My Bank's Computer

Please forgive the forthcoming rant, but I wanted to relate my recent trials in trying to send some money to Germany via electronic transfer. As some of you will know I went to Germany last month to visit my Linux Outlaws co-host Fab, and also attend Linux Tag 2009. It was great fun and obviously there were various costs for hotels in Berlin and travel, amongst other things. I wanted to send some money to Fab to cover these things and a bank transfer seemed the easiest and quickest way to do that, or so I thought. I knew I needed an IBAN code and the SWIFT code for his bank, I thought this would be enough. First off I looked for a way to arrange this with the Natwest Online Banking site, which at the time of writing still hasn’t been updated to accept Firefox 3.5, but that’s another matter. It seems you can’t do International transfers online. I was disappointed by that but it seemed fairly reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »