Eyes wide shut
What I find really difficult to get my head around, is why, after years of watching the biggest and slowest car-crash that is the international banking ‘industry’, I and the rest of the smart-arses didn’t say or do anything about it.
OK, in the nature of smart-arses, we did say quite a lot – but mostly to each other. The problem of course is that we didn’t say anything to the uber-smart-arses that we elected to govern our countries.
I feel particularly bad about this, as my experience over the last twenty years has given me enough evidence to open a full public enquiry. Instead, I’ll just briefly relate some sorry tales…
I started my first business in 1991, a bijoux little design and marketing agency called Ambience. To this day, it was my most successful business, due in no small part to Nigel. He was the manager of my local Midland Bank (one of the UK’s Big Four at the time), and from our first meeting he helped and guided this enthusiastic but naive entrepreneur. Having set up my account, Nigel would offer me overdraft facilities or short term loans, as and when he deemed it prudent to do so – always ensuring that repayments were well within the scope of my business turnover. Every few weeks Nigel would call, just to ask how things were going. In this way, I was able to build Ambience into a formidable little bugger, capable of competing with much larger companies, but always safe in the knowledge that my business was fundamentaly grounded.
Little did I know that The Great Stoopid had already inveigled itself into my friendly giant, HSBC having already sucked up 15% of Midland’s shares a couple of years before. In 1992 they bought the rest… and Nigel left. Over the coming years I attempted to strike up a similar relationship with a succession of replacements, until I eventually had a relationship manager – with whom I had no relationship at all. What was fascinating about each newby was that they were all more interested in telling their woes, rather than listening to mine. And every damn one of them admitted the same thing: they hated their job. Mostly because, as ‘Peter’ said to me once, “You do understand that I’m not a bank manager don’t you? I’m actually a senior retailer, in charge of a team of people who are employed to sell you more products”.
Of course, all of these conversations were within the bank, as I had made appointments to see each one of them (4 in total – in four years). Why did I do that? Partly because, in the interests of my business, I wanted to get that relationship going again… but mostly because HSBC, in their infinite wisdom, had made it impossible for anyone to phone their own bank branch (in the early days using a call centre in Scotland, and later in Bangalore(ish)).
Since then, I have closed that business, started another one just like it (Immaculate Concept), launched the UK’s first designer goods website (Pupsnuts) and currently run the only travel company to specialise in Slovenia. And as the days and years have passed, so has my credulity at the ever-decreasing care for customers, and eventually the utterly shit-house standards employed by what are now simply money-making corporations, rather than the up-standing institutions that we used to rely on (and sometimes curse… because they were too cautious!).
Oh yes – and they’re charging us for the privilege.
Having seethed for a couple of decades, I at last have no excuse for seething in silence, as I now have a fully-functional Interweb Blathering Machine. I shall be blathering on some more about banks of all sorts – high street, merchant, investment, national – they’re all the bloody same and I’ve boody well had e-bloody-nuff.
Recent Comments