Maybe that works in the some countries, but among the 3-4 mainstream banks in my country, making that threat when you are anything less than an unusually high earner by local standards (and perhaps a customer of ancillary investment services) is just going to be met with "Fine, we'll close it then." You might be overestimating just how much banks need any one average person's custom. Also, by local cultural standards, making such threats to a business for the sake of obtaining better customer service is over-the-top Karen behavior, so you have already lost when you do that.

Why wouldn't you close your account if they don't provide what you want? It's not an empty threat, just a fact.

Because you won't get what you want at any other bank, either. Hardware tokens are viewed as superseded and phased out everywhere.

I'd close my account anyway. If other banks are no better nor worse, then no reason to stay with the one you have.

But there should always be at least one bank which can give you what you want, whatever that is. There are dozens to choose between if you're banking in USD or EUR.

"There are dozens to choose between if you're banking in USD or EUR." No, in several EU countries there are just a literal handful after successive mergers.

What's always funny to me about these threads is that my bank's app has always worked for me on every version of android I've tried. Rooted, not rooted, graphene, etc. It's always been fine and secure. So I actually kinda don't care what Europeans do. They are always a bit behind the times and a bit misunderstanding how technology works. That's why Americans say stuff like "just switch banks" because we're all a little astounded at what you guys over there will put up with.

I was responding to specifically the OP's mention of banking in EUR. However, a dearth of banks is not limited to said parts of Europe but can be found elsewhere in the world, too. So, your disparagement is uninformed.

Americans in these threads recommending switching banks are often unaware of how the USA is a relative outlier when it comes to diversity of banking. A lot of that is due to the rather distinctly American concept of the credit union. But within corporate banking, even the USA has seen successive mergers and some decline in choices.

You can get a EUR bank in a different EU country, unless you're some kind of thrall.

At this point I have to assume that you're debating in bad faith or in hypothetical because I don't believe for a moment that you'd move all your money into a foreign bank out of spite.

Nobody would move all their money out of the country they live in.

The Euro has been around for 25 years by now. Having a EUR account in another EU country is about as strange as having a USD account in a different state, which I'm sure millions of Americans have.

Just because you haven't considered it doesn't make it anything strange or "bad faith" or "out of spite". People ate sushi before you ever heard of it.

As discussed elsewhere in this very thread, this is not always the case in practice. Neither one's national tax authorities nor one's employer may play ball regardless of what possibilities legislation supposedly offers. Also, login to government websites may require authentication via a bank app based on an account only in that country.

If your tax collector won't take your tax payment, then you sincerely don't have to pay the tax - at least not immediately.

They take you to court for not paying tax. You provide the judge with evidence that you actually did pay tax, but the tax office refunded it back to your account. The tax office looks very silly and the judge orders them to either accept the payment or waive the tax.

The legal system in many countries is far more adversarial than your idealistic imagination, and the amount of time and effort this would entail is immense. In the real world, people aren't going to deal with this just to get a bank app working on the kind of mobile OS they demand.

I think that's how we tend to view it when we've never had to partake in it. It's this big scary unknown thing.

Honestly, your comment smells a little bit too much of thrall...

"Oh no! My employer doesn't allow me!"

"Oh no! My tax collector doesn't allow me!"

"Oh no! My government doesn't allow me!"

If you're a free man you do what you want, and the rest is their problem. If you're a thrall, you aren't allowed to be on the internet unless you show me a permission paper from your lord.

I agree with the poster above, yours is bad-faith commenting. There is a whole diverse continent out there in the real world beyond your pointless axe-grinding.

Okay. How about this: Try to open a bank account in a different EUR country and see how it goes.

I'm a bit mocking, because it is such a silly trait among many (mainly Northern) Europeans to have a total thrall mentality when it comes to their banks.

In the real world, there is no problem at all for you to open a EUR account in a number of foreign EUR banks. Your employer pays to an IBAN account just like if you had a national bank. Your income is declared just as normal, because it doesn't matter one bit in which country the bank account is and tax authorities don't ask. That's how it functions in reality, and people claiming anything else are either uninformed or just spreading their mommies old boogey man tales.

My employer told me they will only pay to a local account, i.e. an IBAN that starts with that specific ISO country code. (This isn't hypothetical, I know this firsthand, and so do coworkers.) Now what? No one is going to hassle their employer about such legalities for the sake of getting the kind of mobile OS they demand, and especially not just to satisy a crank on HN who likes to talk about "thralls" like some American Libertarian on nineties Usenet.

Moreover, you aren't considering that some countries have BankID systems for everything from tax matters to accessing healthcare, and that only works with a local bank account (so much so that people moving from other EU countries are commonly shut out of everything for weeks until their local bank ID comes through).

You can push back against your employer. They are not superior to you in this negotiation, and you are wrong to call it "legalities". Your employer doesn't make the law. I successfully pushed back against a big corporate employer way back in the days when I was just a kid at the lowest rung, and they agreed to pay my salary in hard cash instead of a bank wire. So that could be an answer to your "Now what?".

People may prefer a foreign bank for any and every good reason besides mobile OS nerding, and that's nobody's business. Certainly not your employers business.

As for BankID, I know of it and it might just as well be called ThrallID from how ridiculous and pathetic it is that people would let their IDs be controlled and owned by private banks. You must admit that it's nothing to be proud of.

You can also keep your national bank account for your salary and ThrallID if you want to, and just transfer all your money to a foreign account every time you get your paycheck. That way your money is also a whole lot safer, and you get some better peace of mind.

"When you were just a kid" implies several decades ago. The economy was much different back then.

You seem to fail to understand that every country has a different regulation. First of all, in a lot of countries it is mandatory to have traced payments, so no cash can be involved. Then, every country has different taxation. A lot of EU countries tax you just because you have a foreign bank account.

Also, theory and practice are very different. While I agree you can fight back for your rights, I remember having contacted different kind authorities for 7 months because a company was rejecting my SEPA IBAN. Unfortunately, that was the only company I could use for that mandatory service, and after they got fined, they happily continued accepting only national IBANs.

The result has been months of frustration, endless calls/appointments with authorities to gain nothing. If I could go back, I would give them a different IBAN, even if on a theory level they were wrong.

You have the right to be paid in cash. If your employer stubbornly refuses to pay to your bank account, exercise it.

By law not in Norway, salary has to be deposited to a banking account by the employer, unless it 's impossible or highly inconvenient [0]. And to combat fraud it is basically impossible for the banks to deny you a basic account (how else could the tax authorities reasonably audit who gets paid what), so be ready for the employer taking you to court to make you open one (accounts are free to you as a consumer after all) so that they don't have to deal with salary amounts of cash, and the courts siding with them.

[0]: https://lovdata.no/lov/2005-06-17-62/§14-15

Sounds like your employer decided it was impossible

Norway is not a EUR country, so their situation hasn't anything to do with my original comment that this thread spawned from. Norwegian salaries and taxes are paid in NOK.

"I won't continue to be your customer if you cannot provide the service I need" Is not "Karen behaviour".

Continuing to patronize a business that will not sell you a product you want is being a pushover. The flip side is if a business is in the custom of only providing certain services to those who threaten to leave, then they shouldn't be surprised when people threaten to leave in order to receive good service.

I suspect that you live in Canada, which has the banking oligopoly that leads to banks not giving a shit, and customers that are used to banks not trying. If more people were willing to take their money and walk, Canadian banking would probably suck less ass.

Canada has a lot of banks, including digital/virtual ones. All provinces also have at least one credit union to rival regular banks.

Just because there are juggernauts ("the big five/six") doesn't mean it's an oligopoly. This isn't like telecom where there are only 3 choices (4 in some provinces) and nobody else can enter the game because it costs too much.

An oligopoly is typically defined as when the majority of the market is captured by a few players leading to pricing control. It does not matter that there are dozens of other players, it is about who controls the market share and pricing power. In Canada 6 big banks have accounts for 85% of the population and control 93% of assets. Canadian Banking is frequently used as an example of a real world oligopoly.

The existence of Credit Unions and small banks that offer similar but limited service does not negate the pricing power of Canadian banks. E.g. in most other modern countries paying $17-$35/mo for a checking account is not normal. In Canada that is just what every major bank charges for a checking account.

its also worth highlighting that many of the "options" in Canada are just online only brands of the big 6.