Nelson123

Hi
Can anyone recommend a bank comparison website to check for the best Italian bank for the below or If you have any recommendations. When living in the UK a lot of people contactless debit card transaction with the no card usage fees, is this the same in Italy? Also customer support in English would be needed as I am only starting to learn Italian.

low bank transfer fees between Italian bank (euros) to UK bank (sterling)
low or free ATM, Debit/credit card charges

Many thanks

Geordieborn

Look at Currencyfair or transferwise or others like that. Also have a look at pre loaded cards such as fairfx and/or caxton. The latter are likely still the best for ATM, but you could have both or if you still qualify a clarity card perhaps?

Plan B

The use of contact-less debit cards here in the villages in the Veneto is very limited; indeed I haven't been offered this facility once, although my bank has provided such a card. Cash is still the expected medium for payment for any smaller item; say, under 25 Euros. Debit cards are accepted everywhere, though always with the user's PIN, not contact-less.
I believe that the charges levied by banks on shopkeepers for accepting debit and credit cards is relatively high compared to the UK, which slowed their adoption until recently but still means that their usage is only for larger sums: don't try paying by card for two coffees in a bar ! On the other hand, the tax authorities are forever seeking ways of squeezing every last drop from small businesses and shopkeepers and this has been a contributing factor in the government pushing for the reduction in the use of cash and for more transactions to be made digitally or electronically so that they can be tracked.

Nelson123

Thank you for this!

Nand

We have three bank accounts in different places in Italy. We researched others.

Some were local,others Provincial and one National.

All offered and give excellent service and were very warm, pleasant and easy to work with.

All, both researched and the ones we joined, are extremely expensive.

Jake.White

I agree with the expensive part quoted above but otherwise I haven't found Italian banks to be particularly pleasant or easy to work with. I had a non resident account with Unicredit and found them to be self serving, unhelpful in the extreme and of the attitude that I had an account with them solely for their benefit rather than for my own. They consistently ignored all attempted communications from me by email or letter and the only way I could ever get them to engage was to go in to the branch and deal with them on a personal level. On one occasion despite having been with them for several years they froze my account and demanded I present my passport to them to re-verify that I really was who I said I was.

Their charges for running the account and making transactions became so ludicrously high that on two occasions they had helped themselves to so much money out of my account that there wasn't enough left in it to pay my electricity bill and ENEL cancelled the direct debit and came round to my house to cut me off - the bank never informed me that there was too little money left after them seeing to their all important fees and also never informed me that the direct debit had failed because of this on two consecutive occasions and I only found out when the ENEL man came knocking on my door with tools in hand.

I could of course have fed the account with greater amounts of cash than I did to keep things going as it had been my policy to only put in what I thought I would need to pay the bills, but feeding a great fat financial parasite for what amounts to a piss poor service shouldn't really be the point should it.

Having an account with Unicredit was like having a great fat leech sitting on my shoulder bleeding me dry of Euros and when I finally decided enough was enough and went to close the account I went along to my local branch only to be told that the only way I could close it was to go in person to the branch where the account was held and do it there. Fortunately that wasn't too far away and meant only about half a day wasted in driving to and fro, signing a small mountain of documents in quadruplicate, and being charged a final hefty sum for the privilege of getting rid of them, but imagine if I had been living in Puglia with the account having initially been opened in Milan..!

Maybe things are a bit different if you're resident in Italy and have a resident account but for non residents like me it's all just a big rip off, so if you're also non resident my advice is to just be careful and ask yourself if you really need that account, and certainly don't expect the kind of customer service we enjoy and take for granted here in the UK, because you wont get it.

I would agree with Geordies suggestion re the clarity card. I use one myself when I'm over there and pay it off in full every month to get the best from it. I also now pay ENEL via Paypal which once you have it set up on your system is dead easy, perfectly secure, and lets you keep track of what's going on because you can see your bill right there in front of you on ENELs website. It used to be the case that you couldn't do that - at least I couldn't and would spend hours going round in circles trying to navigate what used to be a clunky and useless website - and had to rely on some dodgy self serving bankers who would happily let you down if it suited them, but ENELs website is these days a whole lot more user friendly and much easier to navigate than it used to be and I imagine other Italian websites will also have been similarly dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world compared to what they were 10 or 15 years ago.

Stuff the banks if you don't really need them is what I say.

philat98

That great fat leech has some grasping cousins living at Tim and Wind.

Plan B

Darned right! I switched from Wind to illiad a year ago: the reception is the same as before (i.e. so so) because it piggy-backs on the Wind antenna but at least it's cheaper. Bit of a pain initially getting the payments sorted out but all running smoothly for now.

Geordieborn

Yep, and still cheap at €7.99/mth , including 50gb data!

Jake.White

That's pretty good. I'm paying £11 a month with vodafone for a sim only deal and only 5gb data.

Nand

This honestly is a refreshing thread about Italy.

I felt as if I were a Jersey dairy cow, there to be milked at every turn.

I won't bore anyone with all the tales I could tell.
The ongoing and continuing lies about fast internet became the thing that ended the Italian Nightmare for us.
And I was Resident for several years, it didn't change a thing.

Jake.White

Lol, you sound like you had a right old time of it there. I also have a shed full of anecdotes, some good and some bad, gathered over my 15 years of owning a property over there and many of which I've already related on other discussions here. The trouble I find is that people who have never experienced the reality of life in Italy tend to view the whole thing as La Dolce Vita through rose tinted sunglasses, where every part of life there is fluffy and delightful and everyone wants to be your lovely friend, and I find that when I start to spell out some of the bad things which can happen to you as a gullible foreigner a lot of people simply don't believe me and think I'm just making it all up.

Life in Italy isn't all bad of course and I really do enjoy the time I get to spend in my big garden there, and the comparatively people free experience of living in the Italian countryside and driving along on refreshingly quiet roads, but in almost everything I try to do there and every project I try to get off the ground I seem to find it to be 10 times as hard as it is here at home, and not just because of the language barrier, and I totally get the jersey cow concept you mention above as I've so often felt like one myself.

I'd love to hear some of your tales btw, and I'm sure lots of the others would too.

Geordieborn

Trouble I find is that many compare Italy with UK eyes! No matter what problems there are there, it is a superb place to live - unless of course you are obsessed with the UK way of life. When things like this come up I always think of friends we have living in Italy who party with the Italians they bought from. At such a gathering of the family they raised the subject of their mobile contract. Well it was the best laugh of the night for the Italians – “what, no Italian has a mobile contract” ! I have no idea how true this is, but I’m willing to bet it is very true.

AlexBrazillon

The choice of a bank in Italy should be based on the basic needs of the client: if you need a large European bank, there is a large selection of branches and subsidiary banks in Europe, that is, the only option is UniCredit. A similar large bank, but more with Italian operations - Intesa Sanpaolo.