Years ago in Germany, most all banks ran accounts with no real cost factor (they might have mandated you needed to maintain x-amount of D-Marks in the account).
Currently, the Deutsche Bank has a fee deal....8.99 Euro per month. Normally, it's one of those banks that I would advise people to step around, and look for lesser cost situations.
Well...ARD (public TV, Channel One) brought this up today....with the Deutsche Bank. They were taken to court.
The accusation? The 8.99 fee was unjust.
An amusing thing came out of the Federal Court of Justice today. They said this fee was not qualified or just.
Yes, even a homeless guy should be able to have a 'free' account with the Deutsche Bank.
So this goes back about four years ago when laws were changed, and said that banks needed to offer a free basic account. Deutsche Bank was sort of a holdout on this....saying that a fee of some type needed to be built into the system. The court says 'no'.
What happens now? I doubt if Deutsche Bank gives up on this, and they might try to come back to say each transaction requires x-amount. It'll be challenged again in court.
At some point in the future, I expect a cashless society proposal to come up and the government (maybe 20 years in the future) will pursue the idea of having everyone go digital. That is going to open this discussion even further.
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