Shun The Banks

Given that it appears unlikely the administration will do much to reduce the power and influence of our biggest banks I have become a big advocate of direct people’s action against them. Move your business elsewhere. That includes your credit cards everyone! This effort to change the banks by taking away our business is about the only method left available to those of us not included in the cozy Wall Street to Congress lobbying circle.

Arianna Huffington is leading this charge over at the Huffington Post and points us all to our local community banks via a website called ‘Move Your Money’.

Since local banks usually charge a lot less for the basic services most of us need this movement away from the big banks will both enrich you and send an appropriate message to them.

It is time for a change.

And as our government is too corrupt timid to make the move, we must.

While I am on the subject of the big banks: I am in complete agreement with Paul Volcker. These mega-banks offer us nothing in return for their egregious size and power. The idea that they innovate is a laughable canard. My ears are still ringing from meetings at the bank I used to work for when the best innovation on offer was to call our customers ‘guests’. Nothing is more shallow or hollow than lying to a customer. Calling someone who is clearly and definitively a customer by another name is not an innovation. Especially when that other name connotes a whole slew of alternative experiences that the bank has absolutely no intention of delivering. In our bank’s case it was a a minimal effort to paper over our strategic and infrastructural weaknesses – weaknesses that would have required far too much innovation to resolve. To my mind guests are invited, they do not simply turn up; they get free and attentive service, they are not charged for every little thing; they are treated with attentive dignity and service, not confronted by faux service and endless bureaucracy; and they are are listened to, not channeled down whichever ‘service model’ the bank deems appropriate.

The simple fact is that banking is a commodity item. They are all the same. No amount of paint – not even the brightest of reds – can overcome that basic fact.

Most of us want reliable, simple, plain, timely, and accurate service. With an emphasis on that word service. That means we are customers. The ‘customer-service provider’ model is the core of banking. The silly and outmoded Madison Avenue gloss of using the ‘guest-host’ model is an attempt to distract us from just how basic and cheap banking should be.

Apparently ‘guests’ can be charged an arm and a leg for the simple things that customers would demand for free.

Innovation? Phooey.

So take your money away from them. Don’t forget that they use your money to fund their gambling. They cross-subsidize their traders by using retail deposits and then fail to pass the profits back to the funding source – that would be you. They all get caught up in how to lavish goodies around the executive floor, rather than in lowering their costs and returning the profits to either their customers or their shareholders. Innovating the basics of banking would imply radically reducing the scope of the operations and slashing costs: exactly the opposite of the bloat so popular amongst our top bankers.

Oh well. Nothing is more ridiculous than calling a customer a guest.

But there is one great advantage to being a guest: you can leave.

So go ahead: leave.

Banking is not in the hospitality business and I am not a guest.

If you value my custom you will treat me accordingly. I am a customer.

Or was.

Thanks anyway.