All of Europe, afaict. It's often so baffling to read about finance/payments in North America, ahead in other ways of course somehow that sector has just completely stagnated, from a consumer perspective anyway.

Europe in general would be my example for how banking should be done.

Would you be willing to go into more detail on why banking is better in Europe? They seem to have their own problems, too.

If France is part of Europe, then no f’ing way. It’s a nightmare: arbitrary limits on debit cards, large transfers have to be done in person at your specific branch. The security requirements are Byzantine. For example, to get a new pin code, they actually mail you paper, you can do it in a branch. International money transfers require permission (only obtained at your specific branch.) They charge a monthly fee to have a Visa debit card and to get a “Gold” version with higher limits, you have to pay them more. Paper checks are still vastly preferred in France (for paying school fees, etc.) Banking in France is just one step above banking in Korea or China. French bank fees make American fees look positively discount by comparison.

That you have to go into your specific physical branch to do certain things is ridiculous. I can go into any Chase in the US and do anything I could do at my normal “home” branch.

N26 (a German bank) was vastly superior but even that had limitations, especially with moving money around internationally.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

I'm from France and I'm using an online bank. Almost none of these apply to me - yes the pin code and the card come by mail but I can transfer arbitrary amounts online, I have a free gold card, there are basically no fees at all: the account is free, the card is free, transfers are free, I don't think this account cost me anything at all. I had to open the account with a significant amount to get the gold card but you can open it with a much lower amount or by receiving your salary there, and the only difference is that you get a regular card instead.

The only downside is that you don't have a physical branch you can go into but you can do basically anything online without ever interacting with anyone, or at worst you can always call them. Those are real banks btw, not pseudo-bank fintech companies.

YMMV I guess. I'm in France too and none of those points apply to my experience (except the monthly fee for the debit card and the snail mail for the new PIN). I have not set foot in my physical branch in 10 years, and have not written a paper check since 2011.

I think what you are looking for is a direct bank. It's weird to complain about having to go to a branch when you sign up for a bank account at a bank whose primary selling point is the availability of a local branch.

So curious how he banks there make money?

For individual mass market the big driver is loan margins, both for home mortgages and various short-term loans.

But the improvement in payments was mostly driven by legislation (e.g. the Payment Services Directive from 2007 with most of implementation at 2012) without which banks were quite happy to offer payments as slow and expensive as they could as it was too profitable for the industry to voluntarily agree to disrupt this, especially since most payments are cross-bank and so a single "defecting" institution can't simply offer cheap&fast payments if others don't want to play ball.

So I don't think that there's any way how USA financial industry might get to a similar point if gov't doesn't decide to force them (which might be taboo for many USA politicians) - I'm certainly convinced that European financial institutions would not have reached this point currently if they weren't forced to do so despite all the lobbying.

With 1.6% interest rates for mortgages... I don't know how dutch banks make money.

They sell insurance and offer consumer investment accounts -- which are not permitted for us citizens!

I don't know anything particular about the Dutch market, but some rough estimates:

Current 3m euribor is -0.4% so 1.6% interest rate means 2% margin. Assuming that your initial costs of selling/assessing/processing the mortgage are covered with fees, something like 0.5% would be enough to cover the main (non-systemic) risks and expenses for decent quality mortgages, so you get 1.5% of pure profit; for every billion in your portfolio you'd get 15 million profit each year; Dutch banks have 500B of housing loans so that's a capacity of something like 7-8 billion of profit per year from housing loans alone.

And various short-term loans have lower volumes, but much higher interest rates and room for profitability.

Looking at the stats in https://www.statista.com/topics/3442/the-banking-sector-in-t... it's clear that the net interest income dominates, it's something like 5x the fee income.

Banks usually add a flat percentage fee on top of the current interest rate. Lower interest rates mean people are willing to borrow more so low interest rates are beneficial to banks.

With the pile of cash they hold for clients.

I'm sure they do in North America too, and make orders of magnitude more from it than for charging monthly or transaction fees. But if everyone else charges those, why not make that bit extra too?

It just needs some 'disruptor' to do it for free and drive the rest of them down, as is happening both there and here in Europe with trading accounts (where most money is made from order flow, but traditionally, why not make a bit extra from commission too?).

There is no transaction cost to pay with a card in the US either. ACS transfers are free and, if you have the right account, wires can be free as well. I bet at that Netherlands bank a non-SEPA wire isn’t free. There are plenty of options for “good” bank accounts in the US, they just aren’t always obvious.

What do you mean, no transaction costs? What are ACS transfers?

Can you share a "good" bank account?

I've moved after 36 years in the states -- and was shocked at the quality of ING Bank.