Roundabout
Don't Bank On It
By KATHARINE WHITE HORN
SOME people spend Bank Holidays writing letters, and write them on no other day. Some spend them complaining about the rain, or wondering what is a cameleopard, or devising a Private Member's Bill to force manufacturers of all
narrow bottles to make their labels heatproof, so that tea which is stirred with them shall not taste of plastic. A Bank
Holiday, too, is as good a time as any for brood-
ing about banks—safe, too, since it is the one day on which one runs no risk of losing one's temper, rushing out and grabbing the manager by his lapels and abusing him until his ears spin.
My most recent, though not my main, grievance against banks is their new system of listing cheques by numbers only on the state- ment of account. This has been presented to us as a piece of 'modernisation'; it is in fact mechanisation, which may make life easier for bank clerks, but makes it a good deal more difficult for us. Part of a bank's function, after all, is to give a relatively easy way of checking what money has gone in and out: except for the final total, whose accuracy it now becomes much harder to check, the statement of account has become virtually useless without elaborate reference to check stubs and independent records kept of all money paid in. My bank clerk says the bank feels it can no longer afford to do its clients' bookkeeping for them—forgetting that it is for precisely this double check on one's financial life that one resorts to banks at all.
One might be more inclined to accept such a piece of mechanisation if there were the slightest signs of banks appreciating in other was that they are no longer living in the nine- teenth century. They say that they are trying to attract more `ordinary' people to start bank ac- counts; and one might suppose that they would therefore consider how they could make the banks open at times when ordinary people could go. Not a bit of it. Whenever it is suggested that banks should open earlier and stay open longer, there is always a howl of execration from bank clerks and their wives who say (rightly, for all I know) that they are overworked as it is, and that there is a great deal of work that has to be done before the banks open and after they shut. Suggest that it is madness for a bank to be half- staffed during the lunch-hour—the one time when most ordinary people can go—and they ask aggrievedly if we want them to eat their lunches at ten in the morning. Of course we don't; but this argument is absurd; obviously, if a bank wants to stay open longer and be better staffed, it would have to employ more people and make their hours more flexible. Truck Acts or no Truck Acts, the banks aren't going to get more people into their net when the net is so often closed. If they want a piece of modernisation that will actually benefit us, what about an all- night bank in every town, as we have an all-night post office and an all-night chemist?
It seems to me absurd, too, that any dress shop will take my cheque on the flimsiest identi- fication, or even on none; whereas I cannot get money out of a branch of my own bank without lengthy telephoning. The bank could surely issue some sort of identification card—they, after all, have your address and your reputation in their hands as the shops have not. The one thing about British banks that I wholly applaud is the habit of having just one man to deal with in cashing a cheque, instead of having to queue once at the counter and once at the caisse, as you do abroad; I suppose it is only a matter of time before this, too, is ironed out in the interests of modernisation rather than of the customer.
Of course, a great deal of the trouble lies in the fact that the banks do not seem to look on us as customers at all, but as tiresome children who have to be protected from access to their own pocket-money. This is nowhere more evident than in their attitude to overdrafts. They know and we know that banks make a healthy profit out of overdrafts; they know, too, that the timid young person who wants twenty pounds till the end of the month is a lot less likely to renege on them than the businessman who cons them out of £500; yet the smaller the amount, the
more overbearing the magisterial condescension with which the overdraft is granted.
I once had a most exhilarating row with a bank—having moved to the London branch of the country bank where I had sheltered for years in the genial shadow of my father's overdraft. The first time I asked for a little more, I was made to feel like Oliver Twist; I was told that I could have it if I was a very good girl. It set my teeth on edge, but I got the cash; the ro. vv came later. I was trying to cash a cheque which carried a male signature; instead of ringing UP his bank to see if he was bankrupt or not, or simply telling me that to cash it was against. the rules, they asked me what the cheque was for' When I said that was hardly their business, theY said that if I wanted them to cash it, they had a right to know. At that point I removed the cheque and closed the account, with a blistering letter from me and a grovelling one from the manager; and I have felt better ever since. One is brought up with the feeling that one tn°4 never talk back to a bank; and it is always 3 tonic to remember that one can.
If people were more in the habit of talking back, it is scarcely possible they would put UP with a system which allows almost nobodY t° predict what their bank charges will be; that gives one man an overdraft and denies another; a system which bounces a cheque ooe week and honours it the next. I cannot help feel- ing that if the banks want to offer an old-world, middle-class personal service, they should go .(1g offering it; and that if they are going to bring themselves up to date, they might start out bYd becoming more predictable in their attitudes adaptable in their services. They can't have both ways; and maybe sooner or later they vo` realise it. But I wouldn't bank on it, myself.
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