The linked page shows that Belgium cares just enough about preventing the forced digital transformation down our throats to pressure banks to offer an analog means of access. But Belgium is okay with banks fleecing offline consumers to the tune of €62.50 €88.10¹/yr above and beyond the normal service costs, plus a bit more to pay for printed bank statements.

One disgusting side-effect is that there is no pressure on banks to avoid enshitification of their digital services. Normally when a digital mechanism is enshitified, we can use the analog mechanism instead. And rightly so if that costs the bank more -- they should factor that into their enshitification plans. But since analog customers must pay substantially more to offset the costs, there is no incentive not to enshitify the service.

Perhaps the greatest injustice is that analog consumers get no refund for the cost of the digital infrastructure that they do not use. It’s comparable to being forced to pay for an MS Windows license on a PC that will only run linux anyway.

So the shitty choices are:

• get enshitified access at a normal price; or
• accept less convenient low-tech but non-enshitified service and pay €88.10¹+/yr more

It seems as if banks are in fact encouraged to enshitify their digital access because driving people to go analog is just an extra bonus revenue.

The original thread is here.

¹ Update: Originally posted €62.50, but that was in 2022. There is an index increasing the cost by €6.40 every year.