The Bank That Has Only One Branch

I have an account with a bank that seems to have only one branch and one head office somewhere in the country. When I tell others the name of my bank they tell me they’ve never heard of it. It’s only branch happens to be near my home and is a small, quiet branch manned by only a handful of staff. One would think that in this age of competition for customers, banks would be going out of their way to offer better service to the customers. The people at my bank seem to think otherwise.

I was there today morning to open an RD account. I filled up the form and gave it to the lady at the counter. She asked me if I would like to come every month and deposit the amount in my account or if I would like to have it transferred from my other account. I told her I would like to have it transferred and told her I had given that option in the form I had just given her. For some reason she asked another staff, some kind of a manager who looked up in alarm and told her, “No, let him come every month and pay. Don’t encourage transfers.’ The guy said it as if it involved digging a pipeline to transfer the money between my accounts.

It made me wonder what difficulty they had in transferring the money from one account to another on paper. I didn’t want to argue with them because it was meaningless, and they would offer a thousand explanations why they couldn’t do it. It happened in the past. They are bothered about their own convenience. It is one think I dislike about most public sector banks. They have their own convenience in mind and not the customers’.

Maybe they wanted the branch to be seen as a busy one bustling with customers. From past experience I knew the bank belonged to a different era but still I patronized it because it is a small bank. My bank has a lot to catch up with, and meanwhile I will go looking for a better bank.