It is high time that leg­is­la­tion be in­tro­duced to pre­vent the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions-name­ly, the banks-from con­tin­u­ing with their un­hin­dered lev­el of con­trol as it ex­ist in T&T.In de­vel­oped na­tions, fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions are pre­vent­ed, through leg­is­la­tion, from col­lud­ing when it comes to prices on ser­vices and prod­ucts. Not so in this de­vel­op­ing na­tion. Through the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, banks get away with "mur­der" while pro­vid­ing "shod­dy" ser­vice.Some months ago, it was men­tioned on the night­ly news that the Fi­nan­cial Om­buds­man on­ly re­ceived 12 of­fi­cial com­plaints in 2010. As a re­sult, the con­clu­sion was that in­di­vid­u­als are gen­er­al­ly sat­is­fied with the lev­el of ser­vice.

From my per­spec­tive, this is not so. I have had se­ri­ous ser­vice-re­lat­ed is­sues with two dif­fer­ent banks over the last six months that, in more de­vel­oped mar­kets, such as Cana­da, cus­tomers would not tol­er­ate. A month ago, I was at a bank in Ch­agua­nas and the lines were so hor­ren­dous­ly long that cus­tomers were mum­bling and ob­vi­ous­ly very dis­sat­is­fied. Yet, they do not com­plain to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties. Why? That is sim­ply our na­ture.At one par­tic­u­lar bank, cheques from an­oth­er bank, once de­posit­ed in­to your ac­count, now takes five work­ing days to clear. Why? The ar­gu­ment is be­cause of the state of emer­gency. This is lu­di­crous.

There is ab­solute­ly no rea­son to have five work­ing days. If I make an on­line cred­it card pur­chase, in less than two sec­onds, the funds are deb­it­ed from my cred­it card. This is the world of tech­nol­o­gy. Why, then, must it take five work­ing days? Be­cause of the float!

Bit­ter ex­pe­ri­ences

Banks make enor­mous amounts of mon­ey by hold­ing on to peo­ples' funds for three days, far less five. Think about it. If they have ac­cess to your cheque, say $100,000 for five days-I say have ac­cess be­cause if I de­posit a cheque in­to my ac­count, the monies are deb­it­ed from the ac­count of the per­son who is­sued the cheque that same night-think of the in­ter­est that the bank can earn if they have that same $100,000 cir­cu­lat­ing as a loan to some­one else. Then mul­ti­ply that fig­ure by hun­dred of thou­sands of cus­tomers who are in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions.

A few weeks ago, I de­posit­ed a cheque in­to my ac­count. This oc­curred at 8.14 am on Fri­day. I was told that the cheque would take five work­ing days to clear.I hasti­ly told the teller that this was wrong. He smiled and said that he un­der­stood, but that this was the in­struc­tions re­ceived be­cause of the state of emer­gency. I told him that the bank is hold­ing peo­ple to ran­som. He laughed this time and agreed. Mind you, he was ex­treme­ly cour­te­ous as if he to­tal­ly em­pathised with me.

Lo and be­hold, I would have thought that by Fri­day of the fol­low­ing week, the funds would be avail­able in my per­son­al ac­count. It was not un­til Mon­day morn­ing-nine cal­en­dar nights af­ter-that I had ac­cess to my funds. Clear­ly, the cheque was "post­ed" to my ac­count the Sun­day night. Now, you tell me: is this not a crime in it­self?I have had many more (and heard many more per­sons com­plain bit­ter­ly) very un­for­tu­nate ex­pe­ri­ences with these banks and at­tempt­ed to fi­nal­ly com­plain to the Fi­nan­cial Om­buds­man.

I vis­it­ed the Web site to try and un­der­stand the pro­ce­dure and pro­to­col. To my amaze­ment, the pro­ce­dure is very com­plex and ex­treme­ly time-con­sum­ing and not user-friend­ly. This is why the on­ly re­ceived 12 com­plaints last year. Make it sim­pler and less time-con­sum­ing (and pro­mote it to the pub­lic) for a cus­tomer to voice their frus­tra­tion and you would be sur­prised.I would like to sug­gest to the pub­lic to vis­it on­line Zeit­geist The Movie. It gives a per­spec­tive of the pow­er of fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in so­ci­ety. http://zeit­geist­movie.com <http://zeit­geist­movie.com/>

Paul Burke

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