I hear that this has rapidly changed with Covid, and the Germans may finally be seeing the light with cashless!
Perhaps the article I read exaggerated the phenomenon though.
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Wouldn’t people just buy the cash when they go abroad to one of these countries, just like they do now?
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That might be difficult for countries such as Sweden, which is I believe actively heading toward a completely cashless society.
Australia I believe, they find it incredibly odd if you don’t ‘Tap and Go’.
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It doesn’t work with either her or my name, or with the name that the account identifies itself when sending payments (which is a combination of both our names).
I suspect that it wants a combination of our both our names, but as my OH’s name is silly long it needs to be abbreviated somewhere. But Barcalys can’t/won’t tell us how, so we can’t get it to work. 
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Yes Neil, slight mistake on my part, I should have said ‘Tap and Pay’
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I totally agree. In the past I would’ve been frustrated if I had received money as a cheque, since it meant a trip to the bank, but now that I try to never use cash (for the range of reasons listed in the Going Cashless thread), I now find cheque preferable for receiving money - aside from bank transfer of course. With cash, I have to visit my local Post Office and deposit it into my Starling account, whereas I can get rid of a cheque from the comfort of my own home.
I think before cheque imaging came along, cheques were seen as super dated and inconvenient, and something that we should be working towards eliminating from the banking system, but now I think they’re pretty perfect for those occasions when a bank transfer isn’t possible or when you want to give someone a physical token instead of just a digital transfer (some of my relatives like to send money in a card, and I think that’s a situation where cheques would be a great alternative).
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By 2050 banks won’t exist…it will all be crypto and we’ll be driving round in Teslas paid for in dogecoin or ethereum (depending on how Elon feels that week).
/nelliep ducks for cover!
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By 2050, If I’ve not already joined the approximately 110 billion human beings that will have by then passed away before me since homo sapians first inhabited the Earth, I will have already handed in my driving licence and my whatever remains of my financial life, will be under the control of my appointed Power of Attorney. I’ll be sat there listening to Aha! and Dua Lipa in some old folks home using coins as tiddlywinks and having hearty laughs with other residents about when we used to use cash.
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Cryogenics for us oldies, surely?
God no! The thought of being frozen like a fish finger and woken up in 500 years time, I have no interest in 
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Sounds like you may be in a fairly specific situation of both joint account and long name, which must be relatively rare.
I’m not dismissing the problem, but I doubt that others have issues to the same extent. The bank also should, subject to you passing the relevant security checks, tell you what name should be used.
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Dua Lipa’s Hallucinate, the perfect song for when you are clearly losing your faculties!
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For joint accounts surely the sensible thing to do would be for banks to allow either account holders’ names? Seems much easier than some kind of amalgamation, considering confirmation of payee uses a Firstname Lastname format.
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it would be - but since when does “sensible” play into these sort of things …
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I don’t guffaw often…but today? 
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I’d edit that second word in the title too, but, trust levels
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Card acceptance has changed massively in Germany over the past 3 years. Many stores used to only accept EC-kart (a local Maestro) and V-Pay. Recently everywhere tends to accept regular Visa and Mastercard. American Express is quite widely accepted now too. Indigienous folk still use EC or V-Pay as that’s what many local banks issue by default. N26 issue Mastercard debit, and (optionally) Maestro.
I visit regularly as my Dad lives there so it’s noticable how much easier it has become recently. I do have a german N26 account because of Maestro. But these past two years I haven’t needed it and now it’s sitting empty. Curiously, N26 gave me a 500-euro overdraft despite my registered address being in the UK and no regular money going in.
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Interesting! How easy was it to open this using a German address?
Also, did you ever experience occasions where even your N26 Maestro didn’t work? From my understanding, it is just a general Maestro even in Germany, so doesn’t support EC.
From my understanding, local banks usually issue Girocard debit cards (which are sometimes called EC-Karte) and those are something you can never get outside of Germany, so shops accepting only those would mean tourists would always have to use cash.
I read a while ago that this was a problem, but now with the rollout of Apple Pay in Germany, increasing adoption of Visa and Mastercard (like with N26) and less use of cash in general, I wonder if that might have changed?
That has been my problem for years. I used to work in a supermarket in Germany for quite a while, so got friendly with the owner. When I went back there for shopping a few years back, I was really surprised that they wouldn’t accept any of my cards. Spoke to the owner, and apparently it wasn’t even that it’s too expensive or anything. There just wasn’t any demand, and it wasn’t part of the standard package, so why bother.
That was about 5 years ago, though, so things might have changed now (boy, it’s been ages since I last was in Germany).
The Swedish system doesn’t work if you don’t have a domestic bank account.