What is the Banking mobility assistance service?
Banking: Why changing establishments is (still) too often a matter of the obstacle course.
Set up in 2017, the banking mobility assistance service would not be as effective as hoped.
Facilitating competition in the banking sector by allowing users to change their establishment quickly, this was the objective of the "banking mobility assistance service" set up in 2017 by the Macron Law.
Banking mobility assistance service
Thus, if you request it, it will be your new bank that will take care of making your change of bank address free of charge with all the organizations that make direct debits and automatic transfers to your current current account (electricity, telephony, rent, taxes, insurance ...). All transfers of operations must then be made within 22 working days.
Likewise, always at your request, the arrival establishment can manage the closure of your previous bank account, taking care to repatriate its balance to your new account, at the earliest within 30 calendar days or at a later date indicated.
To benefit from this optional service, all you have to do is sign the bank mobility mandate proposed by your new branch and provide it with a bank identity statement (RIB) from your old account.
However, be careful, this device only works for deposit and payment accounts. If you want to close your savings books and securities accounts, you will have to do the procedure yourself with your old bank.
Banking mobility assistance service details
While the banking mobility service promised a greater fluidity of the sector, the reality is more nuanced. Indeed, only 20.3% of users used this device in 2020 according to a survey by the Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR) published recently.
Moreover, although the deadlines for transferring transactions are respected, only one in ten accounts is closed on time. It thus takes an average of 53 days to obtain the effective closure and the transfer of the credit balance (compared to 93 days in 2019).
To justify these delays, the institutions then reject the responsibility on their customers because of the persistence of an overdraft, the non-return of the means of payment or the holding of an account or an associated product which complicates the procedure. Worse, 8.9% of mobility requests made in 2020 were refused by the home institution, certainly for legal reasons provided for by legislation but not always well known to users.
Therefore, the ACPR notes a global lack of information on the part of banks that do not explain the system enough and sometimes even forget to put an ad hoc documentation in the branch, although it is nevertheless mandatory. In plain english: not all establishments play the game!
Banking mobility assistance service comments
- For example, I changed banks at the end of last year. Mid-November it seems to me. On January 15, the old account was still not closed and I continued to pay for the old card that I had returned.
So one Monday, I decided to send a slightly salty email to my old bank, clearly specifying the steps I was about to follow to officially report these defaults. Surprise, the next day early in the afternoon, they answer me very kindly that I did well to come back to them to report this delay, blablabla estimated customer all that. I check in the evening, the account has been closed, everything is settled.
Moral of the story, show the fangs.
- Even just to change branches of the same brand, for banks the "we take care of everything" basically comes back when we have done 90% of the work: census of payments and direct debits and transmission of references and addresses, to enter this information into their system. The "portability" is nothing automatic and for sure if it becomes one day it will be a paid service :o))))
