COMMENT
Written in a coffee shop at Wickham Market, Suffolk, and dispatched via a free wi-fi service in Woodbridge a day later.
Go back 40 years and you would find telecoms providers slow to respond to customer and market demands. By modern standards they were sluggish in every aspect of their operations. Like the banks, they served a customer base that was largely lethargic and faced little or no competition.
But back then there were no mobiles. People only had one line at home and office, and for the telecoms provider the world was a safe and stable place.
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Fast-forward to today and we have multiple fixed and mobile networks with twisted pair, coax, optical fibre, wi-fi, and WiMax providing telephone, TV and broadband connectivity, VoIP, quadruple service plays and number portability.
As a result customers are now fickle and quick to move with the technology to those offering the best devices and services. So churn has become a big deal and hanging onto the customers a primary objective.
What a change. And how very different and convenient for us customers and users. But not so the banking industry. Customer lock-in and lethargy are now used to exact stability in a world gradually being flooded with connectivity and accelerating change. Account portability ought to be available, but it isn't.
Moreover, moving bank accounts is so onerous and difficult most people won't consider it. So customers voting with their feet and their money is, relatively speaking, a rarity.
While the technology to allow us to move bank accounts at will on a regular basis is available today, it isn't being made readily accessible for obvious reasons of commercial interest. And until there is far more pressure on the old banking world from the new, nothing will change.
To be blunt, more global internet banking entities are required to invoke significant change in the old institutions and bring them into line with the rest of 21st century humanity.
So when might we enjoy bank account portability in the same way that we have number portability? I reckon we might have to slow-forward another 40 years.
It's going to take a while. But then again, if the mobile industry changes its billing engines into banking engines, it could happen tomorrow.
Comments
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1. Simon Allen
I agree that we will have to wait a long time. Largely because the banks hold all the 'levers'.
One of the reasons that comms broke open so easily was because it could be turned into a commodity. The customer holds the mobile phone or the fax machine in their hand and can control it's use.
But, in banking, the customer only has a piece of plastic and some papers - everything lies within the bank's physical premises. We have no access other than through our own bank and they have done extremely well at all doing near enough the same thing .
2. Bagpuss
Sorry - totally disagree with you here. Its dead easy to set up an account these days so anyone can do that first then move all thier payments over. However I agree that the moving over part would then be difficult but from one point of view that is quite a good thing - how woudl you like it if someone moved your account to another bank for you? One area where it was made much easier to move companies was gas and electricity and we have heard lots of horror stories about people having thier accounts moved because thier daughter answered the door etc. I don't think anyone would like moving banking accounts to be that easy. Also the huge amount of red tape banking regulations that the banking industry is wrapped in in the UK make moving moving accounts a regulatory minefield.