traduction par Argos Translate:
Vivaqua a retiré leur machine à sous et refuse maintenant de l’argent. En effet : pouvoir accéder au service d’eau à #Bruxelles dépend désormais de l’acceptation par la banque et de l’acceptation des services bancaires.
Those documents are not always needed. There are students coming to Belgium all the time, they manage it.
Are you opposed to the banking system as a whole, or are you looking for a bank that would accept opening a bank account for a foreigner? https://wise.com/ allows to open bank accounts without proof or income, minimum deposit or work permit.
How would you deposit cash on the wise.com account? I didn’t look too closely at it but I’ve noticed in general the more modern & online a bank is, the more crippled and helpless it is. I see that the app for wise is limited to Google playstore or apple, so that’s another vector for exclusion unless their web access is fully featured. (edit: #Wise is a Cloudflare site, so I would indeed run away from that as it gives a US tech giant a clear view of all traffic, usernames, passwords, etc… i’m not that trusting)
I’m opposed to forced banking. It’s good to have a banking system in place as a convenient option, but a disaster to be wholly dependent on banks and entirely helpless when there are technical problems (which have dozens of points of failure both on your side of the transaction as well as the merchants). I was in the grocery store and a customer’s bank card failed. Long line of people had to wait through many reattempts before in the end she had no choice but to walk out empty handed and leave all her groceries at the cashier, who then had to haul them out of the way.
Banks are gradually becoming less and less competent overall… some even forcing customers to blindly trust & execute closed-source software.
I think if I arrived in a foreign country for a 90 day vacation I would be outraged if I had to spend however many days researching and fiddling with banks just to pay for running water… time that could be better spent. Refugees will likely be harmed by the loss of cash option as well. Though it’d perhaps be poetic justice if in the end such a mess were simply left without bill payment. Hopefully Vivaqua’s move leaves them with some delinquent accounts they can’t collect on.
You indeed would need to send money to the Wise account from another bank account, but that’s following the logic that you have a bank account in your country of origin.
People coming to a country for 90 days usually have contracts were bills are included. Student housing in Belgium includes electricity and water in the vast majority of cases. Short-living rentals usually account for it as well. But to be honest, both student and short-rental housing would also prefer you to make a bank transfer rather than to pay them in cash.
I know people who helped refugees arriving in Belgium, one of the first procedures the refugees want to do is to open a bank account.
Vivaqua’s money comes from the population taxes. Please pay them rather than leaving a public institution with debt.
At the demonstration against forced digital public services a few weeks ago I spoke to a charity group there that assists refugees & they said bank accounts are a serious problem for them. They have to find someone who will be officially hired in their place, who then withdraws cash and pays them as subcontractors because they are excluded from the banking system. Then the workers have to trust that the middle man will actually pay them. The energy suppliers have always been anti-cash which is a problem for refugees.
Seems strange to me:
https://febelfin.be/fr/services/service-bancaire-de-base-pour-les-particuliers
I mentioned the basic bank account to the charity workers. I don’t recall now what their response was.
But undocumented immigrants come in different varieties and the keyword in that faq you quoted is “recognized” refugees. Perhaps they don’t all reach a level of recognition that they need. Or perhaps they simply fear it. Forcing a bank account on them obviously adds complexity to their already overly complex and difficult situation.
Being recognized is indeed a struggle, but even without a bank account, if they are not recognized, they wouldn’t be able to work, to find accommodation, etc.
Ukrainian refugees opened 11k basic accounts: https://febelfin.be/fr/presse/banque-et-societe/11-292-comptes-bancaires-ouverts-par-des-refugie-e-s-ukrainien-ne-s-en-belgique
Banking is a part of society, that’s not specifically Belgian. It can be accessed using BPost bank, for free if you receive at least 500 euros on your account monthly: https://www.bpostbanque.be/comptes-et-cartes/comptes-a-vue. Otherwise it’s 1,5 euro.
I don’t even think employers would agree to pay you in cash today, for security reasons.
They do. As I said, they work for a middleman and that middleman is where the paper trail stops. The middle man takes a cut & they get exploited. It’s a hard life but they survive.
Glad to hear there are success stories. But those do not obviate the horror stories. The horrors are facilitated by a system of forced banking while the success stories do not require forced banking.
Optional banking is part of society. Forced banking creates a crippled society that’s gradually and quietly becoming a reality in Belgium. It’s not an acceptable society to create. So far it’s unlawful. Belgian law still requires a cash option but it’s going unenforced. If you report Manhattan Burger for refusing cash, your report will be ignored.
Banks decide who you’re allowed to pay. E.g. ~10 or so years ago banks in collusion decided if you wanted to donate money to Wikileaks they would not support it. Donors were blocked. Luckily cash enables people to escape from that nannying. When the cash option is gone banks will be able to abuse their power much more rampantly. They can collude to cancel any org they want.
Banks can also block your account spontaneously for trivial reasons such as the copy of your ID card on their records expiring. Indeed this is how some banks inform you that you need to help them update their records- they just block access to your money. Luckily when that happened cash enabled me to eat until the bank opened again on Monday morning (although this was a time that I was expected to be present at work).
Banks inherently collect data which is then vulnerable to breaches. The best defense against data breaches is to not arbitrarily create the data to begin with. I.e. pay in cash. Outside of the GDPR region, banks would gladly sell records on how much you spend on McDonalds food, tobacco, and cigarettes. Health insurance companies would love to have that data. Within the GDPR, I think they can still do that but they have to put it in their terms of service you must agree to. So it’s important to have the option to disagree.