Comment by jeroenhd
5 hours ago
People investigation Israel for war crimes tend to get sanctioned by the Americans. Because European banks don't have the necessary guardrails to block an individual account from participating in their American-facing banking operations, they have to choose between being sanctioned themselves or kicking out their America-sanctioned customers.
The real solution is for them to fix their shitty systems but I don't a handful of judges, lawyers, and human rights activists are important enough for them to make that investment.
Not to sound cynical, but what's to stop these officials from picking non-multinational regional bank?
This isn't just about being a customer to a multinational bank: this also includes European banks who do business with American banks. For instance, most credit/debit cards in Europe are based on either Mastercard or Visa. All banks I know of will allow you to pay in dollars through online banking.
I don't think there are any European banks that don't communicate with American payment providers in some way by default. It's possible that there are some that trust their feature gates enough to take on these sanctioned people (like government-run banks for those who can't get a normal bank account, i.e. because of a history of fraud and crime), but I don't think these banks will advertise that ability.
Perhaps if she'd take an Iranian, North Korean, or Russian bank account, she might be able to do America-free banking, but that's not very practical outside of Iran, North Korea, or Russia at the moment.
I'm an EU citizen and UK resident. If I were to become one of those officials, my banking situation would become much more complex. One of the defining characteristics of the EU (not that the UK ever cared, even before leaving) is Freedom of Movement, and this is a credible threat to that freedom.
When in the EU the UK was actually one of the countries (if not the country) that made freedom of movement the easiest because, indeed, they did not care. You could move there with zero involvement or knowledge from the authorities.
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Visa and MasterCard, for a start: if a bank issues any kind of commonly accepted debit card to someone who is sanctioned then what is at stake is that bank's ability to continue issuing those cards. Realistically, the bank would be destroyed by being excluded from payment networks and card issuance. So only very little banks that don't interact with anything American (you might manage this with a credit union in the UK, potentially) would be your best bet.
You can't have a credit card which makes your life miserable in the modern world even if you can find a bank : Visa, Master Card, Amex are all American.
Financial sovereignty is one of the reasons India went with its own RuPay (https://www.rupay.co.in/credit-cards) credit cards.
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Many European countries still have their own (single-country) versions of debit cards - EC card/giropay in Germany for instance - and they are often accepted more widely than credit cards.
But international travel becomes painful. (Hence EC cards are co-badged as a fall-back with Visa Debit or Maestro, impossible if you are sanctioned.)
Europe used to have its own system, but it merged with Mastercard in 2002.
These days however the focus has moved to digital payments, and Europe is now backing Wero, which they aim to start rolling out properly in 2026.