Some bankers think what we most want is convenience – what their customers really want is trust

ACOUPLE of years ago, the new head of Bank of Ireland, Francesca McDonagh, was asked what she believed her customers most demanded from their bank.

At the time, Ms McDonagh, who has Irish grandparents on both sides, was head of retail banking for HSBC in the UK and she didn’t hesitate in identifying the customers’ top priority.

‘Convenience,’ she trilled, ‘I think our customers really value convenience.’ The banks, she went on, make the mistake of thinking it’s all about ‘innovation and technology’, but innovation and technology have to be about delivering convenience, because ‘that’s what the customer really wants.’

Really? Customers prioritise convenience over trust? Well, in that case, all of those people currently bellyaching about their tracker mortgage woes need to get a grip. When their banks decided to fleece them by blocking their entitlement to cheaper tracker mortgages, it was all done with the minimum of inconvenience to the suckers – sorry, customers.

It was handled so very smoothly and conveniently, indeed, that they scarcely noticed a thing until they started to lose their homes. Did they have to wait in line at a busy cashier’s desk, while the Bank of Ireland set about overcharging its tracker-rate customers by 0.15%? No, not for a moment. Did they have to fill in any fiddly little forms and stand in a queue to be denied the correct tracker rate?

Not a bit of it. On the contrary, everyone was totally convenienced here – especially the banks, who conveniently all hit on the same strategy to defraud their customers and now, equally conveniently, have all settled on the same defence.

Does Francesca still think that convenience is the Irish bank customer’s top priority, after she was one of the first bank chiefs to be hauled in for a dressing down by the Finance Minister yesterday over the tracker mortgage scandal?

Or, despite her €958,000-a-year salary package, did Francesca actually need to be told that trust is the quality upon which the whole banking system is based and that her bank and others are still on very shaky ground in that regard?

In that interview, back in late 2015, Francesca McDonagh added as an afterthought that obviously customers also wanted banks that worked and were ‘reliable and safe’, as if these were a given in any modern banking system.

Once again, let us hope that the Finance Minister put her straight on that yesterday, when the €2,625-a-day bank chief was summoned to the department to be ‘admonished’ over the tracker scam.

‘Reliable and safe’ are not words that we use to describe our banks here, not since almost a decade ago, when their relentless pursuit of profit brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy and obliged the taxpayer to bail them out at a cost that will burden generations to come. But try ‘greedy, amoral, contemptuous of the public and shamelessly focused on their own interests’ as terms to sum up our banks, and you won’t get too much argument from the average customer.

Francesca McDonagh, who is just 42 and has a most impressive banking career behind her, has a unique opportunity to reform the 234-year-old institution that she now heads up. She’s a big critic of gender imbalance in the financial world, which implies a belief that the increased involvement of women could only benefit those banks and businesses they run.

Well, here’s her chance to prove it.

Profit

Here is her chance to implement a profound cultural change across the Bank of Ireland, while she is still the new broom, and to set a standard within the industry which the other lenders will have no option but to meet.

We had such high hopes for Nóirín O’Sullivan when she took the top job in An Garda Síochána; there was a genuine excitement at the prospect of a woman boss cutting a swathe through an old boys’ club and bringing a brisk, can-do determination to tackling the ingrained cultural failings within the force.

That’s not quite how things worked out, but that’s no reason to lose faith. Francesca McDonagh has a similarly ingrained, deep-seated, cultural blight to confront within Irish banking and a unique opportunity and mandate to defeat it.

Perhaps the most depressing element of the tracker scandal is that it shows how very little has changed in our bankers’ mindset and that the lessons of the past decade have fallen on fallow ground.

Our financial institutions, it seems, still keep a portrait of Henry F. Potter lit by votive candles on the walls of their secret inner sanctums and still base their business model on the example of the villainous banker from It’s A Wonderful Life.

To Old Man Potter, as he tried to crush the humane Bailey Bros Buildings and Loan out of business in Frank Capra’s festive fable, bank customers were just economic units to be squeezed until their pips squeaked. But to George Bailey (James Stewart), homes weren’t just building stock to be traded, they were the very heart of a family and the solid foundation upon which a secure and equal society stood.

How did we come to have so many people in such positions of power in Irish banking who share such a merciless and mercenary view of our society’s basic building blocks of family and home?

We now know that, in the banks affected by the tracker scandal, staff understood that in all dealings with customers, the bank’s interested were to be prioritised above those of the public. If somebody had to lose out in a transaction, it was always to be the customer.

And anyone who has engaged with a bank recently doesn’t need telling that. Look at the phasing out of human cashiers, in most banks, in favour of machines that chew up your cheques and spit out your cards. Look at the charges they impose for the tiniest service, as the notion of basic courtesy has been rationalised out of existence. Listen to the heartbreaking stories of family after family who have had their houses repossessed in times of genuine difficulty, only to pass their beloved homes later and find them boarded up and empty. That’s not a business model – that’s just malice. Listen to the misery they’ve inflicted, even in this latest scandal – the evictions, the despair, the suicides, the breakdowns, the fractured families and ruined lives.

For years, banks have operated just like the dodgy shopkeeper whose ‘errors’ in giving back change always seem to favour him, except they don’t even bother to hide the fact that this isn’t just a sneaky scam – it’s a policy. And, since they’re all at it, we customers don’t have the option of taking our business elsewhere.

So no, Francesca, you do not have the luxury of making convenience your top priority, just yet. In case the Minister didn’t spell it out yesterday, we can tolerate some minor inconveniences if we have bankers we can trust.

One of Francesca’s innovations in HSBC was what she called the ‘onesie’ – not a fluffy one-piece jim-jam, but a one-day mortgage approval guarantee.

Onesies certainly sound cuddly and snug, again not notions you’d associate with our bankers here, but I suspect most people would prefer to wait a few days if they could be sure the mortgage they were getting was manageable, honourable and fair.

We can live without onesies and conveniences and super-cheerful electronic tellers wishing us a good day, Francesca, if we have banks that don’t rob us.

It really shouldn’t be too much to ask.