How digital money is changing everyday banking - Joe Bennett

How we manage our money has changed a lot Photo / 123rf

I know, I know, it’s a weird thing to do these days, but I went to the bank.

A pair of glass doors opened, then closed behind me. A second pair stayed closed in front of me. Presumably, I was being screened, but by what? Some unseen operative? Facial recognition software? Interpol? All of the above?

Whatever the test was, I passed it, and the doors slid open, but what if I hadn’t passed?

Would the doors have stayed shut, trapping me in plain view, in a banking fish tank, till the uniforms arrived with a tall metal van, and the paraphernalia of enforcement?

Inside, it was a bank no longer.

Gone were the ranks of little windows, the tellers on stools with their stamps and their forms and their drawers of cash and their mesmeric skill at counting notes.

Gone, too, the queues of people clutching cheque books, paying-in books, bags of takings. Now just a single counter, sleek, synthetic, undefended, with a screen on top of it and a young man behind it. “I won’t be a moment,” he said, and disappeared. I had the bank to myself.

Along one wall, potted plants, softening partitions and little desks for the priests of banking to sit with members of the congregation one at a time and talk in hushed tones about you know what.

But there was nobody there. A cheerful free-standing sign announced that the bank no longer dealt with cash.

You couldn’t bring money to it. You couldn’t get money from it. After thousands of years of tangibility, money is no longer a clink in the pocket or a wad in the wallet, a thing to be felt and counted, a thing to draw comfort from.

Now money is just ones and zeroes that fizz along wires and fibres and microscopic tubes of glass, and even through the air by Wi-Fi, unseen, unfelt, un-understood by most of us, and nobody asks what the fi means in Wi-Fi because we know we are out of our depth.

With ink-and-paper ledgers long since gone, all wealth today is digital, and if some monster solar storm blew out the world’s electronics, we’d no longer know who had what. We’d have to start again, every one of us a pauper.

Ladies and gentlemen, the race to plutocracy will be rerun. On your marks, get set…‘What can I do for you?’ said the young man, returning, smiling.

I offered him the six-page form I had completed, and a photocopy of the photo page of my passport, certified as true and accurate by a lawyer, and the passport itself, to prove that I am who I say I am, and a copy of my rates demand to prove that I live where I say I live, even though I have been living there for 20 years and banking with this bank for 38, and being who I am for 68. Time was they’d just have said, ‘hi Joe, nice to see you,’ but ah, well.

As the young man verified my existence he asked what I had done for a living. I said I still did it for a living and he said he was sorry and I said it was all right and he said what did I still do for a living and I told him. ‘That’s nice,’ he said politely, but I wasn’t sure he knew what a newspaper was.

I asked if he would still be here and banking in 10 years’ time and he said perhaps not here, but somewhere similar.

He said he hoped to become a financial adviser, there being a desperate need for financial literacy in this country. He made it sound like missionary work.

“Isn’t financial literacy just arithmetic and common sense?”

The young man looked up from the forms. “I think there’s a bit more to it than that.”

“Is there?” I thought but didn’t say. And then the polite young man told me all was well with who I was and the glass doors let me out. And as I drove home I determined to look up a line from Dickens so as to have it to hand when next I hear the phrase financial literacy.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”