Funny to see this pop up again (I'm the author). The year is now 2025 and I still use Chase as a personal bank and I'm now discovering new funny banking behaviors. I'll use this as a chance to share. :)
My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.
As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.
Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.
Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.
This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.
I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.
The fraud story is interesting, but something I had hoped would be addressed by the end of the post, wasn't. You wrote:
>Someone out there is probably mentally screaming at me "you fool!" at this point. With hindsight, I agree...
I was hoping the piece would end with what you would do now (or what should you have done) when Alex called you. Did I fail to understand something in the piece, and simply staying on the phone with Alex would have somehow avoided the fraud situation down the line? It doesn't seem so?
If I were to get such a call, today, my instincts would be to engage in the same "I'm fine" get-off-the-phone-fast actions. What is the alternative?
I read the whole story and I'm still struggling to understand what you did wrong here. You indicated many times "I know, that was a mistake" (or similar phrases), but each time I was baffled because I saw no mistakes. It was your business, and you had every right to move around the funds within your account. What gives anyone at Chase the right to say diddly squat about how you manage your business' finances?
I don't think he was trying to imply that he did anything wrong. He was admitting the ignorance regarding how banks and banking work... plus acknowledging that a lot of readers will have had experiences that would make them think "Oh you young fool."
In 2022 I lost my business banking and had to shut down a business that I owned for 20 years because it was related to the adult entertainment industry and, despite being completely legal and aboveboard, a single wire transfer that got a little bit of scrutiny resulted in them asking questions about what we did and, knowing that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, I answered all of their questions truthfully and completely. A few months later I was told that we "fell outside of their risk appetite", our accounts were being closed... and for two months we searched for any bank or credit union in Canada but none would take us.
A lot of industry insiders had that exact reaction: "Are you stupid? Did you not know?! You NEVER admit that you're in this industry you moron!" etc. We even had a very sympathetic branch manager suggest that we re-incorporate, re-brand and hide what we do (a front, in other words). I couldn't do that. And I mean, we had no issues for 20 years. 10 of which were banking as a corporation (was personal accounts before that since we ran it as a proprietorship) and I thought that being in Canada we were pretty progressive. No one I told on a personal or professional level had ever cared. So why would the banks? We were lawful so why should they care?
1: Chase's business account wasn't appropriate for a tech startup; nor was it appropriate for the amount of money Mitchell was handling.
2: When your bank calls you after a very, very large money transfer, you should take the call.
That being said: In today's world where every other phone call is some telemarketer trying to scam you or otherwise sell you something you don't want or need, I can sympathize with why Mitchell blew off the first call.
It's not even an indication of fault. It's actually their internal sales/marketing system that flagging these messages. When they notice something like a large deposit, it triggers a message because they want to sell you a new account. Maybe it's savings, a CD, or you're getting ready to buy a house and they can help you with a mortgage. The average teller or even customer service person can't turn off these notifications, although, you may have some ability to opt out of them. Unfortunately, I find opting into useful notifications also opts me into useless ones, so I just ignore the texts...
Your whole arrangement of having an operating account separate from your wealth accounts is highly regular.
Edit - sorry realized I replied to a reply! Put air quotes on You/Your
Most banks have dedicated startup bank account tier where you get many perks (AWS/GCloud/azure credits, transactions fees waived for the first few years, accounting software discounts, virtual credit cards) so it's a good idea to open that account instead of a standard business account plus he had $35m just sitting there in a checking account if he has opened an account with a bank that is more experienced in dealing with this type of businesses their RM would have suggested to keep certain amount in the business account and create another saving account where most of the money would have earned interest or invested in some fund. So I think maybe he is implying that due to these mistakes he missed out on personalized guidance.
The biggest thing to me imo is that everything was in one account while fdic insurance is only 250k although if chase goes out of business you probably wont need the money anyway. Also specialized startup banks come with a lot of perks for companies and founders and chase evidently didnt (or just had account rep who sucked at his job)
> private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors
> depositing a quick check.....Zelle.
Good lord
American banking really is in the stone age. I don't think I've seen a cheque in 20 years. As for private banks, in Blighty they all (?) offer 'retail' services that out perform high street offerings.
Incidentally, all high street banking is free in the UK. Only private banks tend to charge for their services.
Zelle limits the amount you can send per day, starting at $500, so you can't even necessarily pay your rent in one go the first month.
With Chase, I don't have the ability to do ACH transfers to accounts I don't own (I hear other banks allow free ACH transfers), so if Zelle limit is too low, my only option would be a paid wire...
This is somewhat funny to read because if you were a JPM(chase) Private Bank client you wouldn't have any of these issues (zelle works, you can deposit checks, pull from any/all ATMs).
yeah agree -- it seems like a mistake to use retail banking for real business amounts of money and transactions. I suspect that young adults focused on a fast-moving tech world really did not live the hard lessons of the past with business restrictions. On the one hand, it is a new world now (no one would have come up with the kind of money referenced here, with Mom and Pop business pace); on the other hand, maybe you really are trying to load a trucking worth of transactions onto the top of your used Honda Accord, so to speak.
At what point does it make sense to sign up for private banking? I've been happy with our credit union for day to day stuff but we don't keep a ton of cash around (most of our money is in a brokerage account (ETFs)). Is private banking just for folks that want to have a lot of cash around but not have it in an easy to use account?
If you have to ask, the answer is you don't have enough! :)
Seriously though, just wander into any big ass bank(Chase, BOA, etc) and ask them. They have multiple tiers of private banking, depending on your wealth level. Generally the bottom tiers start around $100k and go from there. To get into the fancy tiers you generally need $1M or more of bank assets. To get into family offices, you generally need $100M or so. Though shared family offices are sometimes available at the low 30-50M range.
Just be very careful of fees. Generally the larger the private client services, the higher the fees.
When you are managing a $500k-1M+ liquid net worth.
I think Chase starts “Private Client” at $250 or $300k. (Don’t use Chase, however.)
It might in some cases be more trouble than it is worth, if you are right around the threshold. A “normal” retail checking account and a brokerage account at another institution with the ability to transfer between them is probably sufficient for most. If you need loans or mortgages or other stuff, it might be worth the hassle (and phone calls).
Congrats on the success! I’ve had a similar experience since I started moving more money around. My local branch started calling me too. I live in a busy area where lines at the bank can take hours, but now they told me I can just message someone whenever I go and they’ll move me to the front.
The other day I was just poking around the investment section of the app to see what kind of rates they offered, and almost immediately I got a call from my personal banker, haha. I actually ended up trying the investment since the returns looked good.
Chase has a decent private banking operation, which you might consider (so does BofA, and most large banks) which can give you the best of both worlds.
That was an interesting and entertaining read. Well written. Thanks for sharing. It reminds me I do have a bank with physical branches, the digital world made me forget all about that.
I move $10k+ in and out of BoA/Merrill every week and I’ve never received an alert or phone call. I would have stopped using Chase a long time ago if they were that annoying.
I basically never want to talk to anyone at any bank, like any other utility.
You should start a business for your construction projects, then use a business bank like Mercury instead of Chase and get all the nice business features.
The US tends not to regulate what kind of services a bank has to offer to its customers. A bank doesn't need to offer any kind of transfer services to be a bank. As far as I know you can legally be a bank and only offer cash deposit and withdrawal.
The EU has PSD (Payment Services Directive) and PSD2 which stipulate what kind of transfers have to be possible to customers.
Because of that the US just has a bunch of startups which offer services that unify the payment landscape. The alternatives at a bunch of banks is still that you need to write checks.
Once upon a time my wife went to close a bank account in Italy.
She went to the post office which is also a bank in Rome. She asked to closed her account. She was told that she needed to go to the branch where she opened her account in Florence.
We rented a car and drove to Florence.
When we arrived at the bank in Florence, the teller informed us that we would have to come back “domani” which is Italian for tomorrow because the only person who could help us was the banker who had originally opened the account for my wife when she was a student many moons ago.
We came back the next day and met the banker who immediately recognized my wife including recanting that she was an artist. He informed her that he could not close her account, she would have to speak to the Director of the bank.
We waited in line for the director of the bank but we were told it was too close to the end of the day and the bank was out of money so we’d have to come back… Domani.
Domani arrived and my wife again waited. The Director willfully ignored her for 2 hours and it wasn’t until my wife began to cry that the Director finally called her over and allowed her to close her account.
This for €2500. That was a balance that meant a lot to us at the time.
This is everything in Italy, not just banking. I remember studying abroad there, it took us a week and a half of “domani” to get the wifi password for the dorm!
I'm Italian and both the previous story as well as your comment trigger me.
1) You could've asked the password to literally anybody in the dorm.
2) Unless this was geological ages ago, by law, all you need to close a bank account is a certified email (or PEC) or a certified letter (you go to the post office with a document and a simple form that specifies where you want your stuff transferred) you don't need to go in person anywhere at all.
I have a similar story in France. Closing an account with Caisse d’Epargne was nothing short of pure torture.
Luckily, I didn’t actually have to go in, but the process took me nearly 6 months of back and forth, multiple phone calls, multiple hand written letters. Yes, France loves hand written letters, no you cannot type it.
Every now and then I think it would be nice to return and live in France, but the thought of having to deal with French administration has vaccinated me for life.
It's so easy in Norway. When you start a new relationship with another bank, they just offer to move all your money and automatic bill payments from the other bank to your new bank. So the new bank handles everything
Sounds like your experience was some time ago. Banking with “traditional” banks is still slow and bureaucratic, but not to that point. And online banks let you do everything online quickly.
During COVID, I took a major haircut in my day job, and ended up doing a lot of side work to stay solvent. All my banking was with Chase; I setup a new checking account for my side work. One day they just took about $900. No matter who I spoke to, they bounced me around and never gave me an answer why. I can only guess there was a fraud trigger or something, but to this day, I've never gotten the money back or even gotten an answer as to what happened. I'm fortunate enough in life that $900 isn't a big deal, but at the time, it was HUGE. As a result, I will never, never do business with Chase again (and it would be very convenient, given how many branches I have around me)
PayPal did this to me in 2004 or so when I tried to use a debit card to withdraw cash and it didn’t give me the cash but still debited the account. Hours on the phone, never got the $400 back.
I closed my account and have never directly used PayPal since.
When I was an American PhD student in Zurich, none of the Swiss banks would accept me—except the official post office bank. This was due to the stringent FATCA laws, which made U.S. citizens too burdensome for the traditionally privacy-centric Swiss banks.
Within the first few months, I accumulated around 40K CHF in salary that the university owed me (technically from the Swiss government, since researchers were federal employees). Eventually, the university emailed me to ask if I’d like to pick up my money in cash (Bargeld). Apparently, this wasn’t uncommon.
One day I went to the office to collect it. They asked which denomination I preferred (I assumed 20s or 100s). I asked for a mix, and they handed me several envelopes filled with 1,000 CHF notes and smaller bills. I distinctly remember carrying multiple envelopes. At one point, as I walked back to my office on top overlooking Zurich, a gust of wind blew behind me. I turned around and saw colorful 200 CHF and 1,000 CHF notes scattered along the road. I calmly walked back and picked them up.
For a few months, I paid my rent and groceries entirely in cash. The Swiss didn’t think anything of it—in fact, it was fairly common. Eventually, I was able to open an account and received a yellow two-factor authentication device that looked like an old calculator. I deposited the rest of the money and, for the remainder of my studies, used the “yellow calculator” to pay bills online by debit.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQhylNX...
I never did receive an official Swiss credit card which was fine. However, I did accumulate funds a Swiss 401K which is another story unto itself.
One thing that has always amused me as a German is that for every banking/investing account I have ever opened they always included one question: Do you have an USA citizenship?
I assume with online banking this has become less of an issue, but apparently having US clients as a non-US bank is a massive hassle that no one wants to touch.
It's still a thing. The US thinks it's hot shit, wants banks all over the world to comply with extra requirements for US citizens, which no other country does. Banks don't want to deal with it. Ordinarily they'd just ignore stupid requirements coming from stupid countries like China, but when it's the US they don't want to be sanctioned.
Thankfully, the US is now trying to delete its special position so we may soon be in the situation where stupid requests from the US are treated the same as stupid requests from Russia.
Amusing to read this and think back on GitHub's seed round ($100M). At the time we just had a small business account from Bank of America... going from relatively thin cushion in the account over the previous few years to suddenly dropping in $100M was pretty amusing. I believe we moved to a more sophisticated setup quickly thereafter.
> Ultimately, there was no long term negative impact of the events that transpired (except maybe for Alex, but I truly don't know) and I can now look back on it with amusement.
So a software guy who didn't understand people or banking opens an account at Chase. And a guy from Chase who didn't understand people or software calls him-- repeatedly over years-- and fails to ever connect on any human level whatsoever. Now when first guy withdraws millions from Chase, he unwittingly causes the second guy to lose his job. This means the the second guy isn't around to help the first guy when he needs him the most-- to help him navigate banking fraud on that same account.
This just seems tragic. Second guy's success as a banker and first guy's ease of mind as a customer were inextricably linked. Yet neither of them knew how to form the simple social bond of two 4 year-olds playing in the same sandbox.
Seriously-- how did Chase not hand the account to someone who could connect with this guy? For a multi-million dollar account this just doesn't pass the smell test.
I think daily is an overstatement, but it does sound like the guy took credit for some type of relationship that wasn't there, which is kind of unnecessary because maybe what he did was the right move, he gave the client exactly what he wanted.
This is one of the takeaways I wasn't able to formulate.
Author added some disclaimers which already clarified their inexperience with the world. But I think that a.. preference for avoid human interactions, and a worldview of computer systems with no human systems are what explains why Author wasn't able to quickly adapt to this adult experience.
What sealed the deal of this interpretation to me:
"He literally writes down a phone number on a piece of paper. This is all feeling so surreal."
Why would this feel so surreal? Gauging by the dates, Author was born in around 1994, phones where definitely a thing, and phone numbers more so. My interpretation is that this guy was absolutely absorbed in computers, every social interaction occured in dms, or emails or posts, or articles. Both the 'unsophisticated' act of transmitting numbers and the need to deal with a human in real time were foreign. Without going into harsher labels like autism or antisociality, I think it's definitely the type of behaviour (described as being heads down), that is necessary to be competent enough with computers to build a hypertechnical security product over the span of almost a decade.
The point of view of the banker and how he fumbled this as well is a nice touch, illustrates the advantages of throwing a bone to your business partners. I mean even if you think of it from a non social perspective, only business, this is a supplier like any other, loyalty and gifts go a long way in general. But I guess that you don't need business acumen for a startup, you can just hyperfocus on your product and have your investors worry about the rest.
> I never told them what my business does or what I'd use the money for.
This stuck out to me. I'm in the process of opening a bank account in Singapore for a newly registered company, and boy is it difficult.
Hour-long KYC interview. Details of what the business does. Anything remotely controversial could be a red flag. They want to hear about boring B2B services. They want to see evidence of customer communications or contracts, so they can see you're a legit business and not a shell company. This is very difficult for a company that hasn't started operating yet. Why would I start operating without banking? How can I show business activity before commencing operating?
By comparison, I've opened business accounts in both AU and the US without hassle.
It's likely because of the nature of the country. Singapore and the UAE (another similar country) are notoriously difficult for getting started with business banking because banks often expect you to be either well-funded (from elsewhere) or matured as a business. For a long time, they haven't ever evolved their thought to expect startups to natively grow, and even of late, they expect startups to be these well-capitalized entities with angel/VC funding. That, I presume, is because of the fact that these countries tend to be conduits for money rather than destinations themselves - they'll roll out the red carpet for you if you went with another, more "matured" objective in mind like laundering money or expanding into the country.
On the other hand, Switzerland has been surprisingly very easy to get started with quickly, even though Switzerland falls in the same category. You can easily obtain a (shitty service) Postfinance account to get started, and UBS is a breeze to work with, despite being bulge-bracket - even for new companies. Or you can also opt for a cheaper Kantonalbank, which are surprisingly very open to new businesses.
Whenever I move significant sums into my bank account, I guarantee that my bank is going to do an "Alex" call. I can also guarantee that there is no freaking way I am going to do a call with some rando not already in my contacts to discuss my financials. I really don't know why banks don't understand this.
Chase is not the only offender but they are unhilariously, shockingly bad at this: if you do a large transfer, they will sometimes cancel it unilaterally and without warning because of their fraud detection. And then they'll call you, but the dude speaking won't know anything about your account and ask you about what you just did. "We are clean on opsec" is very much not the vibe.
Lest this be just me moaning, Fidelity gets it right. When you log on you can see who your banker is and how to reach them. A real human with a phone! And that person is the one who calls you, emails you, and you can set up a call/mtg with, so you don't have these random calling you.
Readit News
My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.
As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.
Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.
Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.
This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.
I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.
>Someone out there is probably mentally screaming at me "you fool!" at this point. With hindsight, I agree...
I was hoping the piece would end with what you would do now (or what should you have done) when Alex called you. Did I fail to understand something in the piece, and simply staying on the phone with Alex would have somehow avoided the fraud situation down the line? It doesn't seem so?
If I were to get such a call, today, my instincts would be to engage in the same "I'm fine" get-off-the-phone-fast actions. What is the alternative?
In 2022 I lost my business banking and had to shut down a business that I owned for 20 years because it was related to the adult entertainment industry and, despite being completely legal and aboveboard, a single wire transfer that got a little bit of scrutiny resulted in them asking questions about what we did and, knowing that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, I answered all of their questions truthfully and completely. A few months later I was told that we "fell outside of their risk appetite", our accounts were being closed... and for two months we searched for any bank or credit union in Canada but none would take us.
A lot of industry insiders had that exact reaction: "Are you stupid? Did you not know?! You NEVER admit that you're in this industry you moron!" etc. We even had a very sympathetic branch manager suggest that we re-incorporate, re-brand and hide what we do (a front, in other words). I couldn't do that. And I mean, we had no issues for 20 years. 10 of which were banking as a corporation (was personal accounts before that since we ran it as a proprietorship) and I thought that being in Canada we were pretty progressive. No one I told on a personal or professional level had ever cared. So why would the banks? We were lawful so why should they care?
What I think it was:
1: Chase's business account wasn't appropriate for a tech startup; nor was it appropriate for the amount of money Mitchell was handling.
2: When your bank calls you after a very, very large money transfer, you should take the call.
That being said: In today's world where every other phone call is some telemarketer trying to scam you or otherwise sell you something you don't want or need, I can sympathize with why Mitchell blew off the first call.
Your whole arrangement of having an operating account separate from your wealth accounts is highly regular.
Edit - sorry realized I replied to a reply! Put air quotes on You/Your
> depositing a quick check.....Zelle.
Good lord
American banking really is in the stone age. I don't think I've seen a cheque in 20 years. As for private banks, in Blighty they all (?) offer 'retail' services that out perform high street offerings.
Incidentally, all high street banking is free in the UK. Only private banks tend to charge for their services.
Zelle limits the amount you can send per day, starting at $500, so you can't even necessarily pay your rent in one go the first month.
With Chase, I don't have the ability to do ACH transfers to accounts I don't own (I hear other banks allow free ACH transfers), so if Zelle limit is too low, my only option would be a paid wire...
(Better than fine, in fact, in that they refund your ATM fees.)
Seriously though, just wander into any big ass bank(Chase, BOA, etc) and ask them. They have multiple tiers of private banking, depending on your wealth level. Generally the bottom tiers start around $100k and go from there. To get into the fancy tiers you generally need $1M or more of bank assets. To get into family offices, you generally need $100M or so. Though shared family offices are sometimes available at the low 30-50M range.
Just be very careful of fees. Generally the larger the private client services, the higher the fees.
I think Chase starts “Private Client” at $250 or $300k. (Don’t use Chase, however.)
It might in some cases be more trouble than it is worth, if you are right around the threshold. A “normal” retail checking account and a brokerage account at another institution with the ability to transfer between them is probably sufficient for most. If you need loans or mortgages or other stuff, it might be worth the hassle (and phone calls).
The other day I was just poking around the investment section of the app to see what kind of rates they offered, and almost immediately I got a call from my personal banker, haha. I actually ended up trying the investment since the returns looked good.
Which one(s)?
I basically never want to talk to anyone at any bank, like any other utility.
every time i have to interact financially with americans its always focused around these random transfer apps like zelle, cash, venmo etc.
The EU has PSD (Payment Services Directive) and PSD2 which stipulate what kind of transfers have to be possible to customers.
Because of that the US just has a bunch of startups which offer services that unify the payment landscape. The alternatives at a bunch of banks is still that you need to write checks.
Dead Comment
She went to the post office which is also a bank in Rome. She asked to closed her account. She was told that she needed to go to the branch where she opened her account in Florence.
We rented a car and drove to Florence.
When we arrived at the bank in Florence, the teller informed us that we would have to come back “domani” which is Italian for tomorrow because the only person who could help us was the banker who had originally opened the account for my wife when she was a student many moons ago.
We came back the next day and met the banker who immediately recognized my wife including recanting that she was an artist. He informed her that he could not close her account, she would have to speak to the Director of the bank.
We waited in line for the director of the bank but we were told it was too close to the end of the day and the bank was out of money so we’d have to come back… Domani.
Domani arrived and my wife again waited. The Director willfully ignored her for 2 hours and it wasn’t until my wife began to cry that the Director finally called her over and allowed her to close her account.
This for €2500. That was a balance that meant a lot to us at the time.
I will never forget banking in Italy.
1) You could've asked the password to literally anybody in the dorm.
2) Unless this was geological ages ago, by law, all you need to close a bank account is a certified email (or PEC) or a certified letter (you go to the post office with a document and a simple form that specifies where you want your stuff transferred) you don't need to go in person anywhere at all.
Luckily, I didn’t actually have to go in, but the process took me nearly 6 months of back and forth, multiple phone calls, multiple hand written letters. Yes, France loves hand written letters, no you cannot type it.
Every now and then I think it would be nice to return and live in France, but the thought of having to deal with French administration has vaccinated me for life.
(Also close the account. No bank should lose money like that.)
You might also try some other governmental bodies but I've read a lot of success with the CFPB
I closed my account and have never directly used PayPal since.
Within the first few months, I accumulated around 40K CHF in salary that the university owed me (technically from the Swiss government, since researchers were federal employees). Eventually, the university emailed me to ask if I’d like to pick up my money in cash (Bargeld). Apparently, this wasn’t uncommon.
One day I went to the office to collect it. They asked which denomination I preferred (I assumed 20s or 100s). I asked for a mix, and they handed me several envelopes filled with 1,000 CHF notes and smaller bills. I distinctly remember carrying multiple envelopes. At one point, as I walked back to my office on top overlooking Zurich, a gust of wind blew behind me. I turned around and saw colorful 200 CHF and 1,000 CHF notes scattered along the road. I calmly walked back and picked them up.
For a few months, I paid my rent and groceries entirely in cash. The Swiss didn’t think anything of it—in fact, it was fairly common. Eventually, I was able to open an account and received a yellow two-factor authentication device that looked like an old calculator. I deposited the rest of the money and, for the remainder of my studies, used the “yellow calculator” to pay bills online by debit. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQhylNX...
I never did receive an official Swiss credit card which was fine. However, I did accumulate funds a Swiss 401K which is another story unto itself.
I assume with online banking this has become less of an issue, but apparently having US clients as a non-US bank is a massive hassle that no one wants to touch.
Thankfully, the US is now trying to delete its special position so we may soon be in the situation where stupid requests from the US are treated the same as stupid requests from Russia.
So a software guy who didn't understand people or banking opens an account at Chase. And a guy from Chase who didn't understand people or software calls him-- repeatedly over years-- and fails to ever connect on any human level whatsoever. Now when first guy withdraws millions from Chase, he unwittingly causes the second guy to lose his job. This means the the second guy isn't around to help the first guy when he needs him the most-- to help him navigate banking fraud on that same account.
This just seems tragic. Second guy's success as a banker and first guy's ease of mind as a customer were inextricably linked. Yet neither of them knew how to form the simple social bond of two 4 year-olds playing in the same sandbox.
Seriously-- how did Chase not hand the account to someone who could connect with this guy? For a multi-million dollar account this just doesn't pass the smell test.
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I had one call the police on me recently for (non-surreptitiously) recording our interaction as we conducted a safe deposit box inventory.
What sealed the deal of this interpretation to me:
"He literally writes down a phone number on a piece of paper. This is all feeling so surreal."
Why would this feel so surreal? Gauging by the dates, Author was born in around 1994, phones where definitely a thing, and phone numbers more so. My interpretation is that this guy was absolutely absorbed in computers, every social interaction occured in dms, or emails or posts, or articles. Both the 'unsophisticated' act of transmitting numbers and the need to deal with a human in real time were foreign. Without going into harsher labels like autism or antisociality, I think it's definitely the type of behaviour (described as being heads down), that is necessary to be competent enough with computers to build a hypertechnical security product over the span of almost a decade.
The point of view of the banker and how he fumbled this as well is a nice touch, illustrates the advantages of throwing a bone to your business partners. I mean even if you think of it from a non social perspective, only business, this is a supplier like any other, loyalty and gifts go a long way in general. But I guess that you don't need business acumen for a startup, you can just hyperfocus on your product and have your investors worry about the rest.
This stuck out to me. I'm in the process of opening a bank account in Singapore for a newly registered company, and boy is it difficult.
Hour-long KYC interview. Details of what the business does. Anything remotely controversial could be a red flag. They want to hear about boring B2B services. They want to see evidence of customer communications or contracts, so they can see you're a legit business and not a shell company. This is very difficult for a company that hasn't started operating yet. Why would I start operating without banking? How can I show business activity before commencing operating?
By comparison, I've opened business accounts in both AU and the US without hassle.
On the other hand, Switzerland has been surprisingly very easy to get started with quickly, even though Switzerland falls in the same category. You can easily obtain a (shitty service) Postfinance account to get started, and UBS is a breeze to work with, despite being bulge-bracket - even for new companies. Or you can also opt for a cheaper Kantonalbank, which are surprisingly very open to new businesses.
Chase is not the only offender but they are unhilariously, shockingly bad at this: if you do a large transfer, they will sometimes cancel it unilaterally and without warning because of their fraud detection. And then they'll call you, but the dude speaking won't know anything about your account and ask you about what you just did. "We are clean on opsec" is very much not the vibe.
Lest this be just me moaning, Fidelity gets it right. When you log on you can see who your banker is and how to reach them. A real human with a phone! And that person is the one who calls you, emails you, and you can set up a call/mtg with, so you don't have these random calling you.