Tag: bank reviews

Commerzbank Chapter Concluded

It’s been rather like watching a camel’s back as you add a strand of straw after another. Or, to use the German version of the expression, watching a bucket fill up with water one drop at a time. Until someone drops an iron block on the poor camel/indiscriminately turns the faucet on and the suspense peaks in one glorious heartbeat of chaos.

I have finally decided to relieve myself of the burden of being a Coschmerzbank customer. It actually happened quite some time ago but I’m only writing about it now that I’m at a comfortable level of confidence that my escape worked out well for me.

It turns out that Coscherzbank got my address completely wrong. Despite having presented them with my official registration documents (i.e., the Anmeldung, something everyone needs to do in Germany) they confused my street name. If, for example, I lived in Musterstraße they put me in Musterallee. Is it a mistake anyone could’ve made? Yes. Is it stupid? Heck. Yes. Very.

(As a software engineer, I can just imagine what must’ve happened when their customer support changed my address. He started typing in “Muster” at which point some form autocomplete must’ve kicked-in and suggested -allee and -straße. Guy absentmindedly clicks on the wrong option. But now I realize, this is what zip codes were made for. Both options do exist in Hamburg but in different zip codes. How the hell they didn’t clock that is beyond me.)

This is another mistake that I only figured out due to my own effort following-up with their frankly-useless customer support. I was one breath away from basically telling them how to do their jobs. It puzzles the mind how they can have such a relatively-decent customer support workflow, have agents that are, at least, confident in their jobs, and yet be just about as useful as a bookmark.

Anyway, despite having corrected that, for some mysterious ineffable reason, they still couldn’t get me the activation letter that would’ve finally re-granted me access to online banking. And I know for certain that they finally got my address correctly because I did receive some mail from this joke of a bank, just not the kind of mail that I so urgently needed from them. I know one should never attribute malice before ruling out incompetence, nor should one attribute human traits to faceless, soulless bureaucracy but it’s hard to feel neutral when I can get advertisements in my mailbox—apparently mailed no less than a week before I received it—and yet the activation letter is one of those things that “simply take time”. To add insult to injury, they are advertising their online banking to me when, you know, they can’t even apparently deliver that letter that will activate my online banking.

Hence, I began to consider enough is enough. Why should I stay with a bank who doesn’t give a flying damn about their customers? They feel so at ease taking their sweet time delivering me an important document but should the roles be reversed, they wouldn’t let me take the leisurely route, that much I can guarantee. Of course, this is not an action I could take hastily; having designated them as my “primary” bank, there are actually a lot of essential and automated payments going through my account.

Then fell the iron block. The faucet burst into the dangerously-full bucket. They decided to completely do away with the free tier of their banking services. Which meant, from my perspective, that they are basically asking me to pay them for their incompetence. The audacity. If I wanted to pay someone so they can treat me like dirt, Hamburg’s red-light district has, uh, ladies of that inclination.

(To be fair, this issue notwithstanding, I have a fundamental opposition to the concept of paying a bank for the mere privilege of having an account with them. But what their incompetence ensured is that I wouldn’t have second thoughts leaving them despite all the essential payments like rent, gym, and internet that I am making through them.)

I wouldn’t bore you with the details of which payment was what (nor do I have any inclination writing about how I spend my money). As of this writing, the only inconveniences I have suffered from my move was not having Netflix for about a week and a little surcharge from a transaction I made at the gym. I’m pretty confident that there wouldn’t be more.

Quitting accounts in Germany requires you to mail your formal request to quit, the whole stamps-envelopes-and-Deutsche-Post dance. This is when I realized that I have never actually sent postal mail in my life ever, until now. Yes, I am hardcore millenial, the only thing I purchase from my phone is public transport tickets, and I don’t take public transport. But out of sheer spite for this bank stuck in the last century, I learned how to distinguish between a mailbox and a trash can.

Unsurprisingly, they also took their sweet time processing my request. It got to a point where I just manually moved all my money to my N26 account because I’ll be damned if I get autocharged for my account come June 1. About a week before they started charging for accounts, still with no confirmation that they have processed my account closure request, they send me mail reminding me to accept their new terms and conditions where I reward their incompetence with a small monthly fee.

“Sehr geehrter Herr Estioco,” the letter started.

Don’t Herr Estioco me you bitch. I am done speaking German with you.

Auf Niewiedersehen Commerzbank

I Hate Commerzbank

I’m not a sophisticated banking client. I have a very straightforward use case for my banks. When it comes to banking, it doesn’t get any more boring for me. Money goes in, some of it stays there, some of it I use, some of that usage is online. Boom. Boring.

I have also been banking since around 2009. I have opened accounts in multiple banks, two of them in Germany. I have jumped through all manners of hoops that banks come up with in trying to come to terms with the internet. Having been in the professional software industry for only slightly shorter than I’ve been banking, I try to understand why no banking system is ever pleasant to use.

What I’m trying to say is that I am an easy-to-please, hard-to-piss-off banking customer. I’ve had to complain to banks before, it was unpleasant, but only in the general sense that talking to customer support is unpleasant; when you get to the point where you need customer support, something has gone wrong so no one just “chitchats” with customer support.

That said, Commerzbank is the most frustrating bank I have ever had the displeasure to be a client of. There are only a few things the Philippines is better at than Germany and one of them is that we don’t have Commerzbank.

The sins of Commerzbank:

  • They have an over-reliance on snail mail, which is actually great if you are a bank from the last century.
  • This over-reliance has meant it took them ages to get me my ATM card when I first got here. I moved with only a meager sum of Euros to my name for various reasons but among them is that I was gonna get paid my salary soon enough anyway. I have considered that my employer might do me dirty and not pay my salary on time but I did not consider that I would end up with a bank who couldn’t even get me my ATM card punctually. (There’s a joke about German stereotypes here somewhere, something like, Germany would be actually punctual if they weren’t too bureaucratic.)

    For comparison, Landbank, my first bank and one of the least-prestigious banks in the Philippines, could give me an ATM card on the day I signed up.
  • This over-reliance has also gotten them into, frankly, absurd situations. Some time over the pandemic (I believe it was 2021) they changed their terms and conditions. They went through the trouble of sending all their clients letters informing them of the change and requiring us to set-up an appointment and make a personal appearance in one of their branches so that we could sign the new terms and conditions in wet ink.

    One year later, it turns out there was something wrong with their procedure so some court declared it invalid. They asked us to visit a link on their website, click on “Ich stimme zu”, and that was somehow the right procedure over that whole charade the previous year. Go fucking figure. 🙄
  • A few weeks ago, for some reason, my access to online banking was simply revoked. I called their customer support, who just kept “sending” me activation letters but after multiple attempts, it has become apparent that there is really something wrong with the customer credentials they gave me when I signed up. I had to figure this out myself, just today; I wonder why none of their customer support could figure out why none of the requested letters would reach me.
  • By the way, speaking of customer support, they claim that their support hotline is available round the clock. This is only true in the sense that trumps all other ways of being correct and true: technically. Yes you can call their customer support even in the dead of night and something (not necessarily someone) will interact with you “attempting” to solve your concern. It will even enqueue you for the next free agent. But if you actually want to talk to someone, stick to office hours. The unfortunate and deathly annoying thing is they don’t divulge when exactly these office hours are.

Note that some of these “sins” are not so much grounded on Commerzbank as a company but, arguably, on Germany as a society. Unpicking that is left as an exercise for the reader because I am too pissed and too worried that my rent payment for next month won’t come through because of this. For all it’s worth, during this whole time, I’ve been using my card to make payments and at least it’s still coming through. Small comfort.

Because of the bad first impression that Commerzbank has left on me, I also signed up for N26 as a back-up. I stuck with Commerzbank as my primary bank simply because I thought N26 is likelier to have problems in the long run, given that they are, basically, a “fin-tech start-up”. After almost six years, I think N26 has earned some bragging rights over grandpa Commerzbank.