To Commissioner McCreevy, European Union.


Dear Sire,
I was making a money transfer from Polish bank (PKO BP) to British Bank HSBC.

It was a horrendously difficult task. I only was having my sort code and account number in Britain, and wanted to add funds from my account in Poland.

Luckily the person at the call center gave me the iban number for my account in britain.

But the Polish website of the pkobp.pl bank (Poland's largest, I suppose) wanted also this SWIFT number. What for? Is it not enough to give one IBAN number? This swift code was so difficult to get. Luckily I found it finnaly, ant the machine "ate" it.

I beleieve to be quite a smart person. But how an uneducated person could cope with such a difficult system? Besides, when searching ovewr Internet I found a complaint of Polish citizens that transfered fund by banks from Britain to Poland. Banks charged them 40 quid (circa 55 euro) , 20 quid each. Nicely. It is just horrendous ripping-off people.

And You wonder that people send money to Poland in postal letters. I remember funny jokes in Britain (something like "why the letters to Poland are so thick?"). There was lots of sad stories of people whose money got stolen by postmen. No wonder- if most of the letters were full of it.