I was humiliated last night. After dinner in a favourite restaurant I handed my card to the waitress and had the gut-wrenching experience of being told it had been declined.
After a second failed attempt, I fished out another credit card—one I rarely use—typed my dog’s birthday into the card-reader, and crossed my fingers. Fortunately, it worked and we were allowed to leave without having to do the washing up.
Of course, I bank with Natwest, and I ought to have gotten used to this by now. It certainly proves one thing—you really cannot rely on a single bank.
Payments services are not yet a human right, and banks long ago gave up trying to treat their current account holders with respect. The onus is on us not to let them embarrass us in restaurants and encourage people to use premium rate phone lines when we need their help
In this climate, it is no surprise that credit unions—resolutely local lending and savings organisations—are seeing a resurgence
This latest payments fiasco comes the same day that Bank of England governor Mervyn King told us that we, as majority stakeholders, need to cut our losses in Natwest’s parent company RBS.
“RBS is worth less than we thought and we should accept that and get back to finding a way to create a new RBS that could be a major lender to the UK economy,” he said.
This effectively means separating the bank’s retail and investment arms, but the question remains, how do you create a major lender to the UK economy if you’re going to pare it down to its core retail operations? It hasn’t really worked for Northern Rock.
It is a balancing act. RBS clearly needs some fairly drastic pruning—through its Citizens Bank subsidiary we own and run 1,200 bank branches in the US, which seems a bit extravagant for a state-owned lender. And that’s not to mention RBS’s much-derided investment operation. However, a bank does require scale in order to work on anything other than a very local level.
King was clear in his view that this balance is not unachievable. “I do not believe it’s beyond the wit of man to devise a plan to restructure RBS [and] divide it into a healthy well-capitalised bank capable of lending to UK economy,” he said. “It does mean accepting there are activities that are likely to generate continued losses, and need to be separated from the healthy bank – in that sense it would a be a good bank/bad bank split.
“The whole idea of a bank being 82 per cent-owned by the taxpayer, run at arms’ length from the government, is a nonsense. It cannot make any sense.
“I think it would be much better to accept that it should have been a temporary period of ownership only, to restructure the bank and put it back. The longer this has gone on the more difficult it has become to return RBS to the market.”
Definitely not a bad idea, let’s get out of this business, and invest in something more worthwhile.
But, while I know it’s never a good idea to throw good money after bad, I wonder if we could stretch to buying the bank a few new computers before we get rid of it. At least then Natwest customers will actually be able to access their money when they need it, and we will have achieved something.
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