&gt; They make it easy to accidentally overdraw and then charge you a massive fee. Don&#x27;t pay the fee in time and you get another one because the fee kept you in overdraft.<p>France used to be famous for that. When I was a kid (before internet to check you account), there were TV programmes about people having to pay tens of thousands of French Francs because they forgot about an account and the account charge put them a few francs in negative balance and it snowballed quickly over a few years. Not quite sure how it is today in France.<p>&gt; You need a letter from your employer so you can&#x27;t open an account if you&#x27;re unemployed. Even with that, you have to wait a couple of weeks for an appointment to talk to somebody before they open your account.<p>I had to go through that to open an account in Luxembourg. Never could open an account in Spain for that reason but you don&#x27;t really need one if you have an EUR account somewhere else in the EU. Spain has a wonderful collection of massive charges on everything you would think is free like getting money out of the cash machine, transferring money electronically or even receiving money electronically.<p>At least in the UK, you can get a free account. Used to be not so easy in Belgium (Postoffice offered a limited free banking, so that was the excuse for all the other banks for charging) and they also had their own set of shenanigans.<p>I have noticed things getting better with internet banking. However, some things have gotten much worse. Loan and Mortgage are no longer underwritten by the bank itself, so it does not matter if you know your banker and have been banking 20 years with the same bank - you will need to go through the exact same process as a guy from the street - worse, instead of just using your credit score as other bank would, they will use those 20 years history to give you a worse rate if they can.