The Hindu Business Line : Woes of hi-tech banking

HAS the combination of high technology and competition in financial services in particular served us well as customers? Has it truly introduced a service orientation amongst those staff who manage the various points of contact between the company and the general public?

The answers to these questions depend upon your personal experience with institutions such as banks, hotels, airlines, railways, which in turn seems to be largely a matter of luck.

Cheques meant for someone else get deposited in your account or vice versa, dividend warrants go astray, account balances on the ATM terminal are wrong and over- or under-state the actual by lakhs of rupees, cheques get bounced and are re-credited with no explanation and the Internet banking facility is so full of glitches and so idiosyncratic that one can never be sure how far one can trust the replies one gets on the paperless mail.

None of this is mere speculation or hypothesis but based on actual experiences of the author. Details and names are left out as immaterial!

However, when one considers the variety of customers that the typical bank deals with, even the degree of automation we have attempted in this country is actually rather surprising.

The banking public represents perhaps the widest cross-section of a pan-Indian clientele, second only to the state-run Railways, where of course one expects a rather different level of personal attention and service. Such a customer universe covers every section of society.

All levels of education and familiarity with use of technology — from the investment analyst or fund manager in a big city to the person who hitherto used to claim his remittances from the postman on the strength of a thumb-impression on the money-order — are included. Yet, having launched services that seem space age tech compared to what we grew up with till about 15 years ago, banks must deal with the contradictions of such a difficult task if they are to retain credibility. For, credibility and trustworthiness are the very essence of the banker's way of life.

If one cannot be sure of reasonably immediate attention and a fair hearing from bank officers, one should not be surprised to see irate customers bad-mouthing the bank.

The trouble with retail banking is this: the very banks which catch the limelight with high key advertising and glossy, plush offices are the ones that find the smaller savings bank account holder a thankless job to deal with, from their business point of view and at times deal with him in a cavalier way. The returns on the time spent on the individual customer must seem trivial in comparison with the lucrative large corporate accounts.

Even less attractive is the prospect of dealing with the daily aches and pains of the retail customers due to myriad faults and slips that seem inevitable in transactions running into millions.

Yet, no one seems to have devised separate banking streams or ways of working that deal with the special characteristics and demands of the pensioner who seldom draws a cheque for more than a few thousand rupees and the company that deals in hundreds of crores of rupees.

So long as the same machinery and the same or similar type of systems of controls and operations address such widely different customer groups, one or the other is bound to feel short changed.

It is very much the same as it would be if families across income groups and classes were compelled to buy their groceries from the same multi-storey shopping mall, without a range of sizes and shapes in shops to choose from.

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