4 ms·

Question: does the bank have the right to say, "I'm sorry Mr potential customer, but we can't meet your requirements so are unable to give you an account"? Or i

Question: does the bank have the right to say, "I'm sorry Mr potential customer, but we can't meet your requirements so are unable to give you an account"? Or is it essentially required that everyone doing business must do things like keep all computer systems modernized?

hyperman1 5y ago
Belgian law, if I am not mistaken, requires that every Belgian (European?) Inhabitant has access to a basic package. The bank can deny access to credit etc, but an account and a (normal debet) bank card are a right.
PeterisP 5y ago
I wanted to say that they should not have that right, however, looking at GDPR, perhaps it's not forbidden after all. However, it's worth noting that it's not just a single exceptional person - Belgium has accented letters in two of their three official languages and names with accents are reasonably common, so if you tried that, you would have to discard many customers, and also those customers would be overwhelmingly from the french-speaking part of the country so that might be treated as explicit discrimination targeting the french-speaking minority community.
samus 5y ago
Such a complaint is hard to defend if the customer presents a government-issued identification document. If governments can agree on certain technical standards, even though some of them are actively hostile to each other on other important matters, surely banks can be expected to comply with some of them too. The bank is entitled to use whatever internal representation they like (although they better don't misidentify persons), but they better be able to print the correct name in forms and letters. The embossed name on payment cards is a separate, more troublesome issue. The bank should provide appropriate documentation as evidence if the cardholder's embossed name could not be spelled correctly because of limited technical standards.

hyperman1 5y ago

Belgian law, if I am not mistaken, requires that every Belgian (European?) Inhabitant has access to a basic package. The bank can deny access to credit etc, but an account and a (normal debet) bank card are a right.

PeterisP 5y ago

I wanted to say that they should not have that right, however, looking at GDPR, perhaps it's not forbidden after all. However, it's worth noting that it's not just a single exceptional person - Belgium has accented letters in two of their three official languages and names with accents are reasonably common, so if you tried that, you would have to discard many customers, and also those customers would be overwhelmingly from the french-speaking part of the country so that might be treated as explicit discrimination targeting the french-speaking minority community.

samus 5y ago

Such a complaint is hard to defend if the customer presents a government-issued identification document. If governments can agree on certain technical standards, even though some of them are actively hostile to each other on other important matters, surely banks can be expected to comply with some of them too. The bank is entitled to use whatever internal representation they like (although they better don't misidentify persons), but they better be able to print the correct name in forms and letters. The embossed name on payment cards is a separate, more troublesome issue. The bank should provide appropriate documentation as evidence if the cardholder's embossed name could not be spelled correctly because of limited technical standards.