I heard an interesting story the other day from a young couple trying to open some new accounts.  Things have changed a lot in the almost 40 years since I opened bank accounts for The Bank of Montreal.

Fraud

The incidence of fraud and identity theft has made financial institutions more cautious and documentation requirements have increased to some extent.  This makes the account open process take a little longer.

Also you need to share more information with the nameless faceless institution run by fat cats sitting in their towers of gold ( but that is a different rant for another time)

These changes I can live with, uncontrolled marketing and unwanted sales I cannot.

On line Banking/Fintrac Competition

I used to post the branch general ledger manually and then monthly, quarterly and yearly I filled in the balance sheet by hand.  I used a burroughs tape calculator to add up the figures and balance everything (museum pieces these days, but really it was not that long ago.)

Today its all about automated online, instant access.  Software applications are becoming more sophisticated and major Canadian Financial Institutions ( the big banks) are experiencing heated competition from the so called Fintrac sector which consists of a variety of companies providing Financial services cheaper and faster than the big Banks.

As a result the large Canadian banks have spread their wings somewhat purchasing online financial service providers ( e.g. Tangerine) or cutting deals with major retailers (e.g. Canadian Tire, PC Financial)

In turn these retailers and brick and mortar bank alternatives have been aggressively pushing their financial services.

Marketing Push

To some extent todays financial service representatives are more about giving their customers products than giving them what they need or want.

The young couple I mentioned at the beginning of this post were recent casualities of this sell product at any cost mentality when they went to open a new account at PC Financial.

Products they did not want were pushed on them by the ruthless sales person.  The result was confusion and ultimately cleaning up the mess this sales person made cost them a lot of time and effort.

All they wanted was a simple account not a myriad of services of no interest to them.  And PC Financial’s response to their complaint about the poor service was sadly lacking.

A piece of advise to PC Financial, if you want a long term relationship ( and this makes the most sense) be more aware of what your customers want and need.

Pay attention to the customer not the number of products you push.  In the long run this is a far more successful strategy..