A Time of Magic

Although we often think of America as a close cousin in every way, there’s lots of little differences that you just don’t expect.

Take bank transfers for instance. In the UK it’s a simple matter to transfer money from A to B but it’s only simple because the UK banking scene consists largely of a handful of big banks which operate pretty much right across the country. That being the case, they’ve had the opportunity to make standards stick and to implement a modern banking system.

In America it’s quite different. There you’ll find thousands of banks often dealing only with a local community. Instead of having a handful of banks with hundreds of branches as in the UK, there you’ll find hundreds of banks with only a handful of branches.

This difference has led to a much more community based approach in some cases. Thus the check by phone facility that exists in America has absolutely no counterpart in the UK for the simple reason that community banking just doesn’t exist in the UK: nobody would trust a system quite like the check by phone mechanism!

Related posts:

1. Do you ever think that international finance is weird?
2. A magic weight loss pill?
3. Debit card readers
4. Would you wear a tag to track all your movements?
5. Where do you work?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Finance, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.