheques don't exist and everyone uses wire transfers to pay each other, pay rent etc. They're always free, can be done online, take seconds within the same bank, and half a business day between banks. And this system has been in place for literally decades.
I had one use-case this week where paypal would not work. I needed to withdraw the amount I was to be paid by my client and paypal has a $400/day ATM limit. So I asked the client to see if he can pay directly to my bank.
The obvious solution is wire. Of course, my client happens to be in a state that didn't have his business bank so wire was a no go. You have to visit a bank to wire.
In order for him to send me money he had to write a check from his business account to his personal BOA account, then withdraw from his BOA account and then run to a Wachovia and deposit into my wachovia account--all before 2pm cuz' after that the funds wouldn't be available until the next day for me.
After I got the money, I was to deposit it into a friend's account. I couldn't do it online through my bank's interface even though we share the same bank. I ran few blocks to Wells Fargo to withdraw cash I just received from my client and transfer to my buddy.
My story is probably one of the extreme cases in terms of urgency but it does point out all the hoops you have to jump to do a simple bank-to-bank money transfer just within the US.