Blunderbuss banks . • •
ONE of our senior company chairmen shows me a letter from his bank. 'Dear Customer', this inquires, 'have you ever thought of starting up your own business?' There are times, and this is one, when the banks baffle me. They have two advan- tages which ought to make them unbeat- able. First, they know more about their customers than anyone else can — not just who they are but how they live. Salary cheques, mortgages, dividends, standing orders, regular (and irregular) payments, cash crises — the whole story is there, and the old-style bank manager could read it like a serial. Secondly, they are spending fortunes (L550 million this year at Barc- lays) on electronic systems to put this information at their fingers' ends. Then they contrive to let these advantages cancel each other out. Between old style and new systems, the banks get their lines tangled. The computer knows less than the manager did, and airily offers thousands of pounds , of plastic credit to a young customer whose £50 cheque guarantee card from the local branch has had to be grounded. Just now the banks are wrangling their way through draft after draft of a voluntary code of conduct, to cover the use they make of confidential information — always assuming they know hcrw to. The Chancel- lor warns them that if they don't volunteer he will conscript them into line. People have been most upset, he says, by all these pushy mailing shots. He himself has been upset, of course, by the banks' inconvenient propensity to lend money to people — though most of it has gone on mortgages, which his party is supposed to favour. I should be more upset to find him trying to reintroduce credit controls through the back door in the supposed interests of good taste. Even so, the banks would have to blame themselves. One of the people they have upset — it is an open secret — is a senior company director who lives next door to the Chancellor and is constantly peppered with off-target mailing shots from the banks. I wonder whether they have yet asked Dennis Thatcher is he has thought of starting up his own business
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