Old Skool Banking - Potential Business Opportunity?

ESKIMO

middlepuss wrote: »

Great if you're a bank shareholder? Speaking as a bank shareholder I just wish you were correct!

The likes of you and me are 'menial' and 'negligable' shareholders. The factors that dictate are large shareholders, mixed capital investment funds, insurance companies, underwriters, other banks and financial institutions, conglomorates etc.

Unless your name is Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg etc you may as well just 'submit' to the 'system', tag along and 'try' to 'enjoy' the ride.

ESKIMO

Remember being a customer and consumer allbe-them still 'stakeholders' which unfortunately are not 'shareholders'. - However, there's nothing to stop you from being either and/or.

Rollinghome

ESKIMO wrote: »

Back in the day banking 'actually' used to 'mean' something. It was very personal and involved a vast amount of trust and responsibility.

Well, it was certainly different, even when I opened my first Westminster Bank, now Natwest, current account in the 1960s.

The biggest difference was how few people had bank accounts as such. One reason for that was because banks required references before they'd allow an account to be opened. There was also a charge with no free banking. They made it clear that the unwashed weren't welcome and they had to make do with a savings account with the post office or a building society so couldn't use cheques. Most people received their wages in cash that they kept at home.

The same elitist attitude extended to the staff who were almost exclusively men. For those who wanted to be humble bank clerks the banks still generally required they'd had a grammar or public-school education and 5 'O' levels. Staff who wanted to marry were required to ask permission which wasn't granted until they were at least 25. The reasoning apparently being that no one could respectably keep a wife on the wages of a bank clerk until that age. And this wasn't the era of Mary Poppins.

I first fell foul of my bank manager when I went overdrawn by a few shillings and got a letter from him pointing it out. As my wages were due to be paid into the account within a couple of days, as the manager would have known, I ignored his letter. It was followed by another a week later, after my wages had gone in, saying he was surprised not to have received a reply and would expect an immediate reply to his letters in future.

So it was a very different relationship, especially between a bank manager and a spotty youth. For one thing, the manager sitting in his office behind all that polished mahogany was exactly that; he wasn't just another salesman trying to flog me products as most are today, or at least that was my impression. In many ways the service was better from better qualified staff but it was also snobby, a bit daunting, and expensive.

So overall, I prefer things as they are now with magic like being able to instantly transfer cash using the internet 24 hours a day.

It's not as "gentlemanly" or personal as it once was but that was probably inevitable as more people became affluent enough to need a bank account. Even stockbrokers were gentlemanly then. Had I known more I suspect it may have been less gentlemanly than it seemed.

Now I know it's not gentlemanly, always read the small print, and rarely have problems. All customer-facing businesses seem more ruthless than they once were. Banking is a business like any other and provided I know that, that's fine with me.