Vile Banks

It's no secret based on my inside experience that I loathe banks. I was just reading this article sent in a newsletter I subscribe to and some things about it reinforced some of my ire. Let's read between the lines a little, shall we:

According to IDC Canada Ltd. data, 45 per cent of RBC's banking clientele aren't profitable to the bank. But "all of these guys can be profitable," said James Sharp, a consultant in IDC Canada's financial institution practice. "It's not (the customer's) fault, it's just that the product is not matched with the right person."

Implying that since banks no longer make their money based on the difference in interest rates between what they take on deposit and what they lend out and have been allowed to lend out more than they have on deposit, depositors are now nothing more than liabilities and "marks" to be scammed to pump up service charges in the hopes that what they end up spending on "services" exceeds what the bank has to pay out to them in interest. Those that expect to earn a return on what they have lent to the bank (i.e. deposited) have become "bad customers".

In some cases, losing money on a customer may be an inevitable part of banking, but long-range planning can turn that negative into a positive. Student loans are a net lost at first, said Sharp, but university graduates tend to be the highest earners down the line.

And since this consultant is offering the advice that banks should treat students better because of their long-term potential it backhandedly verifies that banks in fact screw students nine ways to Sunday.

Insights such as these are the reason to implement data mining or analysis tools, said Sharp. "The more granularly you can mine data, the more complex conclusions you can draw."

Meaning that rather than treat everyone fairly they would rather let their obscenely flawed systems (remember, I've worked on trying to maintain these things) spew out virtually arbitrary suggestions to the brain-dead sales-monkeys that have replaced tellers as to what "services" you might be gullible enough blow money on.

Realizing the importance of customer data, RBC recently created a diversity council to address different ethnic groups of customers. Slade said that the bank hasn't been able to turn this data to its advantage yet, but has taken ethnicity to heart at a geographic level. For example, RBC's branches in Toronto's Chinatown are equipped with both English language and Cantonese.

Abso-fucking-lutely amazing. It took a diversity council and a privacy-invading database on customer ethnicity to decide to put up Chinese signs in banks in Chinatown? And what's worse, these people are proud of the fact that all this technology figured this out for them.

If I ever even vaguely suggest that I might under the right circumstances work in the financial industry ever again for any reason, someone please hit me up the side of the head with a 2" x 4" with the word "ethics" written on the business-end, K?