Relationship banking 101: relate to your customer

Money laundering regulations are penalising honest retail bank customers while driving others into the cash economy, which benefits nobody, much less the banks themselves. I recently visited my bank to deposit a reasonable amount of money and transfer some money to pay a bill. Call me old fashioned, but it’s how I use my bank account. A polite youth asked me what was the source of my deposit (despite the fact that it was clearly tagged and inputted from a well-known UK Limited company, drawn on a UK bank) and why I was making a payment  - to a canal narrowboat marina, as it happens. He claimed he was obliged to ask under UK money laundering regulations, which is probably true, since the banks have to comply with increasingly Draconian regulations. But this was a personal, not a business transaction, I have been with this bank for some time, have a good credit record and the amounts in question were hardly large. Perhaps all the UK retail banks have been obliged to bother their customers more than normal as a result of allegedly murky antics on the part of certain banks which have recently been referred to the Serious Fraud Office.... More