I can\’t believe I haven\’t been to this website before!…

While Chinese banks are seeing a credit boom due to the nation’ s huge stimulus package, their foreign peers have not been so lucky and might just be facing their most difficult period as far as business expansion in China is concerned. According to th…

I suppose if we’re not careful, we could go on for weeks about this topic, but I suspect neither of us have the time. I concede that my statement was loose but also feel very strongly that we, as a major stakeholder, are asked to support the banks when the going gets tough. And yet the treatment many of us have received when we needed their support has been, to say the least, shabby.

The difference between bad banking practice and bad customer practice is huge. Here’s a customer who has been recently refused a mortagage by Natwest as a result of complete incompetence by HSBC in 2003/4. And yet its the banks who stick together like gangsters – even though they are in “fierce competition” with each other – against the customer. I know I am talking about two different things here. 1) bank charges 2) credit rating. And yet the two are related certainly in my case. Karen King’s comments spoke for many of us when the news broke. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8376906.stm

When was the last time a bank was stopped doing what it’s always done for six whole years or effectively fined for treating a customer like something that’s just crawled from beneath a rock? That’s what I am facing. And yet I am being told by a leading opinion former that I should have managed my account better. My point is that the bank in question, HSBC should have handled my affairs more sensibly. I bet they payed more than £2400 to DG Solicitors to take me to the cleaners! There are no ethics in that whatsoever.

I also understand that the BBA can’t speak for individual banks or accounts. But, by the same token, I think the BBA do have an inherent responsibility to set a climate for conciliation on this issue of bank charges and many other matters, I note that bodies like the OFT and FSA are looking at this issue in detail. But this will not have any effect on the thousands of people who feel totally let down by the “closed shop” retail banking system which exists in the UK.

The problem for us is that we’re the British Bankers’ Association, not the Bankers’ Marketing Board (no there isn’t one). Each bank does its own marketing and PR, and each is in fierce competition with all of the others.

Your five tips are certainly valid, and we’d love to take at least some of them on board, but that would assume a hegemony among the banks which doesn’t exist. The media and certain commentators are very happy to denigrate “the banks” as if all of them were equally responsible for the credit crunch – as if all investment banks were the same as all retail banks, as if the problem only originated in the UK and as if there isn’t considerable professional pride in the industry and concern that its reputation has eroded so badly. But there are worlds of difference between some of our members, and within the term “banking” there are many different business models.

Sorry we didn’t know we were supposed to be managing the economy. We thought we provided services to people who wanted to use a bank, that’s all.

The Government manages the economy, more or less. And the Bank of England works to keep inflation in check. Meanwhile banks do banking.