Just wondering. It’s an unexpected interpretation.
Isn’t ‘the buyer has agreed to buy’ acceptance which completes the contract?
Subsequently aren’t both parties expected to abide by the contract for the sale?
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The buyer must be a certain racial group? sexual orientation?
… up to the point where it can’t - because the government decides otherwise.
Your experience must pre-date the ACL.
But yes, a seller can withdraw their offer to sell right up to the point where the actual contract of sale occurs.
Actually, it depends on the context. When I wrote that, I was - as the text makes plain - thinking of retail trading, in which a contract is rarely held to be final until money (or equivalent, such as promissary note) changes hands. In other industries, as I mentioned, other rules can apply. In some Australian jurisdictions at least, real estate transactions cannot legally complete until the money (or equivalent) has changed hands, with a written, signed contract being of little legal weight. In business-to-business transactions, however, the opposite seems usually the rule: a handshake - or even just a wink or a nod - can be sufficient to seal a deal.
This thread is, moreover, is about ‘apparitions of a cashless society’. Business-to-business transactions, traditionally relying on cheques or bank transfers, always have been cashless, at least for the past thousand years or so. Likewise real estate transfers. So the only question of current relevance really concerns retail sales - and there, usually, the rule is, cash or cash equivalent is the arbiter of completion.
Imagine, if you will: you go into a shop, having seen something of interest in its window. You pick up the item, inspect it, take it to the counter, and reach for means of payment. So, assuming that there are no warranty issues, at what point does this deal become final, beyond which the shopkeeper can legally refuse you permission to back out?
Let us consider two alternative scenarios. One: the shopkeeper is a friendly helpful sort of person… in which case, having in your case an open and trustworthy face, you may well be given permission to take the item home unpaid for to try it out for a day or two, no paperwork involved. So the cut-off point becomes one of private arrangement, and likely to be exceedingly messy if it ever came to court adjudication. By contrast, in scenario two, the shopkeeper, indifferent your facial features, asks for money on the table, and only lets the item leave the store in the company of a receipt for payment.
So no, while recognising that there are many alternatives possible by private arrangement or industry convention, I think the rule in retail is, payment completes the sale. Only then can the seller be certain of the sale; only then can the buyer walk away with the purchased item without fear of having been accused of shoplifting.
Possibly. Depending, of course, on the laws of the land at the time in question. You have a point, however. Just as the Law permits business owners to impose any of a vast array of conditions on their wannabe customers, so the Law also prohibits application of at least some conditions. By general rule, businesses are not free to break the Law, nor to require others to do so. Beyond that, however, there are few if any boundaries.
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Yes, at least some of my experience predates the ACL. But no, I had not forgotten it. Rather, I was thinking of cases where it doesn’t always apply, such as in the case of some raw materials, or some second-hand goods. Or, at least, in the sense that, provided the goods are correctly - not deceptively - labelled and described, and are sold without assertion that they might be suitable for any particular purpose, there is no implied warranty.
No mention of the increasingly guaranteed skimming of a few cents or dollars on every transaction - unless that is mandated to be bundled into the price - even though it would cost consumers one way or the other. Our banks’ profits should keep going up.
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I support the proposed legislation as it will possibly stop the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, WeChat etc forcing consumers to subscribe to their payment services to be able to make payments through their platforms. Regulating the payment services of these platforms is required because if they don’t, it may cause a monopolisation of the future payment system. Prevention now is better than trying to find a cure in the future if it happens.
I included WeChat as it is one platform where payments have a high risk of being monopolised, and potentially serve in the interests of the Chinese government. The Chinese government has introduced anti-trust legislation to try and deal with monopolies, but…
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Cash Is King
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No surprises here, but interesting summary …
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There is a dedicated topic that began with Paypal and Mastercard was added this morning 
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Nothing new here excepting some stats that appear to demonstrate governments, as usual, do not seem to have a serious policy thus reinforcing a laissez faire approach to ‘cash’.
Issues include technology and access as well as ramifications for very small transactions like the gumball machine, now only $1 per. Who is the benefactor? ‘Banks’ (taken broadly to include that entire industry) as they are able to skim more and more fees for enabling us to pay, our choice to pay or not or buy or not when there are added surcharges for the privilege.
BTW, how do perpetual nomads that might be technically homeless, and the homeless without addresses go establishing accounts?
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I think that the Gov would be quite happy to see cash transactions die out. The cash economy has been the bane of tax collection efforts for a long time, as has the ability of law enforcement to track criminal transactions.
Add to that the cost of minting coins and printing notes.
For businesses, who already have to be card transaction enabled to cater to the majority who transact that way, cash handling is an added impost. For security, for possible staff theft, for counting and reconcilliation.
As for those who prefer the life in the cash payment method; how do they replenish their cash in wallet stock without an account to draw money from?
Is it a regulatory requirement on the banking industry that the customer has an address?
For individual customers, this information includes, as a minimum requirement, their full name as well as either their residential address or date of birth. There are procedures for identifying customers who do not have conventional forms of identification in rare circumstances.
As with cash it appears any financial institution can chose to implement it as they wish so long as it satisfies the KYC criteria and is documented →
You must document the customer identification procedures you use
and the following states can not must or should.
or customers who are considered to pose a lower money laundering and terrorism financing (ML/TF) risk, you can develop and apply a flexible, risk-based approach to customer identification requirements to ensure the community can access the financial services that they need, resulting in better financial inclusion outcomes.
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That would seem to be the crux of it.
If a bank refuses to accept a customer who is homeless then the blame (in this case) is fairly and squarely on the bank, not the government.
Fairly obviously your address is not part of your identification, and even for regular customers your address could be quite ephemeral (proves nothing) but, as you say, it all comes down to
a) what the government requires, and
b) within that flexibility, if any, what the bank’s procedures specify.
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It can be. Identification is judged by a collection of attributes, ideally those that are stable and that collectively make the probability of a correct match extremely high.
The trouble is that in the real world those attributes are not always stable.
- Names can change in a variety of ways.
- DOB can be invented easily unless the validator demands to see documentation and that is not always possible for them to do or for the individual to supply.
- Physical characteristics can change, some easily and voluntarily, some over time. Such are hard to assess over the phone or web.
- Business identifiers like account number can change.
- Not everybody has the supposedly unique government-issued identifiers such as license number. If my creaky memory still serves there have been duplicated social security numbers in the USA.
- Address is changeable and may be null.
None of these attributes is by itself an immutable and unique characteristic of an individual. Given a sufficiently large collection of people there will be matches and near misses of personal attributes which perennially cause trouble. In practice organisations use a collection of attributes that they hope together will do the job where any one will not.
If you want to ban the use of address as a personal identifier you run up against the problem that the weaknesses it has are shared by other identifiers. If you eliminate enough you got nuthin.
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The 100 point rule applies in getting a bank account. Your claimed full name, and DOB needs to be validated with official documents. So, no, DOB cannot be invented easily.
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Indeed. The most common identification seems to be: you provide your drivers licence number and card number.
That is supposed to prove that you are in physical possession of the drivers licence (not that you are that person, but providing that the D/L hasn’t been reported as lost or stolen, it is a good start).
If you are not licensed to drive then the equivalent photo id card should be used.
In turn, that will provide
a) full name
b) DOB
c) current address
You are supposed to update your address associated with the D/L within 21(?) days of moving but I am pretty sure that some people don’t bother.
The full name and DOB together should be pretty solid as a unique identifier. However there is a small cohort of people for whom the DOB is unknown. I have in the past, half seriously, suggested that the gumbyment should refuse to register a birth where the full name and DOB together are not unique.
That’s true but you can only officially change your name in a way that would not invalidate the system.
The grey areas are people who have one unchanging official name but are known by one or more other names. Sometimes that is legitimate, such as might apply in an ethnically “diverse” situation. Sometimes it is of course dodgy.
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From my British ethnic heritage, all males had the same first name. So all but the oldest in the line went by one of the middle names.
I believe the Americans like to deal with this issue with using roman numerals appended to their lineage.
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