Who’s your banker?

For the better part of the 1980s and 1990s, I was chief marketing officer of a company that developed training programs for banks. We were quite successful, counting most of the English-speaking banks you have ever heard of among our customers. To kick off the introduction of our first CD-ROM based program on relationship management (= sales), I created this video of interviews with people on the streets of Berkeley and Mill Valley, asking them “Who’s your banker?”

Personally, I deal with three banks now. I might be better keeping my money under the mattress.

• One of the banks was fined $10 million for unethical dealings with fraudulent telemarketers, misrepresented the quality and risk of $8.5 billion worth of auction rate securities, and was caught laundering money from Mexican and Colombian drug traders.
• The bank where I do my checking has made such bad lending decisions that it’s stock has lost 92% of its value in the past year.
• The bank that issues my credit cards is always up to something weird: today I got a dunning notice because I owe them $0.00. I’ve asked them to stop emailing me because one in five emails is a phishing scam. They refuse, citing their right to email me if they choose. Their website does not offer a way to get in touch with their chief compliance officer.

The lesson from the twelve-year old video remains relevant to this day: banks need to remember their job is to help people, not to seek profits from shady practices and questionable financial engineering.