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.