I was switching to that Up Bank (by Bendigo), but they straight refuse to let me fund my crypto account, so that’s out because I just want basic control of my own money.
I also have a Bank Australia account, but, while they like to pat themselves on the back about sustainability, their service and product is crap, imo.
So what else you got?
Edit: Just realised I should probably have posted this to AusFinance, but ah well!
Haha, I hear ya. But also, maybe not letting me use my own money how I want is a good argument for crypto? 🤷♂️ But they’d happily let me gamble my money away on a sportsball, or buy Funko Pops, so who’s to say what should be ‘allowed’.
The difference being people aren’t regularly the victims of jerks getting into their Internet Banking and betting large sums of money on sportsball with their money. But they are victims of jerks transferring thousands into crypto where its out of reach of the classic financial system.
I do agree there should be some sort of opt-in flag that says “yeah bro, this account will transfer money into crypto. Let the transaction through”. But it should be very non-trivial to opt-in, also. Like a branch visit where a human can sound you out to see if you’re being scammed.
Gotta admit, everytime I see yet another news story about some idiot transferring their life savings to a Nigerian prince I find it very hard to agree that they should be refunded by the bank. Why is it up to the bank to compensate you for being an idiot? Take responsibility for your actions, damn.
We’ve previously had a mortgage with Bank Australia and they were probably one of the worst in terms of the high interest rates they charged.
Everything came to a head recently when we tried to borrow some additional funds to purchase a new house. We’d signed a contract subject to 14 days finance and once we called Bank Australia they told us it would be 5 - 6 weeks before they could approve anything and would not even be able to start looking at anything for over a week.
Called our broker who got on to Macquarie and they had a valuer out at the property at 9am the next morning to start the approvals process.
Would never, ever use or recommend Bank Aus to anyone.
I rate ME bank, out of the banks my partner and I looked at they offered some of the better interest rates for us and they've been pretty good so far. Downside is there are no branches but AusPost has facilities to allow deposit and withdrawal iirc.
Been with ING for... hell, 20ish years? My only issues with them are:
They're slow to adopt new tech. Tap payments, Google Wallet/ApplePay integration, etc. takes a bit longer than the major banks.
They screwed me over once on what should have been a routine (and totally affordable) mortgage extension to finance some renovations. I'm still a bit salty about it, but it was mid-covid and I suspect their competitors would have been just as cagey and risk-averse at the time.
For day-to-day regular transaction account stuff they've been super chill, and their front-line customer service is surprisingly decent.
Unfortunately ING is slowly watering down or removing the features which made them great - like removing the rebates for international Atm operator fee, or requiring more hoops to jump through just to get the maximum savings interest rate.
Still better than the rest I guess but not as good anymore.
That’s the trick, all banks suck. Some just hide it a while to draw people in. I’m with ING and haven’t had any issues since I’m too poor to need internation atm rebates or max savings interest fee, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. I wish we didn’t live in a system where we are mandated to use private, for profit institutions to store our own money that we earn.
Yeah, seems like a blanket rule with Up. They said:
“Your account has been reviewed and unfortunately we are unable to allow you to proceed with payments to cryptocurrency exchanges. We apologise for the inconvenience, however the financial safety of our customers and community are our top priority.”
Up initially blocked my payment, but after reaching out to them, I encountered no problems with crypto exchanges. Is it possible that they only restrict new accounts?
It has been about 6 months since I’ve used crypto so it could also be a new rule.
As someone that’s been with them for almost 3 years, this is actually really encouraging to hear. Crypto exchanges fail often, and the exchange rate is usually volatile. I’m glad I get to keep my high savings rate because they don’t take risks. To each their own though!
Many of the Australian banks are starting to clamp down on crypto transactions due to scams and ransomware. Some of them won't allow transfers to "high risk" exchanges, whereas others are stopping them altogether.
No idea about crypto, but Great Southern Bank is excellent.
They are a “customer owned” bank - so all profits the bank generates from the money you deposit, fees you pay (there aren’t many fees) are returned to you, as both a customer and partial owner of the bank.
According to this article it was because they were losing too many potential customers to banks. Their market research suggested over half of Australians didn’t even know what a credit union was and that number was even higher among young people.
They consistently rank as one of the best banks in Australia on every comparison.
Hardly anyone knows what a Credit Union is - that’s why they removed it from the name (it is still a credit union. And a credit union is a type of bank).
I have no experience with any of the other banks that score as well as Great Southern, they’re probably good too but I’m so happy I don’t want to switch. I went through close do a dozen banks before finding this one.
I think a lot of the ‘customer owned’ banks are usually good, they can be regional based as well. IE for Newcastle area Greater Bank and Newcastle Permanent Buildng Society both have lots of branches and good customer support for local. I used to like StGeorge until Westpac took them over, went downhill after that
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