Red Tape Hot Box on banks

It's easy for companies to tout their products and attributes - even when such claims have nothing to do with reality. All those marketing gurus who are responsible for such promotions seem to only want to draw the greatest amount of attention from potential customers. But marketing professionals must also consider that good marketing runs much deeper than promotional hype and empty promises. Good marketing means consistently delivering real value to customers. Our retail banks appear to fall short in this area.

Here, domestic retail banks try to promote the same attributes of top service and convenience as those in western European countries. But they usually fail to deliver crisp, straightforward service. For instance, they inform their clients out of the blue that their bank account numbers are being changed - by the addition of thirteen zeros! Why must our bank account numbers contain so many unnecessary digits? Why must a customer have to waste time writing long strings of digits onto deposit and bank transfer slips, and then check and double-check the numbers to ensure that their money doesn't end up in the wrong account?

By contrast, British retail banks provide a good example of delivering real value to customers with hardly any pretension. Whereas our banks are busy adding zero after zero to their customers' accounts, banks in the United Kingdom give every customer an eight-digit number with a six-figure sort code (the first two digits are the bank's identification number and the next four are the branch's ID). Therefore, the U.K. can accommodate 99 retail banks, each with 9,999 branches, and each serving 99,999,999 customers. That, you may think, is more than enough retail banking capacity to serve the country's 56 million citizens.

But here, I have heard of bank account numbers that are even as long as 42 digits. Often the deposit and withdrawal slips provided by the banks do not have enough squares to accommodate all these digits. And no one in our retail banks seems to give a hoot about the inconvenience this causes their customers. Perhaps they remain oblivious to the problem since they likely don't have their own accounts at the banks where they work.

Red tape bugging you? Tell Mateusz about it at matdem@poczta.onet.pl.