Postfinance and the 68 dollars

 I recently got a letter from Postfinance (Swiss), importantly informing me that my USD account balance was minus 67.19 USD.  I haven't done anything with it for a while, so I guess it just went slowly down from their fees.  Fine.

This USD account sits next to other accounts in CHF, EUR and GBP, that I hold within one customer relationship, and manage together.  The total balance across the four sits at a healthy positive amount.  Given this, one might assume that negative 67.19 USD on one of the accounts doesn't present a big problem.  Perhaps ignore as long as there's plenty in the other accounts to cover, or gently remind.

The PF letter gives a deadline of 10 days for me to fix my delinquency, after which they fee me 20 CHF.  They also charge antoher 20 CHF every time they remind me.  It doesn't take a psycho MBA to point out: they now have an incentive to "remind" me.  Sure enough, the reminder follows hot on the heels of the original, presumably "earning" them 20 CHF.

The new letter says they're going to close the USD account in 3 months if they don't hear from me.  So I've topped it up and written to them.

The original letter also said they'd blocked my card.  I have a card for the CHF account and a card for the EUR account, both of which have positive balances.  I do not have a card for the USD account.  I haven't experimented to see which of my cards is blocked as collateral damage from the 67.19 USD debt.  But they seem to want to keep the accounts separate when considering balances, and then conflate them when blocking cards.

The original letter also contains the phrase "We look forward to continuing our business relationship", a lovely piece of passive aggression.  "We look forward to not just closing all your accounts and fuck you because you are delinquent in your USD one".

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