WHISTLEBLOWER - Have the banks been lying to us?

[elsinore]

For Barclays read Any High St Bank plc.

 

I visited a Natwest branch yesterday, to ask for my debit card to be unlocked (old git moment last week at a cashpoint).

 

When the clerk had done the necessary he offered my card back to me. As I took the card he held on to his end of it and said that he couldn’t help noticing that I had a large sum of money reposing in the account and wouldn’t I like to take advantage of a Cash ISA? I told him it was indeed one of the options that I was considering. His eyes lit up like lights in a pinball machine. Kerching! Sale! Bonus! Whoopee! Quick as a flash, with one hand, he produced an application form and a pen! I declined, saying that I had not yet made a decision, as there were other factors involved. ‘Well, just some of it then, you can always draw it out, it’s instant access’ He was polite, well-dressed, but insistent. He tried very hard to convince me to sign up there and then, without knowing anything at all about me or my circumstances. In the end, I leaned over the desk and quietly told him that almost all the money in the account was a refund of unlawful charges from Lloyds TSB and that I and only I would decide how and when it was to be utilised. He let go of the card. I think the irony was lost on him at that moment.

 

I’m sure he is a very nice chap, good son-in-law potential and all that, but seriously misguided. You can replicate him in any bank front office, anywhere in the country. He has been taught and encouraged to sell the bank’s ‘products’ and he is managed by someone with the same purpose. That manager is, in turn, overseen by yet another, more senior manager, who also works to targets. Keep going, up the line, until you reach the CEO who will have you believe that everything in the garden is rosy and that such problems as were exposed on Whistleblower are mere specks of dust on the lapel of corporate profitability..

 

Els