I have one friend, who withdraws their entire fortnightly salary from the bank their employer prefers they use, and deposits the full amount into a different bank, who they prefer to use, because it’s faster and cheaper than a wire
Even in some EU countries I heard that most employers have a preferred bank and they’ll even open you an account there. If you want to use a different bank you’ll likely be met with some resistance and ultimately, delays
@ndrw pretty much answered this for me! They can’t necessarily choose the bank for you, but they do have a preferred bank they’d like you to use, and doing so comes with perks. Apple for instance prefers their employees to use Bank of America (this is kinda old info and might be different now, so I’ll double check when America is awake), and rewards them for doing so. As cool as some of my friends there think Monzo is, they’ll never switch because they’ll lose out on those benefits.
I’d argue it’s the largest roadblock for fintech uptake in the US and the EU compared to here in the U.K.
That’s why Revolut’s and N26’s uptake seems impressive to me across the entire EU, even though Monzo’s numbers are quite close just in terms of the U.K. market.
I’ve created a new thread so we can talk about this without going too too far off topic!
Do Apple employees (do they have a name? Applers?) get any perks? Or is there a kick back from the bank to Apple for effectively delivering them thousands of salaried accounts without any individual cost of acquisition?
Again, from what I heard from friends, most people living there just use Revolut as a spending account. They get paid in cash/in the employer’s preferred account then transfer over. Banks there love fees too, so it’s better to use Revolut
Not sure on any kickbacks for Apple promoting them, but there are perks for being both an Apple employee and a Bank of America customer. My friend isn’t too clear on what they are because he doesn’t personally use the benefits that come with his account. So all I know on this front is that there are no fees where there otherwise would normally be.
One example of this, is my friend was able to send me money via Monzo.me as a test way back when Apple Pay was still supported, and they were charged no fees for doing so. Without the benefits, they would likely have charged in some capacity for making a foreign currency payment. It still impresses me to this day, that my friend in the US was able to send me money via Monzo.me for free, and instantly, because it’s a simple debit card transaction on their side of things, but that’s for another thread!
Given how common these setups are in the US, I’d guess it more or less comes down to the way the banking sector is setup in the US, so it just keep things easy if both the company and their employees are with the same bank. Salary will be faster, there will be no fee to send or receive it etc. They don’t have anything that resembles are faster payments network, and interbank transfers are not always free either.
The upside to the no fee benefit, is they can withdraw their salary, from any ATM, and deposit into another bank of their choosing, for free. A wire would still invoke a charge from the receiving bank. I recall in the past when I sent a friend payment for some merchandise from the campus store using TransferWise (my US account) to their chase account, they were charged them $18 to receive it and the whole process took 3 days to complete.
Yes, it would mean massive changes as currently sort codes are wedded to banks, even “branches” (either physical or virtual) of the bank, so it would be a big change.
I don’t expect it to happen because most people probably don’t have the same attachment to their bank details as they do to their phone number, so there isn’t a huge incentive for banks to develop the capability.
It has been explored by the treasury select committee as an idea in the past, though, so it wouldn’t be a crazy suggestion!
Speak for yourself! I absolutely loved the N26 sort code! Primarily because of how it tied into the brand. 04-00-26. Monzo’s is a pretty nice sort code too. The brilliance here is how simple these are to remember!
I’d have loved the opportunity for my N26 account details to have lived on by switching to another bank.
Can’t say I care about any others, nor can I remember them without having to look them up!
In contrast, I can’t say I’ve ever been attached to my mobile number until Sky Mobile came along with a brand new block of numbers exclusive to their network. I got in early, and was assigned a pretty decent number, so I like my number for the first time now. The second a spammer gets ahold of it though, I’ll get rid. But I’ve been very vigilant, and managed to elude them thus far!