55 On Respect for Customers - Banks vs. Credit Unions.

Blog 55  Customer Respect

A complaint has reached us that your friendly old blogster is prejudiced against corporations and especially against banking corporations. 

Yes, but don’t take that personally if you are employed by a bank. Remember that a corporation is not a human being - even though it has a lot of the legal privileges of a human being. A corp is still just a helpless creature which must hire nice human beings, like you, to tend to its needs. Of course,, unlike you, it is legally exempt from being put in jail. (Its owners. too, though human beings like you, in most countries cannot be jailed for anything their corp does either.)  

Hmmmnnn. Perhaps that could be changed, but only for the controlling shareholders, I would recommend.

But this blog wants to report two little human scenes which may, or may not, be relevant to this topic. 

Story 1.  Kitchen table. Wife calls her husband. “Can you explain to me what this means?”  

(I came in after they both had spent “hours” with pencil, paper,  and calculator trying to figure it out.  What they were puzzling about was this section of a quarterly report on a pension fund held by their friendly old bank.) 

                          This Period    This Year    Since Account Opening*

I Opening value     20.897.68    21,394.34               0.00  

I

I   You added                  0.00             0.00       35,568.13

I    

I    You withdrew        364.78      1,094,32       24,632.04

I

I Amount Invested =-364.78  =-1,094.32       23,632.04

I———————————————————————————                                  I Change in Value          100.33         331.21         9,697.14

I

I Closing Value       20,633.23   20,633.23       20,633.23

I ________________________________________

* This chart shows the changes in the market value of your account, and also reflects all cash and securities added, withdrawn and transferred into or out of your account for the specified time period.

I pass it on for more accomplished bookkeepers. To them it will be patently clear what, for example, the symbol “=-“ means. We think we finally got that one, but it didn’t clarify anything else. 

So, just skip this story and get on to:

Story 2 This is a personal experience.

I was doing some business in a credit union branch. There was a lady, well-dressed and smiling, who singled out members coming away from the tellers and asked for their response to the recently revised monthly statement format.

When she asked, me I said, “Well, it seems to me that the Credit Union is getting more like a bank.”

She seemed a little taken aback by that. Pressed, I explained that bank statements are designed for the employees to understand. I might have added “not for the customers”. I explained that the “pre-improvement” version of the Credit Union statement identified each of my several accounts with a number and an account name (Savings Checking, Guaranteed Interest, etc) The new one just had seven-digit numbers for each. Easy for the employees to learn..

Skip ahead about three months on this story, when a  further redesign of the statements came out. It included the name of each account!

Now, I ask you, would you ever get that response from your own friendly old bank IF you were ever actually ASKED to comment on a re-design?  The new statements, of course, would be accompanied with multiple assurances that the new design was “easier,” “clearer,” “more convenient for our customers." ("So there. We, of course, know better than you what’s easy, clear and convenient for you.")