The EU's bank count per capita is tiny compared to the US. Their offers are never competitive if you compare to the US banks (e.g. interest rates, apps that actually work, customer service, etc). They lack competition due to over-regulation, which, if you understand the history of corruption within banking in europe, should not imply good regulation.

Regulating big tech is good. Kill gatekeeping platforms and engagement-driven newsfeeds that are tearing us apart. I wish they could do that. Big tech competition with banking, on the other hand, would be welcome.

It's too bad, too, because overall the EU in most places has a history of better representing their citizens. I wish that mechanism was more functional.

My experience is living in 3 EU countries as an American - the banks are similarly terrible and entrenched in each.

Which EU countries have those been?

The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents). Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.

EU is also ahead with security. PSD2's requirements go further than US requirements, and they are also ahead in the magnetic swipe card phaseout.

Wise and Revolut, two companies which brought a lot of innovation to international money transfer, were founded in the EU as well (since 2020 not EU companies any more).

Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.

Haha, historically Americans over-regulated their banking system, and got rewarded with frequent banking crises in return. (And America was the only major economy with that problem.)

Eg until a few decades ago many American states banned banks from having more than one branch.

See also the big struggles Walmart had in trying to become a bank; and conversely see how US banks are (or at least were) banned from serving their customers coffee..

What problems did you have with EU banks?

The only problem I have with mine is that it doesn't connect with open banking APIs, but I just default to revolut for that.

It could be that they treated you poorly because you are from the US, but I doubt you'd get treated like that in 3 different countries.

Yeah seriously doubting you really lived in the EU instead of just shitposting as another American patriot who has to declare that everything is better in the US. Because I’m Dutch and banks here are fine. I never even have to think about my bank because it just works.

Also no insane fees for going into the red, or having to pay to get my own money and all that fun stuff that American banks seem to love.

I'm surprised by the contraversy of my comment. Maybe I should have been clearer.

The banking /system/ in europe is superiour. It's crazy that the US isn't part of the IBAN system. ACHs suck, etc.

Revolut and Transferwise help a lot with country level bank shortcomings. But they're not really the same as those banks. And they're exactly two mega companies. In Portugal, there is MBWay, and in Denmark there was Visa Electron (might have changed). These payment systems are used everywhere here due to their low fee at the exclusion of other payment systems. I appreciate the low fees to the vendor but it means that Revolut and transferwise are not an every day banking solution here.

When I lived in Denmark, I could not get a visa electron card despite being a resident because I didn't have credit in the EU. This made me use cash for everything as local businesses did not take normal bank cards / credit cards.

In Portugal, banks charge to keep your money in them without offering interest. As an American, managing interest payments from a non-domestic bank is a tax nightmare so I wouldn't want it anyway. But it's notable that they don't have to compete here at all. It was the same, as I remember, in the other EU countries I was in. In contrast, US banks can be found offering competitive interest rates though brokerages are a better option, still.

My point was not some kind of America versus EU nonsense that this seems to have attracted. It's that banks had an outsized influence on politics in the EU.

If you look at the distribution of market cap of industries in the EU versus the US, you'll note that the financial industry in Europe is much larger as a percentage. Step back and think about what that represents.

The US economy has 14% of public economy in financials vs 25% in the EU:

https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/255599/msci-usa-imi-net... https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/b32acc80-b116-454b-a9c4...

A financial industry being the proportially largest sector is not a good thing. It's a rent that's being extracted from the productive economy.

There has also been a huge decline in bank count in Europe as they consolidate: https://data.ecb.europa.eu/data/datasets/CBD2/CBD2.Q.B0._Z.1...

A decline in business counts is not good. It's not good that the same trend for other business types is happening in the US, either. Western governments are now favoring large businesses that hold political capital at the expense of the smaller businesses. This isn't good no matter the industry.

We should all want our businesses and governments to improve. To do that, we must first understand deeply the problems.