Bank CEO surprised at anger over banking fee

Following numerous letters including those published in The Times on February 24, voicing dissatisfaction at some of the bank charges, the Business Supplement of February 26 quotes the CEO of HSBC as claiming that the bank has been rather "surprised" at the anger over internet banking fee. No surprise seems to have been shown though to other numerous unjustified bank charges.

Do not readers find it odd that the CEO is surprised?

Another letter three days later by Alan Kay voiced mainly the same concern and cited a test case in the UK courts to establish the legality of the banks' charging structure. This test case has now been decided by the Courts of Appeal in favour of customers, yet again the banks intend appealing to the House of Lords, Britain's highest court.

In this case the Office of Fair Trading liaised closely with the Financial Services Authority and at this stage the OFT has won the case on behalf of banking consumers. This begs the question as to why no reactions, let alone legal action, from our regulators and financial authorities have ever been raised to the satisfaction of the numerous letter writers voicing anger.

Rather than showing surprise, I for one would have preferred the CEO to enlighten me on how many customers avail themselves of e-banking, the costs involved to the banks, and the profits made by the banks from e-banking.

Yet another test case could be for banks to inform their customers on the revenue generated by the banks from the so-called similar "industry-wide tariffs", which I would rather term as levies, as against the costs involved to the banks when for instance a charge amounting to €15 is levied for not honouring a standing order due to lack of funds in a client's account.

On February 24, in his weekly column, economist Lawrence Zammit called for bringing back human relations into the economy, a component which seems to have been side-kicked far too long with financial institutions amassing larger profits at the expense of customers while ignoring the human element, only for us to wake up, much to everybody's surprise, to face a global financial crisis.

Recently we learned that Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS will enjoy an annual pension amounting to £693,000 at age 50. This goes to show that the human element is present when the banks deem fit but, of course, not a customer human element. We can only hope that no such greed has ever occurred locally.

Let those who have ears listen, since the element of "surprise" to some might be shocking to the wider customer.