The street outside seemed Sunday quiet when I got up this morning and looked outside. Until I went out to get some bread and veg, I didn't realise that today's the Mayday bank holiday. Supermarkets and many other shops, restaurants and bars were closed. Even so, I walked around and found a few small independent shops and greengrocers open, and was able to buy what I needed.
I couldn't take myself out anywhere during the day, as I had a long incoming call booked with the HSBC business account advisor whose job it is to re-check account holders' identity credentials, and their declarations of trading interest, to make sure that all account activities comply with legislation on money laundering, now imposed on commercial accounts. In order to arrange this Ashley has spent over an hour and a half on two separate occasions in a phone holding queue to understand what is now being asked of him and me, as CBS Limited account signatories and directors, also in my case as the signatory for the CCL account we set up for managing the Crime Manager's salary.
The call was expected at three o'clock, but didn't arrive. Ashley called to check if I'd dealt with it as expected, and was most annoyed to find that the arrangements he'd made hadn't worked, so he spent another half an hour in a telephone queue to the HSBC call centre, only to find there was no trace of the call booked in the register for the day, due to some unnoticed flaw in their diary system, or a mistake on the part of the advisor he'd spoken to. So, he's booked replacement call for 17th May. This has cost him two hours work time. HSBC has millions of UK business clients to whom the new legislation applies.
It's costly and demanding for them, but in the end clients will be made to pay for this in bank charges. You can be sure of that. The slowness and inefficiency the procedure entails is to my mind symptomatic of an under estimation of the resources required for implementation. Since the great TSB internet banking fiasco of last week, researchers into the security and stability of networked computer banking systems in the U.K. have commented that banking infrastructure is a collection of old (some, very old in computing terms) networks which once served smaller banks and financial institutions which have long since merged with others. The customer web interfaces may look good, but they hide technical disasters waiting to happen. These are a major threat any time a migration of data to a new system is undertaken, as was the case with TSB.
In the era when banking was labour intensive, it was also highly interpersonal at a local level, so bank clerks and managers knew customers and looked after them. The internet has revolutionised the entire way we do business and look after finances locally and globally. Nowadays the customer constantly has to prove who they are to an impersonal system, often time consuming. This is meant to be progress, but I can't help feeling we've lost the plot somewhere, discarded vital human values.
Anyway, as a result of just hanging around during UK business hours, just in case, I spent time both reading articles and writing all day, but as sunset approached, I went for a brisk speedy walk to the port and back. There were no big cruise ships in today, just the two vessels up for hire, waiting for work presumably. No reason to visit here on a bank holiday, naturally with all the shops and eateries closed down that usually benefit from cruise travellers spending sprees. Even the quays across in the port's industrial zone, occupied by bulk carriers, tankers and container ships lay quiet.
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