What's all this instantly freezing your account all about?

(Omar) #1

I’m 35 years of age, I can safely say, I’ve never experienced having my account frozen, literally on the spot, even on a weekend, followed by demands of excessive amounts of proof and documents. I mean before fintech, your average high street bank, they just wouldn’t do this. Surely the FCA hasn’t approved the banking institutions to conduct their business in this way…

Or is it the banks trying to take the role of being the boss?

(I was left completely locked out of my account with no access to any of my capital, whilst being abroad,on a Sunday afternoon by our Lithuanian backed competitors)

(Nick) #2

All banks have to follow the same regulations. The FCA not only approve banks to act this way, they expect them to. No bank will freeze an account unless they believe they have a good reason for doing so.

(Marcel Ruhf) #3

That’s actually incorrect - there are several articles about this, and laws that are in place encourage this. All banks follow the exact same procedure when they suspect something is amiss.

(Caspar) #4

Or, it happened, but banks didn’t have customer forums and Trustpilot profiles where people ranted about it.

(Jolin) #5

Is this Revolut you’re referring to? If so, they’re not actually a bank (they have a Lithuanian licence, but afaik, are not offering any accounts with it yet). I’m not sure their processes are as ‘rigorous’ yet as with real banks. What was their response when you contacted them?

(Omar) #6

Well I kind of bad mouthed there actions on twitters, which I refused to discuss with them, Revolut then closed my account and reverted all funds to there original source, still waiting for them to show up.

#7

Without knowing why your account was locked no one can really comment more than speculation.

Its easier to open an account with the new breed of banking / finance companies, because of that, they tend to be more strict on how they monitor the operation of accounts and that leads to accounts being restricted more often.

They have also built fraud controls normally from the ground up, they don’t have the data the big banks have, so may give more false positives than other banks, that’s the nature of new technology it has to learn and adapt.

(Omar) #8

Sounds like it’s coming from a professional or somebody who’s has years of experience in this industry. But I can see where your coming from, makes perfect sense.

#9

Not sure how fintechs make it so much easier to open an account, you’ve always just needed ID and proof of address, not hard at all.

As for random account freezes, etc, you may say all you want that it’s like that in all of Europe due to the rules, but it is definitely not. It seems exclusive to the UK and central Europe, probably due to protestant/Catholic cultures and associated differences in privacy concepts and expectations

As an example here in Portugal a bank can only freeze your account if it has strong suspicion and strong suspicion means they have to report it to the relevant authorities. If its not suspicious enough to be reported, then they can’t freeze you. Even then if you have less than a 50k balance they’ll just report it without taking any action and leave it to the relevant authorities. I’ve never seen any report of any legal action arising after Revolut account closures

Sorry if I’m ranting a bit, but Revolut is just a disgrace when it comes to treating their users. I haven’t seen other fintechs having to severely restrict their community forum, including deleting posts and restriction new users from opening threads or posting without their post first being “moderated”. It probably has to do with the degree to which they randomly freeze and close accounts and the disgruntled users that come out of that

(Nick) #10

This thread is talking about a UK bank and the UK banking system. It really isn’t relevant to start talking about how things work in Portugal.

(Marcel Ruhf) #11

Yeah that’s where the laws differ - in the UK, the banks have to report it and freeze the account until the National Crie Agency tells them to do otherwise.

#12

A UK bank? Thought the thread was about Revolut, which has a Lithuanian banking license and which operates in most of the EEA… Additionally a lot of the argument is that through Europe its all the same, so an example of differences is certainly relevant

(Marcel Ruhf) #13

They currently run on a UK e-money license though - the Lithuanian license won’t apply until they launch full current accounts. Until then, I’d think that UK law applies to all accounts held by Revolut customers.

(Omar) #14

Funny you mention Portugal, I recently had a fb friend request from someone based in Portugal, originally from Edinburgh.

(Omar) #15

I’m surprised revolut are still standing with the amount of complaints and negative reviews they receive on all there social accounts.

People are literally cursing them for disappearing fund’s.:rofl:

#16

Happened to me, about 125 euros disappearing for no apparent reason. When I contacted support they immediately reimbursed me, to their credit, but couldn’t provide an explanation and promised to get back to me after investigating, which they never did