International Banking
Nov. 21st, 2018 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinGiven all the fun I had doing this last time, I thought I'd keep a running account of my attempt to transfer funds from my US credit union to my Canadian bank account. The credit union offers good services; I was happy to be a member when I was living in California, and to keep more money there than in the Big Evil bank which has slightly more competence but is still, shall we say, developmentally delayed when it comes to acknowledging that people sometimes live outside the US. The credit union clearly has even less experience doing anything international, despite being a subsidiary(?) of a major multinational corporation with employees from and in a huge number of countries around the world. Also their service centre employees, who sound chipper and articulate on the phone, appear to have sawdust where their thinkers should be.
PROLOGUE
Remembering the three tries it took to get the transfer through successfully when I was imminently departing North America, I decide to log into my account online to see if they've made online international wire transfers a thing.
They haven't.
I initiate a chat with their online help service, which oddly I don't think is staffed by bots. Kristynia informs me I should phone the call centre to see if my account is eligible to make a wire transfer. I phone. It is. I gird for battle.
EPISODE 1
Every last tiny little detail of the transfer information has to be letter-for-letter, punctuation-for-punctuation correct, or it won't go through. I haul out my Folder of Money Stuff and get the sheet my Canadian bank gave me for this purpose, and also all the information for the account I'm transferring from, to pass the dragon at the gate of the call centre.
I phone. Their automated menu voiceover man sounds like he's about to have an aneurysm from how excited he is about the options he's offering me. I select option 8 (wire transfers) and for a moment am lulled by some surprisingly mellow hold music.
T picks up the phone. She asks what she can help me with. I say "I'd like to make a wire transfer," and don't say that having selected option 8 should have put me in the wire transfer queue which T is, supposedly, working on.
T: "OK, have you done a wire transfer before?"
ME: "Yes, that is why I have all my information siting in front of me, because it took three tries to get it right last time, even with double-checking everything."
T: "Haha, well, we'll try to get it through smoother this time!"
I run through it all. She reads it back to me. I spell things in the phonetic alphabet to make sure she's got the right initials. I specify that in the bank's address, "Avenue" is written out and not shortened to "Ave". I spell "Vancouver" because she's in Florida and may not have heard of it before.
T: "OK, this will go into the system now and you'll get an email in about 15 minutes. You need to print out the form and sign it and follow the instructions. OK?"
EPISODE 2
I get the email. It contains an attachment which is supposed to contain a link which will take me to a secure site where I can download the completed form and the instructions. I can't download the attachment because Google insists that this email is phishing, or a scam, and it is making Google very nervous because Google has seen this type of thing before. I have to bat away all the red flags within the email, exit the email, and open it again, in order to download the attachment.
The attachment is an HTML file which, when downloaded and opened, tells me to download the file and open it. Um.
When clicked from within the email, it takes me to the site where I can download the form, review it, sign it, and send it back to the email address provided. I download it. I review it. "Avenue" is "Ave," (yes with the comma) and "Vancouver" is spelled wrong. The instructions tell me to make necessary corrections to the form when I sign it, so I do, in block capitals in black ink. I scan both pages of the form – the one with the transfer details and the one which needs my signature – and the ID they asked for, and attach these three files to an email destined for the address provided.
For the avoidance of possible oversight or inability to read my careful all-caps, in the body of the email I copy out the corrections, including what the form says now and what it needs to be corrected to, with the modifications in bold and underlined. Confident I've done everything I can to preclude idiocy, I send it off.
EPISODE 3
An hour or so later I get an email asking me to phone back and verify my information, which I do. The very friendly and articulate representative, J, asks me to read off the recipient bank's name.
ME: "The Bank of Soviet Canuckistan."
J: "OK. Now the address."
ME: "One Five Seven Three"
J: "OK ..."
ME: "Mackenzie ... that's M A C K E N Z I E ... Avenue ... that's all written out, AV-EN-UE."
J: "OK, what I'm looking at here, it's 'Ave.'"
ME:
ME:
ME: "OK, I had made these corrections on the form I signed and sent to you, is that what you have there?"
J: "Yes, it's signed, but the information sheet just has it as we've typed it, no corrections."
ME: "I am looking at the email I just sent you, there are three attachments: one is the information form with my corrections on it, one is the page with my signature on it, and one is the piece of ID. Did you get the piece of ID?"
J: "Yeah, we've got the ID, and the signed page, but the other page doesn't have any corrections on it."
ME: "I don't know how you got that because I didn't scan that page until I'd made the corrections on it. It's a JPG, you'd have to go in and like ... I just don't understand how the corrections didn't do through."
J: "I dunno. Maybe they just saved the signed page and supplied your file with the information page we already had. Could you try forwarding that email back to the same address?"
ME: "The address 'initials at creditunion dot org'?"
J: "Yeah."
ME: "When I sent the email the first time, I included the corrections in the body of the email. How can I be sure that, if I send it to the same address again, they're not going to ignore the corrections again?"
J: "I work in the same building as them, I'll let them know to look out for it."
Well, there's no way that could possibly go wrong.
I've now missed the cutoff time for the transfer to go through today, so the story will be continued Friday (on account of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US) when I will discover what new and surprising ways people can innovate cluelessness. Just praying the USD/CAD exchange rate keeps doing what it's doing for the next little while ...
PROLOGUE
Remembering the three tries it took to get the transfer through successfully when I was imminently departing North America, I decide to log into my account online to see if they've made online international wire transfers a thing.
They haven't.
I initiate a chat with their online help service, which oddly I don't think is staffed by bots. Kristynia informs me I should phone the call centre to see if my account is eligible to make a wire transfer. I phone. It is. I gird for battle.
EPISODE 1
Every last tiny little detail of the transfer information has to be letter-for-letter, punctuation-for-punctuation correct, or it won't go through. I haul out my Folder of Money Stuff and get the sheet my Canadian bank gave me for this purpose, and also all the information for the account I'm transferring from, to pass the dragon at the gate of the call centre.
I phone. Their automated menu voiceover man sounds like he's about to have an aneurysm from how excited he is about the options he's offering me. I select option 8 (wire transfers) and for a moment am lulled by some surprisingly mellow hold music.
T picks up the phone. She asks what she can help me with. I say "I'd like to make a wire transfer," and don't say that having selected option 8 should have put me in the wire transfer queue which T is, supposedly, working on.
T: "OK, have you done a wire transfer before?"
ME: "Yes, that is why I have all my information siting in front of me, because it took three tries to get it right last time, even with double-checking everything."
T: "Haha, well, we'll try to get it through smoother this time!"
I run through it all. She reads it back to me. I spell things in the phonetic alphabet to make sure she's got the right initials. I specify that in the bank's address, "Avenue" is written out and not shortened to "Ave". I spell "Vancouver" because she's in Florida and may not have heard of it before.
T: "OK, this will go into the system now and you'll get an email in about 15 minutes. You need to print out the form and sign it and follow the instructions. OK?"
EPISODE 2
I get the email. It contains an attachment which is supposed to contain a link which will take me to a secure site where I can download the completed form and the instructions. I can't download the attachment because Google insists that this email is phishing, or a scam, and it is making Google very nervous because Google has seen this type of thing before. I have to bat away all the red flags within the email, exit the email, and open it again, in order to download the attachment.
The attachment is an HTML file which, when downloaded and opened, tells me to download the file and open it. Um.
When clicked from within the email, it takes me to the site where I can download the form, review it, sign it, and send it back to the email address provided. I download it. I review it. "Avenue" is "Ave," (yes with the comma) and "Vancouver" is spelled wrong. The instructions tell me to make necessary corrections to the form when I sign it, so I do, in block capitals in black ink. I scan both pages of the form – the one with the transfer details and the one which needs my signature – and the ID they asked for, and attach these three files to an email destined for the address provided.
For the avoidance of possible oversight or inability to read my careful all-caps, in the body of the email I copy out the corrections, including what the form says now and what it needs to be corrected to, with the modifications in bold and underlined. Confident I've done everything I can to preclude idiocy, I send it off.
EPISODE 3
An hour or so later I get an email asking me to phone back and verify my information, which I do. The very friendly and articulate representative, J, asks me to read off the recipient bank's name.
ME: "The Bank of Soviet Canuckistan."
J: "OK. Now the address."
ME: "One Five Seven Three"
J: "OK ..."
ME: "Mackenzie ... that's M A C K E N Z I E ... Avenue ... that's all written out, AV-EN-UE."
J: "OK, what I'm looking at here, it's 'Ave.'"
ME:
ME:
ME: "OK, I had made these corrections on the form I signed and sent to you, is that what you have there?"
J: "Yes, it's signed, but the information sheet just has it as we've typed it, no corrections."
ME: "I am looking at the email I just sent you, there are three attachments: one is the information form with my corrections on it, one is the page with my signature on it, and one is the piece of ID. Did you get the piece of ID?"
J: "Yeah, we've got the ID, and the signed page, but the other page doesn't have any corrections on it."
ME: "I don't know how you got that because I didn't scan that page until I'd made the corrections on it. It's a JPG, you'd have to go in and like ... I just don't understand how the corrections didn't do through."
J: "I dunno. Maybe they just saved the signed page and supplied your file with the information page we already had. Could you try forwarding that email back to the same address?"
ME: "The address 'initials at creditunion dot org'?"
J: "Yeah."
ME: "When I sent the email the first time, I included the corrections in the body of the email. How can I be sure that, if I send it to the same address again, they're not going to ignore the corrections again?"
J: "I work in the same building as them, I'll let them know to look out for it."
Well, there's no way that could possibly go wrong.
I've now missed the cutoff time for the transfer to go through today, so the story will be continued Friday (on account of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US) when I will discover what new and surprising ways people can innovate cluelessness. Just praying the USD/CAD exchange rate keeps doing what it's doing for the next little while ...
no subject
Date: 2018-11-22 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-22 10:04 pm (UTC)I transferred some of my savings from here to the same Canadian account via a Post Office wire transfer and it was done in like, half an hour.
It has kinda felt like a trip back to the '90s, from our futuristic land of direct debits and online everything, except that I was speaking to someone in Florida from England for free via a high-powered miniature computer running a video conferencing programme. They are addicted to electronic voting machines but still use paper cheques. Go fig.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-23 08:41 am (UTC)And coming from countries where paper ballot is the norm, I don't get voting machines at all.