Jason Elk

I received a printed letter today. The official kind - on a letterhead, in an envelope (with a window), sent to my home address. I’d be forgiven for thinking it was from a company that cared about me. Well, maybe not me (let’s be realistic) but at the very least my business.

I was half right.

It was a from a company, yes, but they certainly didn’t care about me and in fact were writing to tell me that my business wasn’t all that important to them either. Better still, they didn’t even know my name. The letter was addressed to ‘Mr Jason’ and the address on the envelope was a fridge magnet mess. The street name was mangled into the suburb and the house number barely made it onto the end of the line. How it even reached me I have no idea. Kismet obviously.

By the time I got through the door, I was sighing a kind of crossroads sigh. The type where you have a pretty simple choice. Door Number One is all about wailing and gnashing of teeth, which requires you to pick up the phone and rant to a poor customer service agent on the 17th floor of some glass building. Door Number Two is where you instantly move past the point of protest and straight into a white flag sigh, giving up before you’ve even started. You deal with the pain as if you’ve woken up at midnight with a cramp in your calf. Rub it a bit and collapse back to sleep. By the morning all is forgotten.

But before I close the second door behind me tonight, I wanted to share the story of how an online brand that was once built on the principles of customer co-action (years before Web 2.0 became a formal label) has been warped by an industrial-strength microwave of new management filled with old-school ideas of customer satisfaction.

20twenty positioned themselves as an online-only banking alternative. One of their strongest positioning statements was: banks are dead, banking is not. They sold us on a vision of a simpler, friendlier, more human way of dealing with money. They spoke to their customers in straightforward English and answered the phones with a personal greeting. In short, they ran a very capable banking business in the way that your corner cafe ran their grocery business way back when. Yes, there were some shortcomings (like no offline branches) but the fans who signed up (like me) had a different value scale. And for the first time since I was a BOB Junior cardholder, I loved my bank.

This all came crashing to a halt when Saambou, the bank that had invested in 20twenty, folded. Suddenly Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shifted back down to survival and people didn’t care about the dream of beautiful banking bliss - they wanted their money out of their 20twenty accounts, immediately, without delay and right now please. Luckily for me, I had always been a best of both worlds convert. Though I bought into the blue sky idea of co-banking, I kept my money at one of the big four banks and used 20twenty as a credit card provider only. I wanted to be a part of the changing face of financial freedom but putting all your golden eggs in one basket is never a good idea.

So suddenly 20twenty was in trouble. Thankfully, we all thought at the time, Standard Chartered Bank stepped in to save the day and purchased the online banking savant. Only one problem: they wanted to focus on Home Loans and not on credit cards. As an existing card holder, I was encouraged to join Go Banking. One more problem: they used an entirely different credit scoring system to 20twenty and the credit line I was offered, if I moved, was just over a third of what I had enjoyed before. At this point, I chose the un-zen Door Number One and decided to stand up for my rights as a banking consumer. I didn’t choose to be in the situation I was in. 20twenty had approved my credit card with a certain limit and just because they had closed, I couldn’t be expected to come up with two thirds of the spent credit overnight just because Go Banking said so.

So I huffed and puffed with the banking ombudsman until Standard Chartered offered to take over the full amount owing on my credit card as a ‘personal loan account’. Great. Now I owed the money, had to make monthly repayments, and couldn’t even continue using the credit card that I was making repayments to. But at least it was sorted and the hullabaloo of all the moving and selling and changing was over.

Until today.

Because, in this letter addressed from the seventh moon of Jupiter, I’ve now been told quite matter-of-factly that Standard Chartered has decided to “focus its operations around their successful Wholesale Banking strategy” and has been “investigating the sale of the South African Personal Loan business to a reputable, local financial institution (called Real People)”. My education continued as I read on. “For your information, Real People is a registered financial services provider which specialises in credit management.” Excellent.

So let’s see. I started off as a 20twenty customer, was asked to move to Go Banking which didn’t come close to matching my existing credit line, had to fight for my rights via the banking ombudsman (a very decent chap by the way), got transferred to a personal loan account at Standard Chartered and, just as things have started to even out, I’ve now been sold to Real People - a company which might be very good at what they do, but is three degrees away from the bank who signed me up as a customer.

If anything, I’ve become a corporate plaything. A numbered account that can be bought, sold and traded. The irony here is that all of this is happening in an era of economic tension, FICA obssession and the National Credit Act. How can the powers that be allow ‘registered financial services providers’ to push people around at varying interest rates, alternating credit lines and with absolutely no regard for the terms and conditions of the original contract signed with 20twenty.

Customer. Consumer. Commodity. That’s 21st century evolution for you.

Tagged as 20twenty, banking, customer service, internet, standard chartered + Categorized as Everything