[clug] Internet Banking and Linux Support.

[Daniel Pittman]

Randall Crook <rcrook at vtown.com.au> writes:

> I spent a number of hours trawling through the big banks pages
> checking fees and account options and realised that they are all
> pretty much the same fees wise. So it boiled down to convenience and
> prior experience thus leading me to St George.

When I did this my partner and I ended up with the Police Credit Union,
who didn't suck.  In general, in fact, credit unions sucked an awful lot
less, and they are still covered by government deposit assurances.[1]

Not all of them beat out the big banks on fees, but three out of five
did, I think, in our review.

> I have dealt with them before and found them passably human to their
> customers and it is the only bank that actually has an ATM in both of
> the closest shopping centres near my home in Richardson.
>
> And since the latest Bank scam is to slug you $2 for every transaction
> on non-proprietary ATM's, that certainly is a big attraction to me.

This is new?  When I was with the CBA, um, 15 years ago they charged a
fee on that order for ATM use other than their own, or one other big
bank.

The same was true of the other pair: they both set a hefty fee to use an
ATM from the non-aligned banks.

These were, nominally, to cover the fee that your bank paid directly to
the ATM owner in return for allowing their clients to use the machine.

These fees still exist, as far as I can tell, and are still handled bank
to bank in the background.

The recent changes to the law allow the ATM owner to *ALSO* charge you,
the end user, directly as part of the transaction.


So, now, instead of you using an ANZ ATM and ANZ billing the CBA you
have the situation where ANZ bill the CBA *and* you, personally, for the
privilege.  Lucky us.

> It's also great to know I should not have any trouble doing my on-line
> banking with them. I get the feeling that the banks have, to some
> degree, realised that MS does not own the entire world just yet.

This is a royal pain, I agree.  Thankfully my credit union use basic
HTML and JavaScript, and they have developers who actually /understand/
security and threat models, so I don't have a stupid
virtual-keyboard-made-of-buttons to put my password in with either.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  At least, the ones we seriously looked at were.