Alfa-Bank and PrivatBank

I'm continuing to slowly experiment with Ukrainian banks, making purchases and transfers through them.

Alfa-Bank disappointed me even more. I've already written about the problems with CVV2 and the fact that insurance got slipped in during the registration of the card account. In situations like these, neither I nor others manage to get our bearings, so we end up taking that expensive insurance. If the insurance had been mentioned somewhere in advance, you could have prepared and declined it. They also enabled mobile phone notifications by default, which, as it turns out, cost money. The money was withdrawn after two months of use; I couldn't clearly find out which rate it's charged at — I only found the price for a single SMS on the site's search results page, but the "more details" link in the search results itself leads to a different page. I also couldn't find how to disable the mobile notifications, which means I again have to waste a ton of time talking to operators who will, on top of that, try to talk me out of disabling it — whereas at Privat this is disabled by default and is easily turned on/off through Privat24.

Besides that, Alfa-Bank takes a percentage on every currency conversion during a purchase, and for amounts over $100 it works out cheaper to use PrivatBank's virtual card, which charges a fixed $0.35 for any operation. Although maybe Privat is playing tricks and quietly skimming money for conversion, or converting at less favorable rates — I'll need to look into it. To keep comparing: an account topped up through Alfa's cash desk arrives after a few hours, while at Privat this happens almost instantly. I couldn't get proper Alfa details for an international transfer, whereas in Privat24 they're easily available through the menu. The last straw was the absence of 3-D Secure.

During the 2010 FIFA World Cup I managed to win £5 at the ShopTo online store. The amount was small and had to be spent by August. At the time I was actively playing Uncharted 2 online and wanted to buy additional multiplayer maps, so I decided to buy an instant PSN top-up code for £20 — taking the winnings into account, that would have cost £12.85. The thing is, buying instant top-up codes requires mandatory 3-D Secure verification, which the Alfa-Bank card couldn't pass. As a result, the funds on the card got blocked and the £5 I'd won disappeared from the store account, but then they came back the next day — at least here the English didn't cheat, unlike the cheats at Caters News. Why promise £200 and then ignore all the emails? I would have agreed to publish the photos for free, but why act like that? Well, that's a topic for a separate post.

In short, I was left without a PSN top-up, since I switched back from the Alfa card to my old Privat virtual card, which works fine with the new security systems. Since at ShopTo you can buy instant codes 30 days after the first payment with a newly added card, I bought God of War: Collection so the £5 I'd won wouldn't go to waste. In a month's time I'll hardly want to buy anything in the PSN Store, so I'll do without any top-ups.

Because of all this I decided to make the PrivatBank internet card my main one again. As an experiment I decided to transfer 50 UAH from Alfa to the Privat account. To do this I chose topping up the account with a Visa card in the Privat24 system. The transfer cost me 1.5% of the sum, that is 0.75 UAH. The blocking of funds on the Alfa account happened instantly, but the sum was in no hurry to show up in the Privat24 account. I did this in the evening, and only the next day, after lunch, an operator from PrivatBank called and asked me to confirm the transaction, for which I had to state my passport details and so on; I had to ask her to call back, since the passport wasn't at hand. In the end she confirmed the transaction, and after 4 banking days the funds were finally withdrawn from the Alfa-Bank account, but did not appear in the PrivatBank account. After that I reported the problem to Privat24 online support, and after half an hour of searching for the payment they told me they would look into it — I'd just have to confirm the transfer by phone again. Indeed, about 10 minutes later a PrivatBank operator called again and asked for my passport details and confirmation of the transaction, and then a few minutes after that an Alfa-Bank operator called and simply checked whether I had made the transfer. After this the 50 UAH finally appeared in the Privat account.

The experiment was "a success." Transferring a small sum between two Ukrainian banks took a week and a half, more than one phone call, and over half an hour of talking to support. I don't know what I expected — naive, probably; forgot what country I live in. The fastest way to transfer is to withdraw money from one bank's ATM and deposit it into the other's account through its cash desk. Luckily, at PrivatBank topping up an account now happens almost instantly at any time, if you discount the half-hour or hour-long queue of utility-bill payers in front of the cash desk.