Going Nowhere Part II

I have to pay my son’s school fee, but the admin offices are open when I work, and closed when I am free. I don’t have a checkbook, and to send my son out the door with a thick bundle of dollars is – for everyone who is familiar with my son – not a good idea.

In Holland (and many other countries), I could send it electronically, from my account to the school’s account, in a matter of seconds. Here in Lebanon, online banking means that you can only look at your bank account over the internet, but that is all you can do; look. You can also do things like:

Define 'meaningful' to me, please.

But yesterday, when I was ‘looking’ at my virtual money, I noticed a new item in the sidebar Money Transfer. NEW!

Aha, I thought, problem solved. I’ll transfer the school fee online. And so I clicked. I got to the next window. Now who would want to transfer money to himself, I was wondering, and I clicked on the 'another account outside' link. And what do I get?

It seemed that in order to transfer money online, I’d actually have to come to the bank and get permission to do so. Well, what did I expect, that things would go that simple? And so, this morning, I got up early, went to the bank to get this money transfer business set up.

At the bank, the lady asks me;

"Do you have the bank account of the beneficiary? "
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, we need the account number of who you are going to send it to.”
“Well, I might send money to lots of different people,” I say.
"Oh, well, we’d need the accounts of the beneficiaries, which we send to the main office, and then when we get it back, you can pick up the papers, and transfer the money to those beneficiaries.”

The lady was either void of any sense of humor, or totally oblivious to the absolute ridiculousness of her request, as she said this with an absolutely straight face.

So there really is no online money transfer, if first you’d have to go in person to the bank to give the account number of the person you're going to send it to. I might as well get the money from my account (in person), and walk to the school in person, and I would get the money there faster than I would with my bank’s ‘Online Banking’ system. This is positively archaic.

Can anyone advise me of a bank in Lebanon that does have an ACTUAL online banking system, rather than the virtual system of my bank?

We are not going anywhere this way.