Make customer convenience a priority

It is perhaps one of the weirdest abrogation of respect I have ever seen that our government, Central Bank, Directorate of Criminal Investigations and bank boards do not see it fit to guarantee Kenyans that their money will not be abused by banks.

It would seem like a pretty basic consumer right – put Sh50,000 into a Kenyan bank and expect it not to steal your funds, lose them, or otherwise misuse them? Apparently not.

Yet, if we can’t yet expect our banks not to lose our money, should we agree that they do so with impunity? Shouldn’t there be fines, a charge, compensation, perhaps jail time for directors, until we can establish a rigid principle that a customer’s money is the customer’s and a bank liability at all times?

Or, in Kenya alone, does money become the bank’s once we deposit it? Is that why it’s not an offence to lose it?

Whatever the case, we continue to suffer banking that is a good reason for not banking.

To whit, one member of my staff who has just spent the entire day sat in her bank branch, at its insistence, for no reasons they can give except that it made an error.

So what happened? Last week, the bank froze my employee’s bank account. She spent days trying to reach the bank, but it said nothing could be done without her visiting the bank in person in working hours. Nice.

We have barely three–quarter million Kenyans in formal sector employment, that’s less than 1.5 people in every 100, and our banks think that tiny sliver of our population who pay all our income taxes and for the majority of our entire government budget, can take whole days out just to deal with banking system mistakes?

However, with her funds cut off, said ‘rare’ formal sector employee arrives at her branch early on a Monday morning, and waits there - nearly all day. She is told it’s a ‘management issue’, which seems to mean no-one else can be bothered to look at it or has the authority to deal with whatever has befallen her funds inside that bank.

Finally, after many hours, the branch manager comes free, and looks up her account and discovers there has been a banking error, ‘which happens’. It will take a week to unfreeze her account, the manager says.

That’s a charming narrative by any count — let’s imagine what takes a week to reactivate an accidentally deactivated account. Maybe, this bank needs to email China and get a new computer dispatched by air, which will take two days to arrive, and its IT department then needs to configure the computer and then it will take another 36 hours to open the right form on it and press send?

Of course, it can be terribly demanding for a bank running customer bank accounts. You have to keep a record of what’s in them and keep them active.

But faced with the enormous challenges of keeping money for people, at least we can be assured that no accidents or errors or losses will ever be compensated for or incur any penalty for any of our banks anywhere.

These are the ultimate organisations beyond all laws, apparently. No wonder they periodically close and we discover they lent all their funds to directors, or suchlike.

As it is, the manager let her withdraw her funds while the bank resolved its week-long reactivation. It did not explain what had happened or what was going to happen. And, our end, we shuffled work trying to meet client deadlines around the bank’s disregard for its customers’ working lives.

Needless to say, she’s now moving bank.

We spent time discussing to which bank instead. But if banking with this company is open season on an employee’s working time for mistakes ‘which happen’, we can close out that risk for all staff.

There are two banks operating in Kenya that we have always found reliable —neither of them Kenyan.

I want my staff with banks that don’t lose, block or otherwise suspend their salaries. For Kenyans can, at least, vote with their own money.