@fifieldt I have lost hope the incompetence of Taiwanese banks can be fixed. It’s like dealing with toddlers.
Here what happened to me last week at another bank:
I changed my ID number (Yay! only 60 minutes wasted as they never had it done before) at the Land Bank in Nantou City like 6 months ago.
I rarely use that account, so much later I found out my online banking was not working. Their website was telling me my password was wrong and ‘locked it’.
I went to the branch and after another 30 minutes they found out my account does not have online banking enabled and I had to reapply.
So changing ID number in Land Bank removes online banking.
Screw people who have day jobs and never have time to go to the branch during limited opening hours. Have to waste time on my day off to deal with this crap so many times.
I just called and spoke to Amy. I was admittedly pretty rude to her but she was also defending the bullshit.
Apparently they are going to let me know why they don’t offer the options to answer the questions online.
When I asked why the rejected my account she said ‘because we need to ask you questions as you said you are only a tax resident of Taiwan’’ when I replied ‘but you didn’t ask me. You rejected the account, I’m calling you. You didn’t call me.’
She had no answer to that.
I also let her know the household registration question was ridiculous because no foreigner has household registration.
She also asked me if I have a spouse or kids in Taiwan… seems irrelevant too.
I did some digging and they had a decent interest rate for the 6 months prior as well. I won’t keep more than $100,000 in savings in Taiwan anyway. I send it all to Australia
I should probably have clarified that before. Like @justintaiwan wrote, their previous interest rate also looked pretty good (2.8% or something), it just fell under a different promotional period.
I wasn’t meaning to suggest that the interest rate will drop dramatically after the promotional period, just that it isn’t guaranteed beyond that.
Good. Hopefully they’ll fix the system/process then and stop rejecting foreigners by default for the same issues other Taiwanese banks do. What they’ve been doing so far doesn’t seem foreigner-friendly to me…
only real actual reason for me to get that. other things not much of interest to me, but the 3.2% rate on deposits is very good for us dirty foreigners. It will be slightly less since if we are not APRC we get taxed, but still. Better than anything else normally available to us.
E Sun used to let me but they also left me broke in Australia as they turned off my card from accessing cash overseas. So, I stopped using them.
Cathay claimed they would let me and have set it up but it never works, I think they screwed up my excessively long name so it won’t go through automatically ever.
Cathay is my main bank these days. I wanted to switch to CTBC because the debit card gets line points but they do the weird ID thing and they filled out my AU bank details incorrectly so I can’t do online transfers. Their branch staff also suck and it’s really far from my house so I gave up.
I just want to have 1 account with no issues to be honest but it’s impossible.
and every day until it is haha