I seem to recall there being service levels at banks in Canada and maximum numbers of transactions per month until one gets hit with per-transaction fees. I was told explicitly when I opened my TD Canada Trust account there that it was imperative that I both keep money in the accounts and use them occasionally or dormancy fees would accrue (and if there was no money left, they'd then slam it with overdraft fees).

The benefit of US banking despite lax regulation was that there's a ton of different banks and credit unions to choose from. Some are great and some are shit. Literally hundreds to pick from. Canada there was like 5 big banks, a large credit union, and then depending on your area there was maybe perhaps a small community credit union.

UK banks are pretty heavily regulated. For example, the overdraft fee spiral has been banned and in many cases banks were required to pay compensation.

Yet we have quite a lot of banks to pick from - around 60 if you include building societies (more if you include private, niche and specialist banks). We also have a fair few new and digital challenger banks like Monzo, Starling, Atom, Revolut and arguably Metro Bank. If anything our banking system seems far more innovative than the US system.

I don't know about Canada, but clearly regulations don't mean that you can't have competition and innovation.

There are a lot of things that are just plain better in the UK compared to the US. Out of network ATM fees being a big one.

See also regulation about what the incumbent last-mile network provider (Openreach) can charge ISP's to provide services on their lines which has led to a larger number of ISP's available in any one place (unless you're in Hull, because of historical reasons).

if ATM fees are important to you, you could always consider opening an account with schwab. they reimburse 100% of ATM fees.

as for ISPs, it's hard to do worse than comcast, but at least they don't block a wide range of content by default.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...

It was either "voluntarily block, or we'll force you to".

And the piracy site blocks are due to high court orders - not a lot an ISP can do in those cases.

I could be mistaken about this, but I thought it had something to do with the UK’s relationship with the EU (and perhaps the US, as well?) that made the UK particularly attractive to financial industry.

Totally agree, the Canadian banking system is a corrupt cartel the levies it’s own tax on every Canadian. This was made even more clear to me when I moved to the Netherlands and every banking fee was suddenly 1/3 as much as in Canada for the exact same service.

Here in Finland banking fees are a thing only for the poor (and even then we are talking about a total of 20 or 30 euros per year)

Basically every bank has some kind of "premium customer" program that you qualify for by having enough investments or loans from that bank and magically all your banking fees go away (obviously they just make their money from the services they provide for your investments/loans)

Banking fees? Never paid any as far as I can tell, not for the ordinary things. My bank here in Norway won't pay a bill if there isn't enough money in the account. It sends me a text and an email to say what happened and doesn't charge me anything.

The only fees I pay are a small percentage for management of mutual funds.

I’m assuming parent meant fees like X per month for having a debit/credit card or for access to “online” banking.

You are right I pay an annual fee for my credit card and debit card. No fees for using them or access to online banking. The bank is online only anyway.

Yeah that is what I meant. Basically having online banking + debit/credit card. Also for under 2X years old (depends on the bank) they are usually free.

It a uniquely American stupidity that somehow everyone just lives with. The concept of overdraft doesn’t even exist in normal consumer accounts anywhere else in the world. The first thing I do when I open an account here is to disable overdraft - but then you have to pay return cheque charges by whoever was trying to charge your account.

Overdrafts are very much a thing in the UK, most accounts allow it, but you have to request it in advance. In effect they work like a pre-approved loan, which at least when I was working badly paid jobs and needed food right up before payday was a very welcome feature.

With both HSBC and RBS if I didn't have an overdraft in advance they just hit me with an even larger "unapproved overdraft fee" — both refused to disable overdrafts & just bounce the payment instead

The history is that people used to write paper checks, and merchants would charge a bounced check fee. Overdraft _protection_ was actually a banking feature which would save you from the cost and embarrassment of a bounced check.

There is very nearly zero usefulness to overdraft protection in a real-time authorization world. Nobody charges a fee for a rejected debit authorization.

I suppose merchants might charge a return check fee for a failed ACH payment, but nobody uses ACH payments for anything routine in the US.

> nobody uses ACH payments for anything routine in the US.

Water bill, electric bill, mortgage, and property taxes are all ACH for me. Many people pay rent that way. I don’t think it’s commonly used for day to day interactions but a lot of payments are still ACH

The latest thing I've noticed is that if you attempt to debit, say, $100 from an account that has only $95, it will successfully debit $95 and then the POS equipment will show that you still need to find some other way to pay the remaining balance. Used to be in this situation it would just be rejected outright.

It's more handy for gas pumps, but less transparent. It stops before your tank is completely filled, but doesn't say why. You can hear the difference if you are standing there while it fills, of course, but other than that you may be confused why it slowed down and stopped exactly at a certain amount and won't go any farther.

Consumers don’t use ACH for very much. Businesses utilize ACH a lot, because despite the additional time lag, it’s free.

Netherlands has overdraft if you request it, otherwise the payment would fail / card declined. But we don't have overdraft fees, that's the weird American thing that caused all those crazy optimizations like reordering transactions.

The way it works in NL is you pay a (high like a creditcard) interest rate for every day the account is below zero. The transaction order doesn't matter it looks at the balance at the end of the day and charges you 1/365th of 13% interest.

The only way banks fuck you over in this system is with the dates. Using a card means a transaction date of "today", getting paid almost always has transaction date tomorrow. So you end up paying 1 day of interest. Much less than a $ 40 overdraft fee and regardless of the number of transactions.

We have exactly this concept in normal consumer accounts in the UK. It is not uniquely American.

Oh boy no. Canada has only a handful of banks, minimal competition (they make money hand over fist) and customers get bent over on a regular basis.

Canada sure learns a lot of tricks from their big brother.

What’s hilarious is Canadians banks can come up with that all on their own.

My Canadian bank (rbc) doesn’t charge me any fees outside of interest if I keep a negative balance for going into my overdraft.