I’ve never been ignored for half an hour at a bank branch, but I have also purposely avoided doing business with banks that have a bad reputation.
Flip phones? Pheh. I’m a non-retired 40-something and all I have is a landline. And any bank which doesn’t accept that can stuff it.
Another way to think about this is that smartphone market penetration is bigger than bank account market penetration. So it’s not ridiculous to expect someone trying to open a bank account to have a smartphone. Something like 95% of American adults have a smartphone and 93% have a bank account.
And of course there is another way if you don’t have a smart phone: go to a bank.
The latest figures I’ve seen (backed up by a quick google) is that penetration is “only” about 85% of adult Americans have smartphones. Which means, more or less, 1 in 6 do not. That’s actually a fairly large number of people, even if a minority, and it’s not always a matter of being poor. Lots of poor people have them, some well off people shun them.
About 88% of adult Americans have a bank account - which, again means about 1 in 5 or 6 do not. In that case, though, there is a stronger correlation between low income and no bank account.
Looks like the cite I found was for households, rather than individuals, so that might be the difference. 7.7% of US households have no bank accounts, and about 5% of US households have no smartphone.
And, again, it’s not like you need a smartphone to open a bank account. You need something that can take a live digital image in semi-realtime to open this specific bank account.
I bet there are more people who can’t easily get to a bank than can’t easily get access to a smartphone, so having this as an option is enabling, not restricting. All the ways that people used to be able to open a bank account still exist, right? And now you can also do it with a smartphone if you have one.
No, before this rubbish, at least in the UK, online opening of bank accounts is a seamless easy process. I haven’t opened an account in branch in the 21st century and as I move my money round a lot to get the best rates I’ve opened a lot of accounts.
I expect that this rubbish is a response to the fact that it was a seamless easy process for fraudsters and money launderers as well, and there have been new Know Your Customer legal requirements put in place. I don’t know enough about UK banking regulations to say for sure, but things have been trending that way quite a lot.
Presumably they’re going to ask you to do something in that photo that you can’t find a stock example of for someone you’re trying to defraud (like hold up three fingers or wink your left eye) because it’s a lot harder for a fraudster to fake that in a way that matches whatever official document they’ve been able to steal or photoshop.