Businesses have priority … but not privacy
There is a particular bank office in my city, of a particular big Romanian bank that is driving crazy a business man that has to do work with them on a daily basis. Online banking is still not very popular in Romania, therefore most the the payments are still done in cash, both between companies and between companies and state. Usually I have to go to bank 1-2 times a week. My company’s bank, is in the top 3 Romanian Banks and I selected without a very thorough research mostly because they had an office which was closest to our office.
I had a lot of trouble with this bank, most of them related with poor service: unprepared employees, errors in communication, delays in service because of long lines etc. One interesting thing related to this bank was that until few days ago the still had different departments for local exchange and foreign exchage accounts. So, if you wanted to do operations both in local and foreign exchange you would have to go to 2 different offices (in the same building) and stay at 2 lines, speak with 2 people etc. Also, other interesting thing is that each company has assigned a particular person in the office, so if you go there and one desk has nobody in line but your assigned person has 4 people in line, you have to wait. I think they are organized this way since the communist era, some weird work management processes, because a logical distribution of work would distribute available human resources evenly, not the way they are doing. Since today I was amazed to see they made the first step: no more splitting between foreign and local exchange account managements, they are both handled by the same … stil custom assigned person and of course … in the same office.
Other interesting thing I found today: at every desk thay have an announcement: “Businesses have priority” (in regards with individual accounts). So, one more reason not to be their client if you are an individual and one more reason to be happy if you are a business. I found this announcement to be as hilarious as the commercial that they are currently running on TV in which they state: “we know what you need”. Indeed I need to have priority but there would not be a need for priority if they would just simply hire all the people they need and not overload their employees in order to cut costs. They are struggling so much to cut costs that they don’t even have security for private areas, not to speak that they don’t have the space they need, recently they opened one more near an entrance (a privat one). When I went today to their building, going straight to the foreign exchange office where I knew I found it the last time, I was surprised to enter the room and see nobody was there but a lot of files and papers exposed. And in order to get there, I also went through some other corridor that had a lot of files stocked on each side and of course nobody was there. I could have simply stuffed a pile and take it with me if I had a large bag. Well, I was not interested what those files contained, but the possibility that they had private data of businesses made me title this post “no privacy”.
Today’s discovery is only a minor “cann’t belive it” event that is taking place in Romanian banks every day, maybe some time I will comment more on some of these events, like for example how I got my company’s card account monthly report via a friend in some other company that I was luck to know him becuase some bank employee simply gave him the report for my company, probably by error.
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