Ever wonder why Koko Bank don’t offer us “foreigners” any service? It is because we only have overseas secondary documents! And they cannot verify our overseas drivers licenses and overseas health insurance cards… Because we don’t have Taiwanese ones apparently.
Think it’s ridiculous? That’s the explanation they gave me after complaining to the FSC in regards to their policy of denying even Taiwanese citizens who were born abroad!
Apparently we are all driving in Taiwan illegally on our foreign licenses for many years and have no NHI health insurance coverage. We are seen as illegal Mexican immigrants in the eyes of Koko Bank!
The xenophobic racism in Taiwan when it comes to banking is astonishing!
I know a lawyer in the US who just took a 300 million USD suit and made it into a 6 billion USD suit against an American bank just because he closed his accounts there but they didn’t close them on their end, and then they kept contacting him after he wrote a bunch of scary lawyer letters telling them to stop. It’s not a class action lawsuit. It’s something that started as “by law you can’t leave my account open after I closed it. Close my accounts immediately and do not contact me again”, then escalated into what would have been maybe $150 in small claims court, then he randomly choose 300 mil because he was actually fed up with being pestered still, after the threatening letters, then they contacted him again and he upped the winnings (his suit against his former bank. No one else to pay out if he wins this case, not even Uncle Sam) to 6 billion.
Taiwan has anti-discrimination laws. It’s not hard to poke holes in this bank’s logic regarding their discrimination policy. While I would love the same insane quantity of money that my acquaintance above might well be paying himself from his ex-bank, I’m sure you wouldn’t get that much in Taiwan. But I imagine suing them in an effort to scare the shit out of them/force them to change their policies would be very satisfying. You might even get a free biandang out of them
Their explanation that foreigners need to go into branch to open an account because “there are various different kinds of secondary identification documents” and it’s “difficult to verify the authenticity of documents online” is dumb because all legal foreign residents in Taiwan have a standardized ID card which can be used for primary identification, and most legal foreign residents either have a driving license or NHI card which can be used for secondary identification. If Taiwanese can use a Taiwan ID card + NHI card or driving license then foreigners should be able to too.
Of course not! Who does that? If you are living here you would’ve already obtained or transferred it to a Taiwan license! Did you read my post correctly?
Not just them. All virtual only bank accounts… They offer things such as much higher interest, fee free transactions and be able to use any ATM fee free. But none of them offer services to foreigners because we don’t have any secondary ID (TW drivers licenses, Health insurance card etc…)
So you want to open a bank account with a local driving license which is something that they don’t do. They want you to show them your ARC or APRC and this irates you because it’s very xenophobic.
Is this the situation?
What are you talking about? I have 3 different bank accounts, which I have used for saving my money, making payments online and overseas, and I have linked to Paypal. What are you talking about?
Yeah, I just realised that after reading the scanned document. Because his tantrum is pretty incoherent TBH. What racism, xenophobia and shit is he talking about? It’s laziness and avoiding troubles at most.
I see that as a legacy procedure so to say. Banks are square minded and sometimes lazy, and want to go by the the book, and the book hasn’t been updated in ages. But xenophobic? racist? I don’t think so. Just stupid and square minded.
