Christians Read

Our bank was offering a new savings account with a better interest rate than the pitiful amount our current savings account was paying (far less than the inflation rate). This new account had apparently been available for two years, but our bank had not bothered to inform us of this. The bank had informed us about many other new services over those two years but not the one that might actually be useful to us.

So, we phoned our local branch to make an appointment with a financial advisor. Twice. Both times, we reached an automated answering device which said our call was important to the bank and asked us to leave a message. Both times, the automated instructions closed with “We’re here to help.”

When we still had not received an answer by the next day, we decided to go in to the bank. We approached the only teller on duty (the bank prefers customers to use the “automated teller”—ATM—and do the work ourselves). When we finally got to the head of the line, the teller told us to wait in some chairs. We sat down in front of a large poster that outlined some of the bank’s services and then said, “Talk to us today.”

After a few minutes, the teller came back and told us that there would be no one available to talk to until the branch manager returned in an hour or two.

So, we left, delayed lunch, ran some errands, and returned. We found the bank manager. He was dealing with another customer. When he was finished, he asked us what we wanted. When we explained what we wanted, he said that he didn’t have time to talk to us today and we should make an appointment. We said that we had tried that and nobody had called back. He checked his computer and said that the earliest we could make an appointment to talk to someone was later the next week, almost two weeks after we had originally tried to make an appointment. (We wondered if he had also checked our bank balance and realized that we were not among his wealthier customers.) We said that we were not willing to wait that long.

We returned home and phoned the bank’s national phone line. When we got through, we were finally able to transfer our money to the new account. It took more than half an hour to go through all the steps, including listening to a number of recorded messages outlining the bank’s policies. The agent finally told us that the money would be transferred the next day.

We waited two days and checked the account online. The money had not been transferred. So, we phoned the bank’s national line again. This time, the agent explained that the money could not be transferred until we had been informed that only the principal could be transferred but that the “accrued interest” could not be transferred. We asked why not, whether it was a bank policy or a government regulation, but the agent would not answer, just kept repeating that the accrued interest could not be transferred. We then asked that if the bank needed to inform us of this before the principal could be transferred, why hadn’t the bank informed us of this over the previous two days? The agent had no answer. We asked why the first agent hadn’t told us about the accrued interest issue and asked if he had made a mistake. The new agent refused to admit that, just kept repeating that the accrued interest couldn’t be transferred. Finally, we agreed to have the principal transferred but not the accrued interest. We were told that the accrued interest would remain in the old savings account.

The next day, we again checked the accounts online. We saw that most of the money had been transferred out of the old savings account but had not yet appeared in the new savings account.

That same day, we received an email from the bank informing us that the amount in our original savings account had fallen below $100 and that the account had no overdraft protection. The email said that we could leave the money in the account or transfer it.

We waited a few more days and checked again. We discovered that almost all of the money had been transferred to the new savings account, which would leave an even smaller amount in the old savings account. Except that there was no money left in the old savings account. We surmised that the amount had fallen so low that the bank’s computers had decided that the account was dormant and had confiscated the small amount that was left.

We checked again a few days later and discovered that the original small amount had reappeared in our old savings account.

Then we received in the mail an application form that we needed to fill out in order to transfer our money from the old account to the new account. There was another form attached that indicated that the interest rate for the new savings account would be less than we had been told and that it would be harder to transfer money in and out of that account than we had been told.

A week later, we finally managed to secure an appointment to see a financial advisor at a different branch of the bank farther away. He clarified that the interest rate in the new account would be what we had originally been told, and he was able to transfer the small amount of accrued interest in our old savings account to our checking account.

Large institutions often claim that they personally care about us, but the truth is that they are so large and bureaucratic that this is impossible. Large institutions are not people and cannot care about individual people. The claims make good advertising slogans, but they are not backed up by reality.

This makes me wonder about the claims large mega-churches make about caring for people. Can they really deliver what smaller, local churches do?