I tried to use Dwolla and it it was absurd. I set my account up fine. My friend sent me $1200 for a ski lease. I withdrew it and it appeared to work. Days later when the money did not appear in my bank account, I checked back and it said, "processing withdrawl" (or something like that.) It said that for many days before I contacted them. They said I needed to scan my drivers license and send it to them. The only account that has a copy of my DL is the DMV. No other company in capitalism asks for a scanned DL except for (maybe?) my employer. They had my social for crying out loud! And their UI was so broken that it wasn't clear that anything was wrong. At that point I refused to deal with them and kicked the money back to my friend and had him go through paypal. To top it off, they won't delete my personal details from their servers.
When did you open those accounts? "Know Your Customer" (which basically translates to SSN, government-issued photo ID, and blacklist checks) has been required of all US banks since 2003 thanks to the 2001 PATRIOT Act.
When I was 15, I was able to open a checking account by mail with no ID. Today, every bank I use lists government-issued photo ID as a requirement right on the website before you can start applying.
I work at a major online bank in the US. We have strong "Know Your Customer" policies as required by the Patriot Act, but they do not, in the normal course of business, require a copy of an ID. The Patriot Act does not require IDs, it requires processes to identify the customer, and different banks approach that differently.
No, ING Direct USA was always a United States bank regulated by US regulators, it just happened to be owned by a Dutch parent company (and thus ALSO subject to THEIR regulators in some ways). Capital One since taking over and rebranding as "Capital One 360" has not made any major changes to the Know Your Customer process or the application process. As I explained before, the legal requirement is to identify the customer, and there are a variety of different ways to do this which are acceptable to regulators.
A drivers license is a higher trust level document, as your driver ID and document number can be tied to an actual, trusted physical interaction, and it links you to a physical location.
SSNs are horrible IDs for a variety of reasons. Thousands or millions of Americans do not have valid SSNs or use EINs for personal IDE identification.
