> charges me £0

You haven't figured out that there are hidden charges? They're not giving you an account because they love you. They're giving you an account because they're making money on your deposits and/or transactions and not passing it on to you. And the money they're making is pretty proportionate to their risks; the more money you have to lose, the more they're going to make.

Whatever revenue iCloud manages to eke out of a random iPhone is going to be far less, and far less correlated with risk. Apple has to structure the system around the user who buys zero premium services.

> has a £10k limit on transactions

So a low limit by the standards of what we're talking about here, and a nice, quantifiable, insurable amount to boot. Which, as I said before, is the most important part of the whole thing. Oh, and I suspect you'll find out that the limit magically gets lower if the money is being sent to wesellgiftcards.com or whatever.

The person featured in the sob story here claims to have lost an entire career. That's going to be worth quite a bit more than that transaction limit, but how much more is hard to say because it's unquantifiable. It is of course stupid to make that dependent on your iPhone, but Apple still has to worry about it if Apple starts trying to take on responsibility for that kind of stupidity.

> despite having never seen any of my real documents in person

You should get a more responsible bank. Although nowadays they may be able to pull, for instance, your ID pictures from government databases to compare with whatever you send them over the Internet... since they have the numbers (and maybe the authorization) to do the lookups. Unlike Apple.

> Meanwhile Apple is unable to manage to identify its own customers in its home jurisdiction.

"Home jurisdiction" is irrelevant. It's not about where your headquarters are. It's about where you operate. Whatever Apple sets up in its "home jurisdiction", it also effectively has to support throughout the world. There aren't enough phone buyers in Cupertino to support Apple's valuation.