Why I Hate Banks
more than any other organisation
Some time ago I wrote a piece about the bad customer service in France, and more recently one about the kafkaesque horrors of bureaucracy. In fact my inspiration for both of these pieces came from my experience with banks. Banks reveal the worst of several worlds and bring out the worst in ourselves.
Of course you can hate banks for very good reasons like the fact that they are too-big-to-fail corporations that drain our public finances when they do fail. Or that they are predatory organisations that cause gigantic financial crises and bring about misery. Or that they steal from the poor to give to the rich. Those are all excellent reasons to hate banks that I have no intention of denying. But those are rather abstract reasons. My hatred comes from much more concrete day-to-day issues…
Whenever I need them—and they often make me need them, like when they block my credit card for no valid reason—it’s the worst possible experience. It is time-consuming, inefficient and alienating. I makes me feel enraged and stupid at the same time.
I am convinced that experience has gotten much worse over time. Not that people all loved their banks in the 1950s, but at least their banks had a face—a bank clerk who they knew and who knew them, a human being who was empowered to solve at least some of their problems.
The paradoxical reason why banks now offer the worst possible kind of experience is that they have gone through a partial digital and organisational transformation. So that today, they combine the worst of the old world with the worst of the new world.
The worst possible experience
Have you ever tried to get a loan? Or open a professional account? Or just change your personal account into a joint account?
First you will have to get an appointment, which is an ordeal in itself: either you call a number and wait for up to 15 minutes with a debilitating music that seems designed to make you mad (what would Vivaldi think if he knew how his music is used?), or you queue up at your local branch just to make an appointment (it’s actually my favourite option). If you are lucky enough to have already had an appointment in the past, you can send an email… Wow. Otherwise it is rarely possible to do it online.
Going online is generally a nightmare because bank websites seem to have been designed by sadistic engineers who want to punish you for a job they hate. The design is anything but seamless. It’s hard to find the information you need. There are tons of passwords. Or better yet, they have provided you with a special device to generate security codes, like HSBC Secure Key. If you lose it, you can’t go online. Good luck if you need to get a new one!
Security concerns will generally be put forward to justify the complete lack of seamlessness. It’s HORRIBLE so it must be SECURE. Maybe some people feel it’s secure when it’s particularly horrible. That could be why so few customers actually complain. ‘Security’ is why you generally can’t do everything online: they’ll have you combine telephone, computer and postal mail. (Most of the postal mail you get today is from banks). For example, you will need your computer and your telephone to make a transfer online. But if you have to change your telephone number…you will need to wait for them to send you an activation code via post! True example from the BNP:
Bank employees won’t help you
When I wrote this post about Customer service in France: a privilege for the few, not the many, I thought that my nightmarish experience with the BNP in France could not happen elsewhere. And to be fair, the French banking experience does have this extra layer of nastiness because bank employees can often be rude or arrogant.
Now that I have lived in the UK for nearly two years I can say bank employees do tend to be nicer in the UK than in France. But I found the overall experience to be only marginally better because bank employees are as inefficient and powerless as they are in France. So that led me to reflect on the reasons. There are several:
- Banks are fordist organisations. In a search for increased efficiency, they have centralised a lot of their activities, cut payroll costs, hired less qualified (often younger) employees who do not have the status and authority of their predecessors. They are not just paid less, they are also not empowered to do as much. Even when they are genuinely competent or well-intentioned (which I’m sure does happen a lot), they are not empowered to help you and are dependent on centralised services (“Let me get back to you, I need to pass it on to the central commercial team”).
- Banks are bureaucratic organisations that have become even more bureaucratic after the reorganisation of their services.
“When both employees and users (customers) experience pain, then bureaucracy turns into bureaupathology. Because the gap is increasingly wide between employees and users’ expectations on the one hand, and the bureaucratic organisational model on the other, bureaucracy is perceived as ever more “pathological”. It creates a feeling of alienation that empties work of its meaning.”
- In search for increased efficiency, a lot of banks are closing off branches so that more services are centralised in a few branches. But closing times have not changed. As a rule you can’t go to the bank after 4:30 or 5pm…
- For all these reasons, there is a higher employee turnover. As a customer, you can rarely be served by the same employee for a long period of time. That will make continuity of service trickier. You’ll often have to explain things again and again. And have that alienating feeling of being just a number served by a cog.
When digital makes it even worse
Rather than make things easier, digital tools make the whole experience worse because you can’t do it all online, the design is shitty, and you will need the post or the telephone anyway. So why not do it all via the post in that case? Paradoxically enough, if you want to beat the system (speed things up a bit) by going directly to your local branch, they will ask you to fill in a form online. As a rule, digital will not save you time, often because you have to fill in forms online AND offline.
See this article I wrote with Nicolas Colin about the future of banks and why with banks digital means hell:
In truth, very few banks have solved their IT legacy problem so far. Legacy systems, developed and implemented more than 20 years ago, have been at the heart of payments transmission, bank transaction processing and account management for more than four decades. Banks spend 80% of their IT budget on maintaining (or improving) the existing IT base, which leaves very little for strategic long-term progress. As most executives regard IT as a ‘cost’, they naturally want to ‘cut’ those costs and IT is generally ‘outsourced’ as a result. This has been a disaster for banks because consumer expectations are changing fast.
IT legacy is a very good explanation. But even when banks are really ‘modern’ and ahead of everyone else, you can be almost certain, it won’t improve your experience. For example, banks are now investing massively in bots to make customer service more efficient. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Neo-Luddite who is dead-set against all bots… but something tells me I won’t like those bots…
It’s all a question of contrasts
What makes the bank experience so bad is that it highlights strong contrasts. These contrasts make it more unbearable.
- The contrast between a world where everything is more flexible and the rigidity of a bank’s closing times;
- The contrast between the seamlessness of our favourite apps and the digital experience you get from banks;
- The contrast between the kafkaesque bureaucracy and the more evolved organisational paradigms;
- The contrast between a world where absolutely nobody uses postal services and banks;
- The contrast between a world of convenience and banks…
Basically we’re spoiled and used to being spoiled, which makes it all the harder for us to suffer inconvenience.
So that’s why I hate banks. And because they are too-big-to-fail corporations that drain our public finances when they do fail. And because they are predatory organisations that cause gigantic financial crises and bring about misery. And because they steal from the poor to give to the rich, of course.
