I think there is a bit of a difference between buying a car and buying a jet.
I bought a car last year and just paid for it using my chip-and-pin debit card, my bank told me that they can identify accounts for car dealers and don't question large payments to them.
The car handlers in Germany do not allow that for large amount of money. You can authorize a transfer without limits with your card (Lastschriftverfahren), but the handler will not have the money directly so he cannot be sure he will be able to pull the money out of your account. They want money in an irrevocable way on their account, which I understand.
Well, I'm sure a bank has enough cash on its own accounts to pay for a car instantly. My parents had a problem few years ago when they were buying a warehouse for big $$$, and the bank literally asked them to wait a couple days until they could gather that much money to actually pay out the loan. Now imagine that times hundred - I guess it's not a simple operation.
Re:Companies and Billionaires
by kintamanimatt on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @06:50AM
(#12538484)
Were they doing it in cash? I can understand it if the warehouse was literally being bought in hard currency, but otherwise it seems a little strange!
No, they were taking a loan from a small local bank and the bank literally didn't have enough money sitting in the account to pay out all of it instantly - they had to ask their other branches to make the transfer to their account first, before they could make the transfer to the account of the seller.
How much money are we talking about here? It sounds like a lot of money if a bank had to call other banks.
Few million - but it was a small bank. Obviously BoA has that kind of money available at any moment, but that bank didn't. But I imagine even BoA would need a bit of notice if you wanted to pay $250M for a jet.
As I needed to buy a car, I informed my account manager that I would buy one, gave her the bank account information of the car dealer and told her that if everything is in order, I would call and ask her to perform an "instant" money transfer.
Just went to the car dealer, looked at the car, call my account manager, 30 minutes later the money was available on the account of the car dealer and I was ready to go.
For the day-to-day stuff, we use a pure online bank, but I am happy to pay the higher fees of a Sparkasse for such cases where trust is needed.