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After Public Outcry From Customers, Britain's Biggest Bank HSBC Heads Off Complaints Over Small Business Account Closures (theguardian.com)
Julia Kollewe writing for The Guardian: HSBC has rushed to head off complaints from small businesses that found the bank had frozen or closed down their accounts as part of a crackdown on financial crime. Hundreds of small firms are thought to be affected, whose businesses range from an avocado importer to marketing and design companies. Britain's biggest bank, which has faced accusations of reacting slowly to the debacle, said that after becoming aware of problems in the past week, it was putting extra staff on its helpline and speeding up the process for dealing with complaints. It said staff were reducing the amount of time to unfreeze an account once a review had been completed. Earlier on Monday, Richard Davey, an HTML5 game developer and creator of Phaser, shared his ordeal dealing with HSBC, which had suspended transactions from his accounts without much explanation. It was only after thousands of users brought it to the company's attention on social media that the company fixed Davey's account, he said.
Don't bank with HSBC unless you're a drug kingpin needing to launder money.
I also view this story as a warning against an over-reliance on pay-to-play online services. What happens if it's not a banking issue, but a simple lack of funds that causes a scenario like this? Granted, with an online presence of any sort you can't exactly do completely without paid services, but at the very least, for example, if you actually own copies of your software that aren't tied to the cloud, you can simply choose not to upgrade them, and they'll continue working forever. Slack is handy, but it's a third party service that can, in theory, disappear at any moment. I've seen people building critical infrastructure into these types of tools, and I think they're insane.
Instead, having all these online services chewing at your bank account every month means you have few options when it comes to tightening your belt for a short period, something that nearly all small businesses run into at one time or another.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The moronic part is that the $10k figure was set way back in a time when $10k was worth something. As time has passed, $10k has become less and less valuable, so larger swaths of people and businesses have been caught up by the RICO fishing net. Make no mistake -- it's a giant, ongoing, fishing expedition.
"Structuring" is the biggest bullshit "crime" ever invented, and considering all the stupid money laundering crimes we have that's saying a lot. The laws says you have to report >$X. That law shouldn't exist and frankly is a huge invasion of privacy but let's go with it for the moment. If you don't transact $>X then you don't. So now you're guilty of what, exactly? Complying with the damned law?
This financial reporting and monitoring bullshit has got to stop. I am absolutely not in favor of easing regulations on these financial criminals (the banks, that is) but we need to stop turning them into the police and we need to start making them common carriers of money: they should not be responsible for things their customers do that they themselves have no participation in.