Service Charges

So I went to the Alberta Government Treasury Branch the other day to get some cash out of the instant teller. Now I belong to a credit union and so as usual this would mean an Interact service charge anywhere from $1.50-$2.5o. So I ask for $40 and get $40 and on the receipt I find there is NO SERVICE CHARGE. Damn right.



ATB was created as a People Bank by the Social Credit Government in 1938 to counter the Eastern Banking Monopoly and for the creation of Funny Money in order to offset the massive debt and depression affecting the province.

There is great irony that the Alberta Treasury Branches still operate in Republican Lite Alberta. They are unionized, the only unionized banking system in Canda!

The credit union movement in Quebec Cassie du Populaire is close to the ATB model of the peoples bank though it is more of a federated peoples bank as adovacted by mutualists and Proudhon.

The provincial ATB's have low interest rates for citizens banking with them. And they have minimal service charges, like none on Interact banking through the ATM. This is unique since both banks and credit unions charge service charges.

And that fact is amazing because that is where we as consumers get ripped off. We pay exorpident services charges above the actual cost of maintaining the local ATM and the Interact/Plus network that is owned and operated by the Banks! The bank workers get ripped off because ATM's have seen a reduction in teller services.

With electronic transfers of social welfare benefits to banks the poor face a dispraportionate disadvantage of being taxed with user fees/service charges on their accounts.

Like the perennial debates in the House of Commons on gas prices, banking charges are another of those debates that parliament can never resolve. Even as they discuss allowing for bank mergers. Which as documentation shows have increased across North America over the past two decades, with no reductions in service charges or savings to depositors or borrowers.

So why are we being ripped off, paying for service charges for use of ATM's then paying for using the ATM when it is not our bank, while Interac, ATMs etc are all controled by the banks.

In Europe last week the EU announced that it was looking into regulating Master Card and Visa, both controled by the banks as well, due to excessive and profit gouging by the banks and the credit card companies they own.

The report found:

* Credit card charges to retailers add an average of 2.5% to the cost of goods.

* Small and medium businesses pay up to 70% more than large companies for offering credit card payments.

* Consumers pay 100% more for MasterCard and Visa in some countries than in others

While this was report on Europe the same can be said for the North American marketplace.

The banks use the excuse that their costs are the techonology and start up costs. However those costs began over twenty years ago, and are no longer real costs of doing business.

Since these fees hurt customers as well as business, which is charged a service charge for bank cards as well as credit cards, when will we hear from the CFIB and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, along with consumer advocates and unions about how we are being ripped off by the banks?

If you want to put real money in your pocket, as the on line no service charge bank ING says, then its time we ended service charges for Interac banking and on Credit Cards. Service charges that are tacked on over and above interest payments by Visa and Mastercard.

So if the ATB can not charge me for Interac banking why can't the rest of them?
Again a failure of the ideology of competition, obviously in this case the taxpayers citizens of Alberta underwrite this competitive advantage while the rest of the financial industry goes on its merry way gouging us.

Private ATM deployers take root in Canada�s wide-open market - August 1, 1998

Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs says ATM fees on the rise ...

Overview of the ATM and Debit Card Industry

"Rip-Off" ATM Surcharges
Nadia Massoud, Dan Bernhardt
RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 2002) , pp. 96-115

Fees and surcharging in automatic teller machine networks:
Non-bank ATM providers versus large banks

ATM networks were initially developed as a means by which banks could save costs by shifting
customers from costly “teller” transactions using personnel at a branch to the use of machines. In the early 1980s in North America, these initially proprietary systems evolved into shared networks, which enhanced customer convenience in accessing their account, without having to go to their branch. A main fee set by the (shared) network is an “interchange fee” that banks must pay to other member firms for each “foreign” transaction made by one of their customers at another member’s ATM. In order to recover at least part of the cost, banks typically charge their own customers a “foreign fee” for these transactions. In addition to the foreign fee, customers making foreign ATM transactions may pay a “surcharge” directly to the owner of the ATM. This fee structure has the interesting and unusual feature that all three fees apply to the same transaction.

Harming Depositors and Helping Borrowers: The Disparate Impact of Bank Consolidation

Recently, banking has experienced rapid consolidation in many countries. For banks in the United States, corporate restructurings have been driven by advances in information technology and by a loosening of geographic restrictions on branching and acquisitions. The number of U.S. commercial banks declined from 14,469 in 1984 to 7,888 in 2002, while the average asset size of banks has more than tripled over this period, from $268 million to $897
million.

The Welfare Consequences of ATM Surcharges: Evidence from a Structural Entry Model

The goal of this paper is to estimate a structural model of the market for automatic teller
machines (ATMs) in order to understand the implications of regulating ATM surcharges on
ATM entry and consumer welfare.
Since the establishment of the first ATM networks in the early 1970s, ATMs have
become a ubiquitous and growing component of consumer banking technology. By 2001, there
were over 324,000 ATMs in the United States, processing an average of 117 transactions per
day, suggesting that each person in the United States uses an ATM an average of 45 times per
year.
In spite of the vast and growing presence of ATMs, product differentiation may imply
that the market for ATMs does not reflect perfect competition or yield optimal outcomes. In
particular, the surcharge—the price charged by an ATM on top of the set interchange fee—has
increased significantly over the last several years. The increase can be linked to an April 1996
decision by the major ATM networks to allow surcharges among their member ATMs.2 Between 1996 and 2001, the number of ATMs tripled, but the number of transactions per ATM fell by about 45 percent. The technology of ATMs is characterized by high fixed costs—primarily the cost of leasing the machine, keeping it stocked with cash, and servicing it—and very low marginal costs. Thus, the increased price of ATM services has been accompanied by an increased average cost per ATM transaction.


See:

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election

Calgary Herald Remembers RB Bennet

Canada's First Internment Camps

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

The Peoples Bank of Alberta


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Don't Bank On It.

That the banks will voluntarily concede on the issue of ATM fees.

If ATM fees were eliminated, customers would be subsidizing the customers of other banks who use their machines, argues the Canadian Bankers Association. If people want to forego the convenience fee, they should use their own bank's machine.

A red herring, a straw man, and a spurious argument since the oligopoly of the five banks already share their customers since the jointly own Interac, Cirrus, Plus etc. the ATM operating systems. And as such charge fees to stores using Interac, and to private ATM operators. They are literally cash registers for the Big 5 Banks, if not one arm bandits.

But banks don't seem to have convinced either the broader public or their political masters why a fee is necessary.

John Lawford is one lawyer eager to argue against the banks in upcoming finance committee hearings. "There is no need for fees at all," says Lawford, who represents about 4,000 Canadians through the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.

Banks collect an estimated $154 million annually in convenience fees, based on figures supplied by the Canadian Bankers Association – a tiny sliver of their overall profits. But it's an issue that gets Canadians' blood boiling.

A drop in the bucket, but don't forget this is only one set of user fees. There are service charges and exorbitant credit card charges which the Banking Committee needs to look at. Since the banks love to get us to pay for their screw ups.

But if the government were successful at getting the banks to eliminate fees, it might not solve consumers' pocket-book problem.

Banks might just shift the fees to another service, says U of T's Booth. Previously, banks raised service fees to recoup losses on 1970s loans to foreign countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, he says.

While the banks and others advocate you take out large amounts of money at one time from the ATM to avoid withdrawal charges, I point again, that this is simply shifting the burden on the consumer who is being gouged. You are charged by your branch, the ATM you use and further a monthly service charge. The ATM's were instituted to reduce branches and staff costs. The private ATM's were approved by the Competition bureau to provide competition to bank ATM's, though the Big 5 run Interac/Cirrus/Plus that ATM's use.

In February, the Toronto marketing research firm TNS Canadian Facts announced that 81 per cent of Canadian adults surveyed in the fall of 2006 had used a bank machine during the previous month, up from 78 per cent a year earlier, and that nine out of every 10 cash withdrawals had been made at a bank machine.

Furthermore, deposits of cheques and cash at ABMs doubled those made in branches, and in fact only 53 per cent of Canadian adults had visited a branch in the previous month, the lowest percentage since 1994.

So the solution is that the Big 5 banks eat the costs and make it back from stores that use ATM for your purchases, which they charge .50 for. And from the private ATM's, who can charge you whatever they want.

And if this is not solved by the Bank Act Review, it will be real money in your pocket issue that will dwarf any tax break promises the Conservatives make in the next election.

See

Banks

Monopoly

Service Charges

ATM

Bank Profits

Credit Cards


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An ATM art installation mocks wealthy Art Basel guests by ranking their bank balances on an arcade-like leaderboard

Pete Syme

Fri, December 2, 2022 

Art collective MSCHF have made an ATM which puts your bank balance and photo on a public leaderboard.Atit Phetmuangtong/EyeEm/Getty Images

• An ATM at Art Basel Miami Beach is ranking users' bank balances with photos of them.

• One man in a pink t-shirt has had top place since Tuesday, with $2.9 million.

• The machine displays mocking animations, and jokes about Bitcoin and selling organs.

An ATM is ranking all its customers by displaying their bank balance and photo on a leaderboard at Art Basel Miami Beach.

The art installation was created by Brooklyn-based group MSCHF, and a video shared on Twitter has over 80,000 likes – exposing the participants' bank balances to an even wider audience.

One unidentified man in a pink t-shirt is the ATM's wealthiest user so far, as his $2.9 million has kept him top of the leaderboard since Tuesday.

A YouTube video shared by vlogger Joel Franco shows the machine in action, where its artistic license is more obvious.

When a man with a backwards cap and multicolored hair gets second place on the leaderboard with around $500,000, "HIGH SCORE #2" pops up on the ATM in the style of an arcade game.

And when one couple steps forward from a crowd nervously watching the ATM, the man hides his face with a pamphlet as an animation shows money being flushed down the toilet.

"Thanks for playing," says the machine, as the user's $48,000 isn't enough to place in the top twenty.

Of the 93 ATM users seen in one recording, the bottom eight had $0.00.

Other animations displayed by the ATM are futuristic adverts which make ironic statements. For example "Organs 4 Cash" labels the heart for $1 million but the brain for $150, and another jokes "Send 1 Bitcoin Get 2 Free."

Daniel Greenberg, MSCHF co-founder, told CNN that "ATM Leaderboard' is an extremely literal distillation of wealth-flaunting impulses."

The art collective chose the Miami location because "there is a dense concentration of people renting Lamborghinis and wearing Rolexes."

And because the leaderboard keeps a continuous record, MSCHF hopes that they can show the ATM at more events as well.

Cry Me A River

Canada's Banking Cartel is crying about politicians bashing them, cry me a river.

At a time when the federal finance minister is asking Canada's big banks to justify a raft of ATM banking fees, Canada's second-largest bank is reporting its first quarterly profit of more than $1 billion.

Bank of Nova Scotia reported Tuesday morning a first quarter profit that smashed all expectations at $1.01 billion, or $1.01 a share, up almost 20 per cent from $844 million, or 84 cents a share, a year ago.

Last week Canada's largest bank, Royal Bank of Canada, posted first-quarter net earnings of $1.5 billion or $1.14 per diluted share, a 27.6-per-cent increase from the same quarter last year

Let us review the facts; ATM fees are set by a cartel of Canada's six banks. Not credit unions or foreign banks. The Banking Cartel owns Interac, it implemented ATM's as a way of closing branches and reducing front line staff.

Credit Cards, Visa and MasterCard, are owned by the same Banking Cartel. They set the interest charges and fees for the use of credit cards.

Bank fees themselves are then charged on top of this. For instance the banks charge you a service fee for having an account, and for any cheques used, or for any ATM withdrawls, and for use of their credit cards.

So when they claim that they need to charge you ATM fees for withdrawing money from their branch and not your own, well thats a little white lie. Since the cartel owns Interac, the fact is they have colluded in a monopolistic fashion to set fees.

That would be illegal in the United Sates. It is not illegal in Canada.

So you get charged for your ATM withdrawal three times, once when you use an ATM that is not your bank, next a charge by your bank for doing so and then they charge you a monthly service charge for having done so. Sounds like usury to me.

The Finance Committee will be reviewing Banking operations later this month, they need to look at all service charges as well as ATM fees. And they need to look at the impact of the Banking Cartels in operating Interac and the Credit Card business.

It has been a long standing libertarian tradition to oppose cartels and monopolies especially in the banking industry. A fact most conservatives forget, including the ones who claim to be libertarians.

See

Banks

Monopoly

Service Charges

ATM

Bank Profits

Credit Cards


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Hand's In Your Pocket

This is good news for working folks who get ripped off everyday when you use the bank machines. It's a heck of a better political platform than another GST cut or a tax credit. A buck fifty a shot is a heck of alot more than the pennies saved on the GST or the one time tax credit, which is not cash in your pocket but a promise to pay.

TORONTO (CP) — NDP Leader Jack Layton is accusing Canada’s big banks of “gouging” clients by charging ATM fees to access their own cash.

Layton says he wants the practice outlawed.

He says it’s just not fair to force someone to pay $1.50 for withdrawing or depositing $20 or $30 from a bank machine.

Banks had $19 billion in profits last year and Layton says they don’t need the cash.

Layton says bank fees have simply gone too far.

The banks called Layton’s comments “nothing more than political rhetoric” and “bank bashing.”

Bank bashing, I think not. Ask why ING does not charge service charges or ATM charges. It's a bank.

While disgruntled shareholders can sell their stock if they believe their CEO is making too much money, few of us can avoid forking out interest payments and service charges to the big five banks - which in 2005 paid their CEOs an average of nearly $14.9-million, according to a Globe and Mail survey. Cue the NDP leader once more.

"We're working to protect families from outrageous bank service fees and credit card interest rates," Layton told his caucus. "As families open their bank and credit card statements this month, the unfairness of this can't be missed. I want to say very specifically that we will continue to fight for changes that will mean affordability and fairness for the average bank customer."

ATM service charges are the biggest cost you pay over and above monthly service fees the banks charge you.

Wait a minute what the heck are they charging you monthly fees for when they use your money to make more money.

You get charged twice, once at the machine and then again by your own bank! Bank bashing indeed.

And why are they charging you a bank fee for using the ATM which they own jointly as an oligopoly.

Just like they own the Credit Card companies Visa and MasterCard which charge an interest rate only just below what would be called criminal usury.

Why do Hands in My Pocket ads make so much sense in Canada? In Canada, the credit card market is dominated by a powerful oligopoly of 5 major banks. These banks, known as the Big 5, typically price their cards at rates around 20% (much higher than rates seen in the U.S.). As a result, resentment is driving Canadians towards Capital One’s low rate credit cards. In 2004, Capital One launched a 5.99% low rate credit card that was the lowest rate in the country. More interestingly, the rate was 14 percentage points BELOW the typical rate of a Canadian credit card. Accordingly, the Hands in My Pocket campaign is very effective.

And some privatized ATM's are charging as high as $3 in service charges to get your money out.

Luckily that one is at Hudson's on Whyte and the folks that drink there are local business types and Conservative MP's so they get what they deserve, but they probably use their credit cards so they can put it on their expense accounts.



hands in my pockets




See

Service Charges

ATM

Bank Profits




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Bank that opened world's first ATM given heritage status

Dalya Alberge
Mon, 10 April 2023

Comedian Reg Varney examines a bank note as he officially opens the world's first ATM in June 1967 - Mirrorpix

Just as high street banks and cash machines are being closed across Britain to the despair of customers, one branch is literally being consigned to history - with an extraordinary heritage listing.

Historic England has added a Barclays bank in the London suburb of Enfield to its National Heritage List for England, a unique register of the country's most significant historic buildings and sites, it will be announced today.

The Grade II listing recognises that it was the first bank in the world to be fitted with an Automated Teller Machine (ATM), while also acknowledging the building’s architectural interest.


Although the branch is still trading, its customers may be concerned by a sentence on Historic England’s website about its register, which notes: “The places on the list are protected by law and most are not open to the public.”

As the Telegraph reported in January, Barclays have closed nearly a thousand branches since 2015. Having been a familiar sight on Britain’s high streets for centuries, it has shut more branches than any other bank.

Last September another report warned that more than 37,000 free-to-use machines were at risk of closure.

The bank, in Enfield, London, was built in 1897 and opened the world's first ATM 70 years later

 - Chris Redgrave/Historic England Archive

Heritage listing 'ironic'

Simon Fell, the Conservative MP for Barrow and Furness, and co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Business Banking, told the Telegraph: “We see bank branches closing all around us, so this heritage listing is somewhat ironic. Banks certainly are part of our heritage.

“Some of the most beautiful buildings in my own constituency are former banks, now transformed into wine bars and cafes. Regeneration is all well and good, but we need to maintain the link between the high street and access to finance.’

He added: “Not everyone can go online and deal with an AI chatbot to have their query answered, and certainly people in a rush who are concerned about their mortgages and loans should not have to wait in an endless phone queue to speak to a call centre overseas.”

Peter Dowd, Labour MP for Bootle and former shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “I’m concerned about bank closures and what banks collectively might do to protect the service on the high street. The heritage listing is recognition of that building’s significance to the community. That is the irony.”

Crowds gather to catch a glimpse of the cash machine in action following its grand unveiling - Mirrorpix

The ATM at the bank was officially first opened in 1967 by the comedian Reg Varney. The machine issued a £10-note on receipt of a special paper voucher inserted by the customer.

Although the prototype device has long been removed, a commemorative plaque marks its original location at the site, which is located at 20 The Town in Enfield.

Historic England said: “[This was] a major technological development in both banking practice and the general automation within modern society and is of worldwide significance.”

The listing also recognises the building’s “historic and architectural” significance.

William Gilbee Scott’s purpose-built bank won an 1896 competition held for the new branch of the London and Provincial Bank, and was once described as an “exuberant Flemish Renaissance” by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner.

New software marketplace expands licensing opportunities

Business Announcement

DOE/IDAHO NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

IMAGE: MALCOM IS ONE OF MANY SOFTWARE AVAILABLE THROUGH INL’S NEW SOFTWARE MARKETPLACE WEBSITE. view more 

CREDIT: IDAHO NATIONAL LABORATORY

Idaho National Laboratory’s software marketplace is officially open for business.   

The marketplace is a new website developed to widely distribute INL’s innovative software. Its goal: to accelerate industry adoption and fuel innovation in other research organizations. Ultimately, the marketplace is designed to help fulfill the lab’s vision to change the world’s energy future and secure our nation’s critical infrastructure.  

“At INL, technology transfer into the marketplace is important to our mission as it puts our innovations to use and makes actual impact in our community,” said INL Technology Deployment Director Jason Stolworthy. “The website gives us another outlet to distribute and license our software to achieve our mission.” 

The marketplace provides access to software codes and data sets developed at INL through various forms of licenses, including open-source and proprietary options. The site will expand as more software is developed and becomes available.  

View the site at inlsoftware.inl.gov. Questions about licensing or available software can be emailed to td@inl.gov.   

About Idaho National Laboratory
Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment. For more information, visit www.inl.gov. Follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

INL’s Software Marketplace website provides access to a variety of software, like MARMOT, to fuel innovation.

INL’s Software Marketplace offers a variety of software codes and data sets for a multitude of topics, including hydropower.

CREDIT

Idaho National Laboratory

How to make better consistency and availability trade-offs in networks

New theorem benefits distributed system design

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INTELLIGENT COMPUTING

Imagine you want to withdraw some cash from an ATM. You expect it to show your account balance correctly and process your request quickly. However, network delays make it hard for the system to meet both of these simple expectations at the same time. If an ATM system tries to achieve high “consistency,” meaning that it displays the latest account balance by checking a remote database, it could make you wait or even prevent you from accessing your accounts during busy times. On the other hand, if an ATM system favors “availability,” it could let you access your accounts fast, but risk showing inaccurate information. To avoid undesired results, designing ATM systems and other distributed systems requires making smart trade-offs.

Seeking to help system designers make those trade-offs, a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the Technical University of Dresden discovered a simple algebraic relationship between consistency, availability and network latency. This research was published Feb.15 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal.

The researchers call this algebraic relationship the consistency-availability-apparent latency theorem; it quantifies consistency, availability and apparent latency as time intervals. The CAL theorem builds on Eric Brewer’s well-known consistency-availability-network partitioning theorem. Unlike the CAP theorem, which makes system designers choose upfront to sacrifice consistency, availability or both when a network lapse occurs, the CAL theorem allows system designers to adjust their choices depending on the situation — a method that enables “rigorous design with clearly stated assumptions.”

Rigorous design is essential for distributed systems that control complex networks of connected devices such as factory robots, medical devices and security systems, which have varying latencies at different nodes and are prone to network failures. Using the CAL theorem and Lingua Franca coordination language, a powerful tool that lets programmers specify how different nodes should interact with each other, system designers can model complex networks and use the results to customize distributed systems for reliability and efficiency.

The researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach using a simple ATM network for tracking balances and processing transactions. They used the CAL theorem to model a network of ATMs and derive bounds on the network’s latency based on minimum consistency and availability requirements specified using the LF coordination language. Keeping within these bounds, they were able to optimize the design of the network by making decisions about software placement and trade-offs between consistency and availability. In the real world, such optimization may be necessary for the achievement of business goals.

The researchers also showed how to detect and handle violations of network latency requirements after deploying such a system. With built-in fault handlers provided by the LF coordination language, system designers can choose to sacrifice consistency or availability and “handle such failures gracefully.”

Additionally, the researchers implemented two coordination extensions based on the CAL theorem — one centralized and one decentralized — that support flexible trade-offs between consistency and availability as network latency changes. The centralized coordination mechanism prioritizes consistency, while the decentralized one prioritizes availability. A system employing these mechanisms can be customized according to the needs of the context.

---

JOURNAL

Intelligent Computing

DOI

10.34133/icomputing.0013 

ARTICLE TITLE

Trading Off Consistency and Availability in Tiered Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

Credit Card Rip Off

While the NDP in Canada is challenging the immoral usury of bank service charges and ATM charges, in the U.S. the Democrats in the Senate are also challenging the big bank oligopolies and the immoral usury charged on Credit Cards.

I hope in Canada the NDP will expand its challenge to the Banking Monopolies to include their collusion over credit cards, as well as service charges and ATM fees. Just as I would hope the Democrats in the Senate would expand their credit card investigation to also include service charges and ATM fees.

Credit cards have become a ubiquitous and indispensable part of the culture, with an estimated 640 million cards in Americans' wallets and more than $1.8 trillion charged on them in 2005. Many depend on them to pay their bills and buy groceries or gasoline. But consumer groups and other critics say that fees are excessive and that information provided to consumers is confusing.

A study by congressional investigators released in October found that fees for paying credit card bills late averaged $34, up from $13 in 1995, while some card issuers impose penalty interest rates of more than 30 percent on consumers who pay late or exceed the credit limit.

Among other practices cited at Thursday’s hearing:

_Some credit card issuers use a billing method that charges interest on credit card debt already paid by the consumer.

_The massive solicitations mailed to consumers _ an estimated 6 billion in 2005 _ and targeting of college students and the elderly.

See

Service Charges

ATM

Bank Profits

Credit Cards



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