Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing banking in Thailand and we are discussing this in the context of the frustrations folks can have. On a personal note, I was dealing with an ATM the other day and it basically just ate my card. Then on top of that it froze up while it was supposed to be giving me my money and it took my card. It didn't give me the money. I had to go around to the bank, I am not going to go into which bank it was. To their credit they were being perfectly polite but I was not really thrilled that it was their machine that made the mistake, took my card and didn't give me my money. Now frankly after almost a decade and a half here in Thailand I have never had that problem before so once every 15 years I probably should just calm down and not be a hot head over it. Suffice it to say and I am not overly proud of it, I was pretty frustrated and I was not happy to have to be dealing with this especially on a weekday where I had other things to deal with. The reason for the video is not to complain about them and in fact they got everything sorted out about as best as they could. It was just a bad situation all around and frankly I really am thankful to the bank employees for being as professional as they were. 

The purpose of this video is it can be frustrating to deal with banking here. One thing, especially for would be expats, that is something to understand about Thailand. In a way I think I think a lot of expats think of the Government as really the only headache they are going to be dealing with in Thailand. Government here isn't always a headache but it certainly can be. Banking can be too and I would say there are two main things going on here as to why I think that is the case. One, truly a language barrier. In my situation I mean my Thai is functional enough but when you are already frustrated and then you are dealing with all this documentation and numbers, your bank account number your this, your that, that can be frustrating to be doing that in a second language no matter frankly how fluent you are. For many expats over here who have a very limited knowledge of Thai, Banking can really become frustrating. My opinion on that is well it is on you to have better Thai frankly than it is on them to be able to speak in perfect fluent English to deal with whatever you issue you have at every Bank branch in Thailand. I would say that that is a reasonable position to have on that. 

That said, the second point of this is not just a language barrier thing but I would say Banks in Thailand are far more routine driven if you will. I hesitate to say this but I think it is a good adjective, they are quite a bit more Byzantine in their documentation; in their requirements. They are almost Government like depending on the bank you are dealing with in all the documentation they need in order to deal with what I would call non-routine requests. If you just walk into a Thai Bank and you have your bank book and you have your ID documents and you want to make a deposit or a withdrawal, that is actually a pretty straightforward endeavour. You may wait in line a minute and you will go ahead and do that. But like in my case where I am dealing with an ATM card that has been eaten, I have also got to deal with the fact that the bank says I made a withdrawal when I didn't because it was in the process of giving me my money and it didn't come out of the machine. We had to rectify all of that. Again to their credit within a day they had it all sorted out but again I had to go in, sign a bunch of documents, have to pay a new fee for a new ATM card notwithstanding the fact that it was their machine that ate the ATM card. All of these things are a bit frustrating especially for a westerner when you are used to dealing with banking where you literally just walk in and everything sort of, again Thailand is customer service oriented in the banking. They are very polite, very easy to deal with it is just their procedures are far more meticulous and that is not even to say that Western Banks aren't meticulous, it is just not as smooth is the only real word I have for it. 

Folks that are over here, just be prepared especially again would-be expats. This is something that I think every expat at some point in their time in Thailand has had an issue with which is frustrations associated with banking in Thailand