If you had a very large amount of money in your bank, say.. some thing stupid like 25 million, not that 25million is a lot, 300 million is alot, 100million is alot, any way I digress. So your at your local atm and ask for an onscreen balance, would it actual show on the screen 25million, 100million, 300million? We were talking about this today at lunch, well ok I was talking about this today at lunch and other people were forced to listen. I think its a bit of a security risk for an ATM to be allowed to show such a large figure? If the wrong type of person was able to see the screen your evening could alter some what. BTW my balance is £0.03p so I feel very safe asking for a screen balance. Any one work in a bank know the answer to this one?
Yes it would show your full balance on screen. I read about a walter mitty type guy a few tears ago that pretended he won the lottery and this is how he convinced his friends he had. He paid in a cheque from another account he had to the amount of a few million and when he took his mates to the atm and showed them the balance. Obviously the cheque never cleared, but any cheque you pay in automatically gets credited to your account (although the funds aren't available until it clears.)
No one who has that kind of money has 25 million in a single ATM accessible account - simple as that. I doubt many even have over a million in a current account, if any.
Unfortunately I don't know anyone that rich, but I do know that the vast majority of millionaires don't keep their money in banks. It's usually in stocks, assets, property etc. But I'm pretty sure if someone where to keep that much in a standard current account, the ATM would just say: PHP: Your balance: £25000000 You can withdraw: £300
It would show it, but it doesn't make sense at all for a number of reasons: 1. You have some god awful interest rates on your current account, so that money is depreciating significantly compared to alternative places to put it e.g. bonds, fixed deposits, investments 2. Security risks
Probably not, most bank accounts have limits on the amount of money you can put in them, it would show a few million at most. Plus you can't withdraw all the money from a single ATM.
It would seem that this question is a good deal of fantasy just by the very fundamentals of it, obviously no one's going down to the local bank on the corner of 5th and Main and dropping 25mil into a checking account so there's not real point going over why people shouldn't. Following with the security concerns of someone seeing your account balance, it certainly could pose a risk in a number of ways, and not just to millionaires. Man with a gun forces you to withdraw all that you can being the most obvious, but the more nefarious and not too unlikely risk is identity theft. At an ATM you're a) guaranteed to be carrying a card (since you're using it!) b) exposing your available cash and c) exposing your PIN # to a cleverly placed bystander/camera. A dedicated thief could quite practically watch ATM users and follow ones who are shown to be rich.
ofcourse the ATM will show whatever is in the account! You think a bank would actually dedicate people to writing extra lines of code (and add extra complexity to the program) just for those people who are stupid enough to let that much money sit around on a bank account, making the machine less flexible in it's use? There are ofcourse other mechanisms in place to make sure that the situation never arises, but if it should there's no need for the machine to go all OMFG UR SUPAR RICH ZOMG! or anything.
Why would anyone have that much in a checking account? If I won the lottery, I'd keep a separate account to use with a debit/atm card, with maybe $10k max in there.
Clearly no one here has used/heard of Coutts. Last year you needed at least £1m of "liquid assets" to open an account and deposit! Think that's changed now, so current accounts can (and usually did around Oxford) have more than a million.
If you have 30mil, it's not all "liquid assets". Certainly not all in banks. Your financial adviser will have prudently invested in other areas.
So not true. That's what it said on the website, sure. None the less, Coutts is a private bank and they want to keep it that way. I know a handful of people with Coutts accounts and not one of them has a million in liquid form.
Funnily enough, We had a similar (though not all THAT similar) crisis to control at my previous job (which was at a bank in the Dev department). Our sister Bank in Botswana had accepted a forex transaction where someone changed Zimbabwean dollars into Botswana Pula. The exchange rate at the time was several million Zim Dollars : 1 Pula. this led to the core banking system crashing - the columns in the database were physically not "wide" enough to cater for that many 0's. As a consequence of that, quite a few banks in Southern Africa don't accept Forex transactions from or to Zimbabwean dollars anymore.
You can be damn sure they've got fixed assets or interests that give them access to that sort of bank though
