In a slightly creepy turn of phrase, Westpac chief, George Frazis, announced this week that the bank wants to get "closer to the customer".
I don't know which customer he was talking about but I hope it wasn't me. Mostly, I prefer to keep my
bankers at arms-length.
But Frazis wants "more bankers in more places", which sounds ominous.
And superfluous - it's already very easy to find a banker as I discovered today trawling the streets for banking services. Everywhere you look there's a financial service on offer backed up with marketing slogans and well-ironed front-people. They were nice too, the human face of finance - pleasant, informative and accommodating, as a rule.
I can understand why Frazis wants Westpac to get closer to the little people; those boutique local operations have not yet been obliterated by the big brands, presumably because people still need people, rather than websites and automated phone messages, to assist them in financial matters.
As Frazis phrases it: "[Westpac's new strategy] reverses a trend in banking over many years and one that, in hindsight, was a mistake."
He says the push to centralise financial services and gut 'non-core' operations, which Westpac (along with the rest of the trend-following corporates) began in the 1990s "inhibited us from appropriately supporting our customers".
Such high-level thinking, though, must be backed on the ground with appropriate staff.
For example, that rude cow at the BNZ who yelled at us because her computer wasn't talking and the bank was unable to hand over our money could learn something about appropriate customer support.
Honestly, sometimes I'd rather deal with a machine. At least digitised marketing personas aren't patronising, which is something I'll never be doing at that particular BNZ branch ever again.
David Chaplin
