El banco

Ok, the banks in England have certainly had their setbacks. The crash was bad, bankers were allowed to do stupid things so they could become rich (or richer). All that is true and there is no defense. Canadian banks were praised for their rules and general noncrashability. In general, the Canadian system is set up in a very similar way to the British system - a few large national banks rule the industry. When the Canadian system held up in 2008 and on, I was proud.

But today, and really everyday, I have a beef to pick with Canadian banks. Several beefs in fact. Maybe a cows worth.  Lots of Canadians probably don't know that British banks operate like this but

• there are no monthly fees no matter how much money is in your chequing account
• you can easily transfer money from one bank account to another online and for free
• if you use an atm that belongs to another bank it's free

My top three beefs with Canadian banks are:

• monthly fees of circa $8 - for just having an account
• the easiest way to transfer money is by setting up an email transfer ($1 fee)
• atm's that aren't your banks cost you around $2.50 from that bank, and probably another $2 from yours, every time.

I'm not a person with lots of various investments going on. For me, my bank account is simply the keeper of my money. Where I can retrieve money, and send money as need be. So the fact that my Canadian bank account charges me for every single of the three things I do with it - have an account, draw money, send money - drives me mad. Mostly because I know it doesn't have to be like this. Let's face it, RBS didn't need to be bailed out because they were letting the average Joe people get cash from a Barclays machine for free, they had to get bailed out because of bad policies and greedy insanely rich people.

I think that banks in England might have such good customer product policies for the layman bank user because of Nationwide Building Society - an institution run by the people who bank with them. The only downside to Nationwide is you can't become a member unless you've lived in the UK for over three years. Joyously however, Barclays doesn't charge me to use Nationwide atms.