Accessing Your Funds
It is possible for you to access your funds directly on most of the core Associated Worlds, including all worlds of the Fringe, which are serviced by the Imperial Banking and Credit Network or one of its affiliate clearing networks. Direct funds access is also possible on select other major worlds and colonies where First Commercial has branches, using our premium tangle clearing facility.
However, other worlds are affiliated with alternative clearing networks due to local regulatory or legal requirements, or remain unaffiliated. On these worlds, direct funds access is impossible, but First Commercial maintains correspondent relationships with local banks across the Worlds. If a correspondent bank exists on the world you intend to visit, we can provide you with a letter of credit which can be drawn upon there, or a bank draft with which to establish a local account.
If no correspondent bank exists, it may be possible for us to establish a chain of correspondent banks to put funds in place in advance of your visit, or to purchase locally acceptable negotiable instruments or cryp (where anonymous untraceable funds are permitted by local law) on your behalf which you can use to establish a local account.
Please note that specie, unprovenanced gemstones, and precious metals are not recommended for this purpose due to their low mass-value and volume-value.
Access Technologies
Where direct funds access is available through affiliate networks, a variety of different technologies may be required to access local financial networks rather than the Universal, including one-touch credit bars, cards encoded using magnetic stripes, holographic or other optical markings, or physical encoding, or even smart-paper or printed checks manually delivered to a central clearing house. First Commercial can provide you with any of these as required, appropriately encoded to draw upon your account.
You should be aware that while the Imperial Banking and Credit Network affiliate agreement requires adherence to its privacy, anti-fraud, minimum clearance time and fee structure constraints, many of these affiliate networks do not support advanced feature sets including smart contracts, metrics checks, immediate clearing, and referral of purchases to you or your muse for validation. As such, remote access to your funds via these networks requires disabling these security features on your First Commercial account, or setting up a separate foreign drawing account without these features.
For those unfamiliar with these technologies, a cautionary note: virtually all of these, unlike the Empire’s familiar Purchase Threshold ™ system, require that you present goods you wish to purchase to a cashier and perform the transaction explicitly. Do not simply leave with your selected goods; this will not cause them to be purchased.
Thank you for considering First Commercial’s foreign travel and retrocompatibility services.
– leaflet, First Commercial Bank of Seranth