Recently, I had the misfortune of visiting a nationalised bank in Bangalore to carry out few simple financial transactions. Apart from availing the locker facility at the above bank, as I didn’t foresee doing any day-to-day operations at the bank, I did not avail their internet or mobile banking facilities. There were about 50 customers in the bank at that time and the amount of time it took to complete those transactions was a good 3 hours. Due to the fact that I could afford to wait that long and also since I didn’t have any other choice, I waited (quite impatiently). They neither feel that making a customer wait for this long reflects bad on them, nor do they have the willingness to do anything to change the situation. No wonder the younger population of India turn towards the more customer oriented private banks. I am not sure if I can make that statement, as I have never been to any of the private banks in the recent memory – but I doubt if they can afford the amount of laxity and callousness displayed by their nationalised counterparts.

Service delay is not the only point of concern for me. My worry is the total disregard of processes. A certain transaction has to be approved by three different people and in the above said branch, there were not that many people available on that day. What the staff did was utterly shocking. They called up another staff member who was on leave but was glad to share her password, logged into the system as the other staff member and carried out the transaction. All this in broad daylight in front of the customers. What was supposed to be a three layer check was bypassed in a simple phone call. If this is not a wilful disregard for the procedures, then what else is? What if there is an audit tomorrow where it was questioned as how a person on leave can authorize a financial transaction? May be there is a way to bypass that gateway as well.

I am sure that this problem would be prevalent across various banks in India. Despite education, growth and other feel good factors, we still haven’t come of age w.r.t. compliance. Wonder what it will take for that realization to happen.