Or maybe they thought he was happy to see them? 
Taiwan isn’t that corrupt so they probably won’t accept my dirty money.
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Me, as a pilot:
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Must be tough to pilot a joke. Either you fly over or crash and burn. Neither are good options.
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As any other business, being a pilot has it’s ups and downs.
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So… The banker that helped me get the loan wants me to open an account. Fair enough.
They wanted it done this week. I’ve been a bit swamped so I worked really hard to get my work done. So today, Friday, I went by the Taishin in Danshui. I thought no big deal.
I go in, they don’t have a guard, they have a police officer guarding the bank. I go to the machine and I push the button because I know they’re gonna try to push the button for me and completely get it wrong. Then this guy’s like trying to dissuade me from opening an account because foreigners need to wait many hours to open an account.
I tell him I have to open one and go to sit down. Soon I have this cop, the bank manager and and someone else trying to explain to me that foreigners need to be vetted for many hours to see if they are laundering money. They’re all asking me to sit down and I am having none of it because I don’t like multiple people towering over me trying to ‘educate’ me. I call my real estate agent cause her English is better than the mortgage banker.
Where is the mortgage banker? He lives in Xinzhuang. He had told me last week to open an account. Didn’t matter which branch. Stupid me thought I could take the morning off and go to a branch in Taipei County, or at least might as well be Taipei County with the way people think.
The real estate agent gets on the phone and I try to explain to her what’s going on. I took the morning off to do this because you know, they close at THREE!..thirty. The cop pulls my phone out of my hand to talk to her. He wants to get the number of the banker in Xinzhuang, real estate agent’s confused. I’m going nowhere fast. He’s trying to write down the number my agent’s giving him and at this point, I want out. I have already been stripped of my dignity for having a bank cause a scene because I committed the crime of being a foreigner opening an account and instead of just letting me do my thing, they jumped to conclusions and start trying to judge me and goad me into something else or away from opening an account because they’re ‘helping’ me.
I ask for my phone back cause I wanna leave.
I ask again
I ask a third time
I lose it, full volume yelling at the cop to return my phone and rip the number place in line and leave.
I get to shihpai. So much better. While opening the account was slow, it was a lot nicer.
Though… they still insist on the ‘English’ name, (I call it a foreign name because I don’t have an English name) on the bank book so… a quarter of my name barely fits on the thing cause they render letters in full Chinese Character boxes… It’s ugly as sin. Hope they will upgrade their systems. But they were much nicer. I didn’t feel like I was being singled out as a foreigner and was able to do my shit.
Moral of the story? Open your banks in Taipei, especially in Xinyi where they’re actually trained to handle foreigners.
Danshui’s Taishin is fully deserving of its 2.6 rating.
Goddamn was this experience so similar.
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tianmu is also ok. as for banks in xinyi, my First Bank branch in xinyi is just as terrible, depends on the staff and bank policies.
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This is the kind of stuff that will make or break you in Taiwan. I know @Marco is in it for the long haul. It’s good that you share your experiences to vent these frustrations and also to give others a heads up. Life here can be great but it’s definitely not all sunshine and roses.
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Yea. The fact that it turns into a circus just because I entered with a different skin colour is annoying AF.
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I feel this sometimes, but then I see how they deal with my wife when she asks for something out of the norm. There is like a panic when you ask for something new, then a stubbornness not to look it up.
Lucky since I moved down south I get more of “I haven’t done that before so it make take some time as we work our way through it”. To be honest once I find a branch/person who is helpful I normally go out of my way just to deal with them.
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I learnt to tell the guardians to f–k off (how politely and how quietly depends on how fast they f–k off) when they approach me with some random crap. When I went to Cathay to open a bank account in January, this middle-aged guy started pressuring me to give him my company’s phone number (!!!) to ensure that I have a job. I said straight to his face: “Who are you? Are you a bank clerk? No? Then kindly mind your own business. I will deal with a real bank clerk when my number is called. Thank you”. And just ignored him. The procedure turned out to be long but smooth and eventually successful.
I feel for you, man @Marco Curious to know whether these guys at the entrance are instructed to try and get rid of foreigners with funny excuses.
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I couldn’t agree more. I also found a clerk who had never seen a Gold Card before or heard about it, but instead of getting defensive she genuinely wanted to learn more. I showed her the website from my phone and we even joked about the taike blingy colour 
It took long but it was a pleasure to work on it together. I also live down south btw.
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This is exactly my experience with Taishin. After I changed jobs and didn’t need them in order to get my salary I GTFO and switched to E.Sun.
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It’s currently 2.5. Some forumosans seem to be helping out.
Guy
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Don’t let the bastards grind you down!
Guy
If any forumosans are passing this branch and have 6 hours to spare, I would recommend they open an account just to watch them sweat. One a day for a week or two would be even better.
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10 years ago you could open a bank account in 15 min, 30 if the clerk had no idea what they were doing. This nonsense they are doing now seems over the top and it seems mostly targeted to pretend to the fsc that they are serious about money laundering even though most of that issue is locals that the bank turns a blind eye to. It’s easier to blame some lower income foreigners and pretend they are doing their job
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The last account I set up took about this long, it was all the extra bits that made it to about an hour, ( international debt card, internet banking etc)
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Recently? All the horror stories about this know your client stuff seems to be quite recent. Before they just looked at the ARC and that was it.
Last one was about 4 years ago, everything has been simple since then I haven’t needed another one since.