Whatever you do, don't cancel your Canadian cel phone!
There is no escape from Rogers and Telus...
When we stepped onto the plane at YVR we left behind our Canadian phone numbers. Foolishly we thought “We’ll be living in France, how could we possibly need a phone with a 604 area code?” I had even pre-purchased a Bouygues Telecom SIM card on Amazon, so I was ready.
What we didn’t anticipate is that a large swathe of Canadian business leaders have apparently never set foot outside of North America except on vacation. (That is actually a recurring theme over the last three weeks.)
Banks and credit cards are not surprisingly the biggest offenders. And it’s not the day to day stuff like monthly bills that’s the problem - they arrive just fine, either by mail or e-mail.
It’s the endless flood of two-factor identification demands - the pop-ups on your phone or computer that ask you to enter a six digit number that is being sent to you by text-message on your phone.
To your now-defunct Canadian phone number.
You’re now in a cycle where you can’t do something simple like buy car insurance because Capital One or Scotiabank won’t let you use your credit card. And you can’t just log in to change your phone number because, you guessed it, they demand a validation number to access your own account.
Which is why we’re spending an hour a day on the phone changing our contact details with various companies that honestly we no longer want to do business with.
And why we’re discovering that an awful lot of Canadian companies (or Canadian branches of American ones) absolutely refuse to accept any phone number without a North American area code. Yes, there are major corporations that refuse to accept that most of the world doesn’t have a phone number that goes (xxx) xxx-xxxx.
One workaround that was suggested was a company like Fongo, or our choice the more business oriented OpenPhone. Unlike the big evil telecoms like Bell or Telus, these guys don’t own wires and fibre-optic cables. They’re entirely on-line, and buy numbers wholesale from the major phone companies. That makes them cheaper.
Mostly they work great, and my new “Vancouver” phone number, accessed via an app on my phone, is fine for voice calls. Text messages (because some companies still refuse to send validation codes to a voice number) are another thing for some reason, and some companies refuse to send a text to this number on what are claimed to be “security” reasons.
Which at the end of the day means that for a handful of Canadian financial services companies you absolutely, positively need a Canadian cel phone to use their services.
Which is why we’re hurriedly establishing French bank accounts, and French credit cards, that will work with our French cel phone numbers.
Ultimately though this raises larger questions. How on earth does anyone without a cel phone function in Canada? And how does any company claim to be globally competitive if customers outside of North America have to purchase a Canadian phone number to do business with them?
Absolutely fascinating! You've left me pondering a lot, to be honest, and this from someone who's been in the financial industry for 20 years 🤔