Bank services can deteriorate to a point where lawsuits would not be the way to solve the problems. What would be needed is intervention at the level of issuing or renewing the banking licences.

In prior times banks offered ways to share in market opportunities, overnight, 90-day, fixed deposits, inter-bank, CDs, mortgage trust deposit, etc. These all seem to have dried up and become not merely non-existent but totally unknown.

What it suggests is that influential groupings have cornered these areas for themselves, cutting off the rest of society. It’s the opposite of what banking should be; and the reverse of why banks are invited into this land in the first place.

Some might argue it is the result of lower interest rates. Not true. The higher liquidity is being corralled for monopolising the profits. In addition to FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) and FATF (Financial Action Task Force) (and now CIA) and the like, this corralling explains why there has been a drastic change in banking ethics and a loss of common sense where everything has become single-edged and non-negotiable.

Take chequing – the customer’s instruction to the bank to pay a third party; some banks are behaving as if chequing belonged to them to mandate in their sole discretion how payments may be made. Who ever heard of that! Absolute nonsense. Worse when young just-out-of-school bank clerks force it on the customers, not realising that their own jobs are slated to be killed off in the phased onslaught of tech.

Will the next thing they say be – we can offer you 90-day special rates only if you are fully online? I wonder.

E GALY