no receipts
ATMs in Germany did not ask if I wanted a receipt. Then they simply neglected to print a receipt. I noticed one ATM did not even have a printer.. no slot to output a receipt.
Not too long ago I came across some international law regarding ATMs. One of the requirements was that ATMs provide a receipt. How is Germany getting around that law? Or did the law change?
no mention of fees
Every ATM I have encountered outside of Germany (w/the exception of 1 machine) mentions a fee for non-SEPA cards, which is then printed on the receipt. The transparency is also an obligation imposed by international law. Is it safe to assume German ATMs do not charge a fee to non-SEPA cards? Or did I just get lucky on the ATMs I encountered? I think I once used an ATM in France which did not charge a fee on a non-SEPA card.. so they do exist but I’ve found it to be quite rare before traveling to Germany.
Ideally there would be a list of ATMs somewhere that are wholly fee-free. AFAICT, it’s a crapshoot.
banknotes
I heard some German ATMs will dispense bills as big as €200. But banknote availibility is never disclosed until you do a transaction. Some ATMs only went up to €50 and some €100 but I never got a bigger note than that. What bank or ATM operator has €200?
tailgating to reach an ATM
There was a locked ATM room. I did not try my card to open the door because it was not of that bank. But luckily there was enough traffic that I could tailgate someone in to access the ATMs. That’s a bit bizarre, no? Anything wrong with tailgating? Is it setup that way to be a kind of VIP privilege to enter for just that particular bank’s customers?
I don't know of any such law or even which organization would be able to make such a law.
Fee structure is indeed extremely intransparent in most cases. Generally, I have too look up ATM fees in my online banking access and I never know them beforehand. Iiuc, your bank and the ATM-operating bank roll the dice to find out the fees they each want to charge as part of the process of handing out your cash anyway.
I don't know of ATMs dispensing €200 notes. If you're a customer of a German bank, you may be able to get €200 notes over the counter.
In any case, no store wants to receive notes above €100 because politicians and media have successfully created mental associations between those notes and money laundry/corruption/organized crime.
You can usually enter with any card. This is a measure against homeless people sleeping (and sometimes urinating) in the ATM room.
IIRC, when using German ATMs with my Swedish VISA Debit card, I had the choice whether to let my bank or the bank of the ATM do the conversion of € to SEK. For the latter, it displayed the exchange rate.
I also was once "lucky" and only found an ATM of Sparkasse, which displayed that withdrawing money would cost me an additional fee of 5,95 €.
So yes, you have full transparency over the costs and fees of the money withdrawal, yet usually only directly at the ATM.
I would say mostly true. And that much is driven by Regulation (EU) 2021/1230. If an ATM offers DCC¹, it must show the exchange rate and fees, and it must give a comparison to a non-DCC option, which must be offered (iow, there must be an opt out).
A common practice is to charge a flat transaction fee when DCC is not used, and to charge no fee when DCC is used, because the exchange rate is so terrible they are profitting hand over fist if you use DCC. But the ATMs often do not expressly state that the fee is waived in the DCC case -- they simply make no mention of the fee you would /otherwise/ pay had you not taken DCC. This is because (IMO) the ATM operator does not want users to relise that the exchange rate builds the fee into their fat margin.
I avoid DCC. But then my bank statement only shows how much was taken from my account in the account’s currency, not the ATM’s currency. The ATM receipt (which apparently does not exist in Germany) gives the local currency you pulled out. These two figures leaves you having trust them as far as the fees go. Some ATMs bundle the fee with the withdrawal amount and the drafting bank has no way of knowing what portion was for the fee. And of course neither do you, unless the machine properly informed you. But what if it didn’t? There is not enough information for the end customer to work out what the overhead was in some cases because the exchange rate applied by the account’s custodian is undisclosed.
¹ DCC: dynamic currency conversion