Inksmithy.co.uk

For various reasons, I have had cause for one of my family members to send some money to me from Australia.

You would think this would be a fairly simple process. The money leaves the Australian bank account and reasonably quickly, it shows up in my bank account, right? After all, it’s all done with computers over network, right?

Physically, that’s how it should work. On a computer, a message is converted into a stream of electrons encoded in a particular way, sent across a network cable then is decoded at the other end. Between start and finish, the electrons travel at a velocity of around two thirds of the speed of light. That means on average, the message is travelling two feet every billionth of a second.

According to the great god Google, knower of all things, the distance between Australia and the UK is 10,562 miles. This works out to 55,767,360 feet. If we divide that figure by two, we have the number of nanoseconds it takes for a message to travel from the Australia to the UK.

That works out to be 27,883,680 nanoseconds, which is perhaps a little easier to understand as being just under 0.3 of a second.

If we allow some processing time at either end – which is only fair – we can generously expect that an international bank transfer will take no more than two seconds from being entered into the computer at the sender’s end.

This isn’t the way things work though – as I’m sure you are all aware.

Barclays Bank plc, which is the bank I’m unfortunate enough to use, states that a priority transfer will take seven days and a normal transfer will take eight.

Pardon?

Apart from the red mist of rage, what fills my mind here is the vast question of why it takes so long.

Searching the internet for the answer finds only some vague handwaving brush off answers about “processing time”, which I’m afraid I have to call bullshit on. If the processing of payments is still manual in this day and age, there is no way in hell I’ll trust my meagre funds to a bank anymore. My life is just too short.

The perceived wisdom is that the banks at each end of the transaction take the money for a bit of a ride for a couple of days, playing around on the short term currency exchange.

So someone goes into bank A and transfers some money, bank A takes the money out of the account, plays with it for a few days, sends it to bank B, bank B plays for a few days, then graciously allows me – the owner of the money in question – to have the money after I have paid the fee to exchange it from Australian dollars to pounds sterling.

What the fuck?

Why is this incredibly egregious practice considered acceptable to consumers? Why has no one actually you know, spoken up about this?

Are we all sheep to accept this treament? Why isn’t the consumer gaining some sort of benefit from the banks for this incredible abuse of power?

I’m not taking it. Not anymore.

From here on in, I’m searching for a method of dealing with currency in electronic format which doesn’t involve banks.

I’ve long been an admirer of the fortitude and morals displayed by the people involved with wikileaks. They have been in the position unfortunately of being forced to work without access to the major forms of electronic financial systems and have come up with some interesting solutions which I feel I may be taking advantage of in the future.

As for Barclays, I’ll be closing that account as soon as possible and opening an account with the Post Office.

Maybe if more people did the same, the banks would start providing a fucking service instead of financially raping – not a word I use lightly – the people who foolishly place their trust in them.

As a final note on this matter, I would ask why governments haven’t stepped in on issues like this – it is after all the job of a government to protect the people with legislation and so on, but it seems governments both past and present are no more than a collection of thieving, corrupt, self serving turds as well.

I’m tired of being treated like a resource.

———– Update ———–

I’ve been thinking about this a bit.

Most banks – Barclays wasn’t one of them, possibly due to the fact it is better at ruthlessly fisting its clients until they pay them to stop – were bailed out by the various governments of the world a few years ago.

That is essentially inaccurate, since what really happened is the people we so stupidly trusted to represent our interests gave the banks our tax money because the banks involved realised they were going to be a bit strapped for a few months.

And as seems to be the case with elected fools, the repayment arrangements for our tax money looks an awful lot like a chav paying off a quarter of a million pound fine at a fiver a week.

Essentially whats happened here is that we have paid the banks to charge us to take our money and inconvenience us while lying about the cause of the inconvenience so they can make yet more profits, simultaneously managing to destabilise the world financial system again.

Its sickening.