Law

IIRC, Belgium bans the anti-competitive practice of banks forcing other services to be bundled with current accounts. As I understood the law, a bank could not force you to open a savings account (for example) as a pre-condition to opening a current account. Although the reverse was always possible. That is, you ask for some kind of account that is not a current account, and the bank forces you to open a current account.

At some point “basic” accounts became a thing.. an EU mandate whereby banks cannot refuse you a bank account unless you already have an account. These basic accounts are generally shit. Trully basic, feature poor, nannied, and costly. There are no gratis basic accounts.

So recently a friend tried to open a retail current account and the bank tried to force them to open another account of some kind along with it. When my friend refused the other account, the bank said: “we can accommodate but only if the current account you open is your only current account”. This implies that the bank is only granting stand-alone current accounts if they are basic accounts. Strings are now attached to retail accounts.

This seems like an unlawful (and obviously shitty) practice. It means they are abusing the basic account mechanism to impose service bundling on their retail current accounts. This completely defeats the purpose of the anti-bundling law because there already is an obligation to open basic accounts with no extra conditions anyway. Am I missing something? It’s as if the existence of “basic” accounts has given banks the idea that they can arbitrarily refuse access to retail accounts.