Letter of the Day | Have the banks mastered the art of abandoning us?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I am writing to express deep frustration, shared by countless people, over the alarming direction the banking sector is taking. Rather than serving as pillars of community support, too many banks have increasingly thrown their customers under the bus, systematically dismantling personal, face-to-face service in favour of impersonal automated teller machines (ATMs).

It is painful watching these institutions adopt a shrug-and-turn-away attitude toward customer care. They treat customers like an inconvenience, casually ushering us away from the teller windows and herding us toward the machines.

To add insult to injury, this glorious tech-first future is failing on every front. You walk up to an ATM, only to find it completely out of cash, particularly over weekends. And good luck finding anyone to hold accountable. The banks simply point fingers at the third-party contractors they hire, who sometimes appear completely unbothered by customers’ plights.

On Sunday, November 1, at about 1:25 p.m., for example, a service provider (contracted by the bank) was at the ATM by the Central Sorting Office. I arrived to find them there, servicing the machine, and decided to wait because I had a pressing payment to make. After about 15 minutes, the team emerged. They announced they were finished, even though the machines were not indicating that they were operational.

“Give it some time,” said one team member, “it’ll soon come back up.” By the time I left some five minutes later, the machine was still not working. Further up the road, the JN Bank machines were also out of service, forcing me to leave the area to find a working terminal. Not only did these broken promises of technology cause me to break my pledge to pay my contractor within the hour, but they also delayed me for a medical appointment.

If banks are going to force us into a fully automated reality, surely they have a responsibility or, at the very least, a basic obligation to ensure the equipment actually works. We deserve better than corporate indifference, endless queues, and blank screens. It is high time our financial institutions remember that real people, not ATM terminals, keep the lights on.

H. JOHNSON