[BruiseLee]

I lost access to my bank account in UK because my token ran out of battery. The only way to fix this is to fly to London and show up in person. This is a pain because I can't even figure out my account balance - and this is something I must report for U.S. taxes.

[Macha]

There's a youtuber/streamer I sometimes watch, an American living in Ukraine until the war. She fled to Portugal when the invasion started, and paid for an item with her credit card enroute. This triggered an automated lockout from the card suddenly being used abroad.

The bank's bureaucracy advised her to unlock it she needed to go in person to her home branch in Ukraine (which has a decent chance of being a pile of rubble given her neighbourhood was hit by shelling in the time after she left).

[lowercased]

Similar thing happened here to my wife (US, bank in UK). "We don't send those out any more, just use your phone". But... a) my wife didn't have a phone at the time (not one capable of running their only supported version of their app) and ... one of the signup questions was asking about bank balance (or... recent transactions, etc) - but... there's been no recent transactions and we don't know the balance because... we can't log in.

This was... ~ 6-7 months ago. I'm unsure what options are left, or... if my wife sorted it out (she did recently get a newer iphone, and that may have been able to get it sorted).

[ratww]

Similar experience here, but when using the mobile app.

My bank in my country of origin also used to use a token, but they changed to a "token app" in the phone about 10 years ago.

However to authorise this app I had to use an ATM. Since this bank only has ATMs in one country, this means I couldn't lose or trade my phone.

After I moved I kept a super old iPhone in a drawer only for this bank, but at some point the app kept threatening me to upgrade, otherwise it would stop working in the next version. But I couldn't upgrade because my decade-old phone was too old for the new version.

Since even blocking my debit card via phone required using the "token app" (something incomprehensible to me), it became too risky to keep this account.

At this point I had no recourse but to close the account.

[userabchn]

The Bank of America app only lets you install it if your Google (or presumably Apple) account country is set as America. I am abroad but needed to use the app. I had to create a VPN on an American cloud instance and connect my phone to it so that I could set my country to America and install the app.

[kingcharles]

I had similar problems. For one, the LloydsTSB banking app is not available outside the UK App Store, so I had to keep a second iPhone with a UK number while living in the USA just so I could have the app installed.