Red Tape Hot Box on bank bureaucracy
Virtually everyone agrees that private companies work better and are much more efficient than those run by the state. The stories that appear in this column deal mainly with the latter, which tends to support this view. State-run means long queues, unpleasant clerks and paperwork which seems to have been created solely to make our lives harder. The private sector makes us think of exactly the opposite: friendly staff with a decent knowledge of foreign languages, customer satisfaction being the priority, and so on. However, a German reader sent us a letter which proves that in Poland this is not always the case - even at a major foreign bank.
Our reader is a diplomat. This means that he doesn't have a karta stałego pobytu (residency card). Instead, he has a special legitymacja issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Employees of one bank (which will remain nameless) refused to recognize it, and told him that he would have to bring his passport every time he visited the bank(!). After being sent from one employee to another, he was finally told that his legitymacja would be accepted. But he had to sign a waiver declaring that he would not have any claims against the bank resulting from the use of his identity document instead of the passport. As our reader writes, this worked fine until he went to a different branch...
A few weeks ago he wanted to pay his phone bill at one of the bank's many branches. The telephone is registered in a company's name. As the employee told him, Polish banking law prohibits transferring funds from a natural person's account in order to pay an invoice issued in a company's name. Our reader was told to pay the invoice at the nearest post office. Since paying the bill every month at his own branch never caused any problems, he did not relent. By now, all three customer reps on duty at the bank had abandoned their desks to help their colleague solve this problem. After speaking with the head office, as well as with the bank's legal adviser, one of the employees informed our reader that it was impossible to comply with his request.
He got a bit upset and decided to call the head office and speak with the employee who had previously helped him overcome some initial difficulties at the bank. He explained the problem and passed the phone to the employee who was serving him. After a few minutes, our reader was able to pay his phone bill, but only after wasting 45 minutes in the branch for this simple transaction.
Our reader writes: "This is a privately owned, foreign bank, but their smartly dressed staff - most of whom even speak reasonable English - is apparently not concerned with customer satisfaction, but only with avoidance of mistakes and responsibility." Doesn't it sound like a state-run office? All I can say is, let's hope that there are many exceptions to prove this rule.
