This is one of the reasons I use a local credit union with a handful of branches only in my region. I can always re-establish trust by just walking into a branch to do business, and likewise they can always just ask me to walk in with my driver's license if they need to verify that I'm really me.
But the mentions of "his student visa was no longer valid [...] meaning he had to leave the country" make me think walking to a local bank branch might not have been an easy option in the post adrianmsmith recalls.
Absolutely agree! I only brought it up because it seems like, in our quest for efficiency, we are rapidly heading for a world where we try to delegate trust to outside entities (like tech companies, megabanks, or far-off government departments in Washington, D.C.) but, fundamentally, what makes financial transactions work (with anything other than physical currency), is actual real trust between parties. This is how the great banking houses of Europe began, it's how remittance networks still work in much of the global south, and its how the Jimmy Stewart-style small town bank once functioned. National banks with lots of local branches are an approximation of this, but the "branches" keep getting less and less bank-like: there is no "president" at the BoA branch inside Kroger, just somebody with a pulse who can technically pass a background check far enough to get bonded. Finally, many of the big banks are just closing these far-flung branches altogether. Bank of America &co. may get many advantages from their enormous scale, but they may be undermining their own foundations in the name of cost savings by trying to cheap out on "customer service" as if banking were just another kind of retailing and trust wasn't central to their entire business.
They probably know this and don't care because it won't happen this quarter or likely even this fiscal year, so it doesn't matter to anyone in charge. But it does matter to ordinary people trying to conduct their lives without being irreversibly de-personed by a flakey customer service bot.
