ttj - Tom Jones

The background is that I sold a few kilos of gold for CHF, and wanted it in EUR, so I used IB's forex to get it from CHF to EUR at good rates.  Simple right?  Well, it touches on the non-working financial system in several different places, so no, it's certainly not simple, it's an ordeal.  The particular section of the ordeal dealt with here is the seizure of my funds by IB.  The other major part of the ordeal so far is Sparkasse's Kafkaesque handling of giving permission for the EUR to land in their account, which is out of scope here. Like so many things, the problem comes down to authentication.   The general problem is that businesses are generally unable to authenticate their own customers, and this is a competence issue.  This is often accompanied by adhoc and incorrectly-designed processes to sort-of "authenticate" customers, outside what the customer was led to believe constitutes the normal authentication process.   The specific pro...

I've just requested a withdrawal from IB (Interactive Brokers).  The process in total required around five authentications, depending on how you count. There seems to be a basic problem around authentication.  Customers on the whole are poor at managing credentials.  Businesses, meanwhile, try to mitigate this, by making authentication more complicated, unreliable, time-consuming, depend on more external factors, and so on.  It would be better to have a clear mechanism and clear division of responsibility.  After evey major incident, a business case is probably made to add another "step" to the process.  But degrading the chance of legit authentication, or increasing its cost, is wrong.  If every authentication involved infinite steps and always failed, there would be no incorrect authentications, and there would be no authentications at all. For IB just now, I had to enter my username and password to start.  Annoyingly, my browser tries to fill t...