The 𝗔𝗧𝗠 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 in Panama 🇵🇦!

One of the things you get used to in Finland is the technology just works well enough that you can trust it, most of the time, at least.

This Tuesday, I borrowed money from my father-in-law to pay a deposit for a new rental apartment since international transactions take some time.

We went to deposit the money in an ATM.

Mid-transaction, the ATM raised a "Transaction Exception," opened the money hatch, and returned less than half the cash we put in.

The ATM just ate $660 without an explanation of what happened.

This particular ATM was at the bank, so we knew where to go try to fix the situation. However, the bank personnel couldn't explain what happened other than "there was some outage."

My engineer brain started asking how they could run a banking business without having failsafes for things like this, especially since outages seem to be more common here than rare occurrences. Again, no answers.

They created an issue to resolve the situation and told us to wait a few days to recover the cash.

So here I was without the money to pay the deposit.

The best part of this was that just a moment before, I had asked them for instructions on which BIC/SWIFT code I could use for the international transactions.

They gave me the info of three intermediary banks with their respective codes and told me that I had to do it through them.

I checked my online banking app and found no way to use intermediaries through it. Frustrated about this, I did a test transaction with a small amount and used the bank's own BIC/SWIFT, which I could find online, just to see if it would work.

And it did.

The local bank lost my trust within an hour of my first interaction with them since opening my account.

Two days later, the lost money found its way to my checking account, but the trust was lost.