The Anonymous Widower

What Can The Banks Do For Us?

After writing the previous post about Mark Carney’s thoughts on the pound and Scottish independence, I got to thinking about the nature of different currencies and how I feel about them.

On my travels to Budapest, Stockholm, Palermo and Bilbao, I’ve used Hungarian forint, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian krone and Swiss francs in addition to euro and pounds. Train journeys across Europe could be a nightmare, as like the trip back from Stockholm, each country could be a different currency and you end up with enough change to tear holes in all your pockets, but impossible to understand.

The personal preference, that I like to use cash makes it worse in a non-euro and non-pound country, like Hungary, where I don’t have any natural feel for notes and coins.

I just think that the banks are making it easy for us to handle all these currencies, but some have made a start.

I have a credit card from Nationwide, that just converts the transaction into pounds on my statement and doesn’t charge me any commission, when I use it abroad.

As a customer I like that and I’ve heard one savings expert recommend this credit card for just this reason.

So shouldn’t all credit cards be like this?

But i used to be a world-class computer programmer.  Probably to say I used to be is totally wrong, as my mind is still reasonably sharp and it certainly knows what computers can do.

So why when I use my credit card in say Ruritania and I pay for a delicious gluten-free meal with my credit card, does the terminal not show me the cost in both Ruritanian wotsits and English pounds?  If I was say a Frenchman and my bank account was in euros, then I would want euros instead of pounds.

All it needs is a bit of clever software.

Come on you bankers!

January 29, 2014 - Posted by AnonW | Finance, World | Banks