Universal banking service | Febelfin
febelfin.be
The digitisation of society is advancing at a rapid pace and not everyone is managing to keep up. So it is essential to pay extra attention to the group of people who are less or not digitally skilled. After all, it is important to ensure that everyone can participate fully in society as a whole. For this, the banking sector and the government have signed a special charter outlining the principles and terms for a Universal Banking Service.

The linked page shows that Belgium cares just enough about preventing forcing the digital transformation down our throats to force banks to offer an analog means of access. But Belgium is okay with banks fleecing offline consumers to the tune of €62.50/yr above and beyond the normal service costs, plus a bit more to pay for printed bank statements.

One disgusting side-effect is that there is no pressure on banks to avoid enshitification of their digital services. Normally when a digital mechanism is enshitified, we can use the analog mechanism instead. And rightly so if that costs the bank more – they should factor that into their enshitification plans. But since analog customers must pay substantially more to offset the costs, there is no incentive not to enshitify the service. So the shitty choices are:

  • get enshitified access at a normal price; or
  • accept less convenient low-tech but non-enshitified service and pay €62.50+/yr more

It seems as if banks are in fact encouraged to enshitify their digital access because driving people to go analog is just an extra bonus revenue.

The original thread is here.