(This story is best read at the 50odd website. Because there’s a 30 second video in it: https://www.50odd.co.uk/banks/).
Banks don’t get it.
Either from the perspective of What Banks Should Be Doing.
Or How Banks Talk About What They Should Be Doing.
And that is why.
(And I am generalising of course).
Why I think that banks are arrogant, detached, uncaring, ignorant and deeply shitty organisations.
What Banks Should Be Doing.
Banks should look after people.
And banks should look after economies.
Because people and economies are interdependent.
But instead.
In the same week that the base rate was dropped.
On the first day of lockdown in 2020.
Because of Covid-19.
In the United Kingdom.
We read about banks doing this:
“HSBC raised its arranged and unarranged overdraft charges to 39.9 per cent on March 14, up from 9.9 per cent for premium customers’ arranged overdrafts and 19.9 per cent for standard overdrafts.
First Direct and M&S Bank increased overdraft fees to 39.9 per cent.
Halifax and Lloyds are due to lift rates to the same figure at the start of next month. Nationwide and Natwest already charge 39.9 per cent and 39.5 per cent respectively.
This.
Is not what banks should be doing.
How Banks Talk About What They Should Be Doing.
And so to my second point.
How Banks Talk About What They Should Be Doing.
Let’s take a quick look at the current 30 seconds Lloyds TV advert.
This is Lloyds.
A bank.
Saying they’re a bank.
And that’s it.
This is a bank running an actual ad.
Costing millions of pounds of their customer’s money.
To tell their customers they are focused on delivering on the one first principle that all banks should be doing.
Stopping the money you ask them to look after.
From disappearing.
It’s just shit.
Other Businesses.
Let’s imagine other businesses adopted the same strategy.
Let’s imagine that restaurants did the same.
Come to our Restaurant.
We cook food.
Or a jumper company.
Buy our jumpers.
You can wear them.
Or a furniture company,
Buy our chairs.
You can.
Err.
Sit in them.
Utter fucking rubbish.
Banks.
Banks have the opportunity to deliver positively on much higher order needs and wants.
Societal change could be addressed.
If they rethought how they remunerate people internally.
How much deserves they hoard.
How much they spend on refurbishing largely empty premises.
How they set themselves up as brands.
And how they build value and values into their actual reason for being.
But banks don’t get it.
Either from the perspective of What Banks Should Be Doing.
Or How Banks Talk About What They Should Be Doing.
And that is why.
(And I am generalising of course).
Why I think that banks are arrogant, detached, uncaring, ignorant and deeply shitty organisations.
…
4 Comments
Michael Owen, I’ve been researching this for some time and you are SPOT ON!
The banks are dinosaurs – quietly, unreconstructed medieval overlords who believe that’ might is right’ – and confers divine rights too.
They’re dinosaurs not because of their so-called Legacy Systems or because they have not adapted so are unfit for a digital age, but because to this day they carry the same pre-Renaissance pre-Enlightenment DNA.
They are an brutal, arrogant, entitled, elite – just like the ruling classes of the day they were first formed in 1397. Even their PR does not trouble to deny this, as you say.
One way or another, and quite quickly now, we are about to get Digital Money and even the BIS (the Central Bank’s Central Bank) admit they are then no longer needed. They wont see it that way of course.
But this is the first chance in over 600 years to once, and for all, remove this predatory virus from the heart of our societies around the world.
When Bretton Woods was convened by Churchill et al to design the post WWII reconstruction there was only one rule: No banks!
Clearly they crept back in. This time – to borrow some recent words from Richard Curtis (of Blackadder fame) we must “Build Back Better!”.
I wonder if we will?
Barry
Yukky, grabby, short term thinking Barry.
I’m with you.
I suppose the bit I see red over most os their advertising.
It’s just bullshit.
And we’re funding it.
Thank you for taking the time to comment.
M.
I wonder what the supposedly status quo challenging newcomers are doing? I don’t know, I haven’t looked, but there is a chance for them to create real change here. Where are you Metro Bank, Starling Bank, Atom, Tandem, Revolut and Monzo. the time to step up is now.
Great point, that.
M.