bad behavior | Kerrzone Musings

One regular service financial institution ( FI) customers use regularly is money transfer/ payments. Whether a small retail customer or a large Corporation moving funds from one entity to another can be a key service expectation.

The movement of money can take many legacy manual forms from cheques, drafts, wire transfers, payment orders and so on to diect on-line transfers.

Of course just handing over cash was one of the most widely used methods and although still popular for some transactions (e.g., drug deals) that method is slowly becoming replaced by on-line options (e.g., debit cards)

Payment Options

When moving money there are several considerations:

– timing of the acceptance of the payment

– payment guarantee

– convenience

Each of the common legacy money transfer options involve taking money from one account and moving it to another. Because these are not online real time transactions there is risk the funds are not available (lack of guarantee), lost in transit (inconvenient) or take time to move (slow)

When one FI takes the money from your account and then transfers it to another FI or credits your account and waits for reimbursement, it is called float. Float can be positve or negative depending on the flow of funds .

Accumulated positive free float funds can be profitable to an FI while negative float can be costly. In this age of digital technology it is surprising to me Fi’s still have not fully eliminted these legacy manual money transfer methods that involve unnessecary float.

It is true, world commerce continues to moves toward 100% real time online processing more and more, but unbelievably, there still is a high volume of offline processing (whether credit card, cheque or some other similar form )

Personally I find cheques archaic and frustrating but occassionally no alternative is offerd other than these slow inefficient paper options.

Hey bankers out there, get with it. Join the digital age. Resistance is futile . Force your customers to move off these slow, costly, labour intensive, high risk methodologies. Might have been okay 150 years ago when Canada became a country, but today, seriously.

There are a number of broad descriptives for basic simple behavior. I am thinking of things like; angry, sulky, petulant, opinionated, obstenante, vain and so on.

Becoming Frustrated

For me the most frustrating behavior type is passive-aggressive. Regardless of whether its a personal or organizational context this is the most destructive and difficult behavior to deal with.

Well it can be challenging there are a number of options to defuse, redirect and otherwise collaberate with others to turn less pleasant behaviors around.

For example if someone is behaving angrily remain calm, don’t get hooked. Often this approach can defuse a potentially difficult scenario.

I could build on this example with many other behavior types, including other ways to defuse anger but my focus on this post is a bit of a rant about the passive-aggressive.

For passive-aggresive I find it much harder to deal with effectively, ending in a positive result for all.

What is Passive-Agressive Behavior

First you agree with a request, plan, direction;then you work actively and agressively to undermine and foil the objective. In essence the approach makes it seem like you are supportive when in fact you are anything but.

Of course this is a great way to avoid work or undermine a cause while appearing helpful. With this approach there is no need to directly defend or to argue a point. Rather it seems like you are onside and it is only after you have put a monkey wrench in the works that the truth comes out.

Most Surprising

Usually passive-aggressive approaches are shut down after the third or forth try. The requestor becomes aware of this underlying behavior and guards against it. On the first occurrence you might be tricked, but like the old proverb “trick me once shame on you, trick me twice shame on me” applies.

I am never ceased to be amazed at the number of organizations I have been involved with where one or two individuals continually practice passive-aggressive behavior without consequence.

Kerrzone Musings

Tag Archives: bad behavior

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