If you have tried any of the following you could be in for a nasty surprise. Things are not as smooth as advertised.
Opening an account
Moving money
Altering an asset manager
Changing details
The list goes on…… With the aid of technology they should all be simple and seamless but you end up doing a lot of unpaid work for the provider and things can still go wrong. Once manual intervention is needed mistakes multiply. Big banks are particularly guilty. It’s where technology meets human intervention when things invariably go awry. When dealing with retail customers banks, in the rush to apply IT, seem to have forgotten that when things don’t work the fall back is email, phone and paper. Resolution requires some old fashioned skills. Unfortunately finding people who understand the issues rather than reading from a script isn’t easy. Furthermore getting action within an appropriate timescale is nigh on impossible. The worst part is that this wouldn’t have occurred three decades ago. These are problems of capital allocation. Why spend money on sorting things out if you can’t demonstrate a return? It’s simple. A business that loses customers by neglect needs to reconsider where it will be in the future.