What does "store as binary" even mean in this instance, binary is just ones and zeros. You have to decode it somehow for it to carry meaning. Maybe you meant opaque, but even that would the prevent normal display the data to the user. The user is not going to accept a hexadecimal binary form of their name, you can't sidestep Having to deal with encodings by just not specifying one.

Also good moment to point out the you can't do a binary comparison of unicode strings, you need a unicode library that handles normalization.