Abe's New York Giants

In The Past Banking Was Considered To Be A Job For Life, But Who Would Wish To Join A Bank After The Bad Publicity Of Recent Years

With the amount of negativity surrounding the banking industry now, I regularly heave a sigh of relief that my years working for a bank terminated some time ago. Back then when I was finishing school and job hunting, the retail banks were taking on practically anyone with a handful of exam passes, and just two job applications got me an interview and a job offer.

This was decades ago, but I can still recollect the first senior manager I worked with – a crusty old man, who referred to all of the male staff simply by their surname and called all of the female staff ‘Miss’. His office was always full of cigarette smoke (these days were long before smoking was banned in the workplace) and he had a lunchtime tipple nearly every day.

Upon retirement, the new manager was a much more enlightened type, who swiftly became very popular amongst the staff, and thanks to his support, I was encouraged to work my way up through the various clerical grades, rather than remaining a cashier forever. It is to his credit that he recognised capable staff and encouraged employees to improve and there were quite a lot of us employed at the branch who benefitted from his guidance.

In the following years, I moved to work in other branches and eventually became the most knowledgable clerical officer in a big branch where I was mostly used as cover for the various assistant manager roles on any occasion when the job holder was not at the branch. Eventually, I was promoted to take the place of one of the assistant managers who was transferred elsewhere, and so took on responsibility for the counter services employees, the branch cash holdings and the security and alarm systems. (The alarms could be a real nuisance – just a little spider moving and breaking the Laser eye beam in the safe could set all the alarms off, and would mean have to turn out in the middle of the night to check the building!)

I thoroughly enjoyed managing the team, and we consistently gave good service, keeping the queues down to a minimum (not so simple when many customers all turned up together on the same bus every half an hour or so) and building up good relationships with the regulars.

Sadly, it was at about this time that the financial services industry started to move away from being a service industry. Clearly, profits were not good enough (but did any bank ever report a loss that long ago?!) and the senior management were starting to investigate new ways to make more income. So the idea was to insist that all of the grass roots branch staff sell the bank’s products to their customers. I vaguely recall a suggestion to promote other companies products on a commission basis, though it never happened. Perhaps it’s best not to talk about the notion to today’s bankers – we’ll find ourselves in a situation when we are going in to cash a cheque and leave with appointments for test driving a new car, getting a quote for a new patio and having Laser eye surgery!)

Although I didn’t have a problem with telling people about products as far as the customer service team and lending staff were concerned, but my belief was that people who came in to see the cashiers simply wanted to carry out their transaction as rapidly as possible so that they could simply get on with the other things on their schedule for the day. What they didn’t want was to be kept hanging about at the till whilst the cashier attempted to sell them a credit card or a savings account. And what the remainder of the queue didn’t want was to have to keep queuing there for too much longer whilst that was going on. My argument was that by providing a speedy and efficient experience at the tills we would encourage customers to come and talk to us when they were looking for other products, because they would know they could expect good service.

Naturally, that opinion didn’t fit with what the bank wanted and I soon decided that I had no desire to be involved in their mercenary marketing campaigns, and so I got out and moved to an organisation where I could concentrate on providing great customer care for those who came in to have new glasses manufactured or Laser eye surgery carried out.

I have kept in contact with many ex-colleagues who, for some reason, have carried on working for the bank. Unlike those high fliers whose ridiculous bonuses are a a slap in the face to the rest of the banking industry at this time, these staff toiling away in branches and local service centres don’t receive any of the profits, yet they get the majority of the face to face insults from the public. Worse still, the people who had chosen in the past to take share options as part of their salary package are now the owners of shares which have hardly any value. A couple of my acquaintance both work for a bank, and had gone for the share options to provide for their retirement. They now have almost nothing left to help top up their pension.

It seems terrible to me, that these hard up staff, who really keep the organisation going, can be treated so badly by their employer. Not for these staff the private yacht, the country estate, the designer clothes, cosmetic surgery, Laser eye treatment, a personal wine cellar and so on – these luxuries are only in the price range of those who were responsible for the problems to start with.
Ralph Vacchiano previews Giants-Cowboys