Comment by hypercube33
1 day ago
Why would banks be motivated to care? People just give them money as a business model. Up until recently, Wells Fargo didnt have case sensitive passwords even, because no pressure to do anything about that.
To bring it around - the Non-Google android user base is small enough right now that there is no motivation for them to spend money to make their verification/validation stuff work on any non-mainstream platforms.
>> People just give them money as a business model.
You dont actually give them money...you loan them money when you do a deposit. That is why they pay you interest, and that comes with the risk of loans to another party.
A little detail they are happy to omit and they are happy to let people talk about: "I have money in the bank", that you of course ...dont have.
At least in the US most banks are FDIC insured so your first $250k or so in deposits are secured by the government.
There's no real risk involved.
Incorrect-ish. 12 U.S.C. § 1821(f)(1) states that payment shall be made by the FDIC "as soon as possible," but as my sister-the-lawyer has always been at pains to point out to me, the most up-to-date specific language is from 2016's 81 Federal Register 87734, 87735, section B, which explicitly states that they "[do] not specify a time period for paying insured depositors." In other words, if it's a tiny bank failure you might get lucky and get made whole in a few business days, but if it's something larger, they can choose to meet their regulatory obligations over the course of decades - which is very much real risk.
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The existence of the FDIC is in itself, the proof there is risk involved :-)
As of June 2026, the FDIC had approximately $161 billion in its insurance fund against...drum roll... $10.8 trillion in insured deposits.
Good luck calling on your insurance on a systemic bank crisis....
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> At least in the US most banks are FDIC insured so your first $250k
More if you're in Silicon Valley… semi-/s
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The interest rate banks pay you has been 0% since before covid
That's definitely not universally true; my US bank pays 3.2% interest on savings
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This is a thread about a EU bank, and banks in the EU both have some standard interest rate on savings accounts, and moreover might offer time-restricted savings accounts with an even higher rate. That said, they track poorly with inflation compared to actual investment.
I get 4% (instant access savings account with Revolut, UK)
My bank in the uk pays me 3%
Zero is also a number, although not all Mathematicians accept that. 0% interest does not change the essence of the monetary relationship with your bank, or the risk profile.
Ally has been 2% from before Covid and currently is at 3.2%
I have been able to easily find a US bank that pays roughly SOFR minus 25 basis points for FDIC insured savings accounts, even before 2020.
isnt it the opposite in parts of the EU? you pay interest on the deposit
I don’t know of any bank that hides the fact they lend out money. Most pretty actively advertise it.
Technically true I suppose. But go ask the average person on the street where the bank gets the money they lend people for mortgages and cars and such and I guarantee you the number of people that make that connection is going to be much much smaller than you seem to want to suggest.
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>> I don’t know of any bank that hides the fact they lend out money.
Absolutely true. They question here is how many announce they are borrowing from you :-)
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Well, you're probably going to be very disappointed when you learn how money works in general these days.
Hint: Gold has no more to do with it than any other commodity does. Ditto with petroleum.
> Why would banks be motivated to care?
Because courts have made them pay the curtomer their losses when the customer (not the bank) was scammed/hacked/etc.
And you don't think that plays some part in all these arcane security requirements that basically amount to "you're doing something a little weird so we're just going to block you rather than support it"?
> Why would banks be motivated to care?
Unfortunately, banks can be held liable for customers getting scammed. Even if they win in the end, they have to make the customer whole first no matter what [1].
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/eugh-konto-...
They are breaking the law, that should be motivation enough. That the number of non android non ios users is small shouldn't be relevant. The locked down android and apple devices are like virtual US soil. The obligation should be to service all EU citizens rather than a sub set.
Banks are motivated to care, but in the direction they currently do. They can be on the hook for making up losses. Whether you as an ultra leet hax0r can run rooted/jailbroken devices without getting owned, they are worried about your non-leet parents doing the same and having their retirement accounts drained by North Korea. I know it sounds far fetched, but it is a plausible scenario that I heard recently
The same banks that typically embrace the 3 biggest signs of security stupidity:
- max length of passwords (not talking about lengths that would pose a DoS threat, talking limits like 20 characters)
- incredibly constrained character set for passwords (“your password can’t contain a quotation mark, only alphanumeric and these specific 10 punctuation marks”)
- “security” questions (can we just ban these already? Knowing that my childhood dog’s name was Bingo should NOT give you the ability to change my brokerage password.)