“Banking” on banks! Whew!

I wonder what has become of public sector banks. I was actually astonished by the number of people opting for private banks these days; banks like HDFC, ICICI etc. spring to mind. There were a few reasons which made me tear my hair as to why this was happening. Firstly these private banks have very complicated rules and regulations governing your transactions and bank accounts. Some even have limits one the number of ATM withdrawals you can do per month before you actually end up paying for them. I don’t think its reasonable for a common man to grasp all these rules and not risk losing his hard earned money inadvertently to the bank. Secondly, the kind of minimum balances required by some of these banks border on the ridiculous. I mean, honestly, minimum balances are the amounts that you never take out of a bank account. So you would want it to be as minimum as possible. The bank is meant to keep your money tenporarily and you’d be better of not donating money at rates of about 2% for this cause. Thirdly, and most importantly, have our public sector banks- nationalized government regulated supposedly “safe” banks- become just not good enough? One visit to one of the public sector banks confirmed the reason to me in striking clarity.

At this stage I have to be honest and tell you that I’m no expert in banking. On the contrary, I’m what they call a “noob” to banking. But it is to the noobs that the fallacies of a system are most obvious. Especially systems which are as old as the banking system. So when I stepped into the bank* with the simple task of obtaining a DD to pay my college fees, I thought it was just a simple task. Note that I had got DDs from banks before and I have a fair idea on the procedure and the amount of time it normally takes. As I moved to where the forms were “supposed to” be kept, there evidently was none. It was kept somewhere hidden behind a pillar on the main desk. Is wastage of couple of small sheets of paper so great a consideration for banks that they keep it well hidden? I had to ask a couple of people before finally finding its location.

The form was simple. The task of filling it not so complex. I had the money with me. I had the filled in form. What next? Here is where being a noob gives you new insights. A regular visitor to the bank would have known exacty what to do. Go to the cash counter, pay up and get a receipt. But then how am I supposed to know that? I was made to ask another of those bank officers who seemed too busy(impolite?) to answer my query. So then I paid up and got my receipt. To my shock I was made to wait more than 1 hour before that simple DD was delivered to me. The reason being the lady who was supposed to give it was chatting with a friend who had come to the bank. If that was half hour, another half hour was taken up in her going for lunch right at the appointed time totally unresponsive to a DD waiting there before her to be signed and despatched. I had paid extra in commission for this, damn it! After all this unnecessary wasting of time, my patience was at an end as I demanded my DD. Can’t they understand I was in a hurry? So finally as I got my DD, my threat of a complaint to high officers brought only the slightest of smirks on her face.

So now I get it. People just don’t come to banks anymore just to safeguard their hard earned money. They have learned that they are the masters and it is their money which earns the bank its profits. So above all they expect a level of SERVICE. Service not as in “servant” but service as in politeness and user friendly. This is what is appealing to the common man. And it is exactly what the private banks specialize at. Be it personalized phone calls to let you know about your recent big transactions or to inform you about their most recent schemes(or to home deliver those DDs that I talked about!) these banks are adept and efficient. Frankly I think most people nowadays know that they are losing a bit of money but as a trade off for the service they’re getting, it might just seem worth it sometimes.

* Just for the record, the bank I went to was a branch of the Indian Overseas Bank.