The disappearance of high street banks is not something unique to Settle, but the town has been hard hit by the rapid loss of all its physical financial outlets, with the exception of Skipton Building Society, the latest being the closure of the HSBC branch late last year.
The alternative to a presence on the high street with all its expensive overheads, clearly favoured by the banking industry, is to encourage – some might say force – its customers online by removing all other options.
Now, if you are the proud owner or a computer, tablet or a smartphone, and grew up in the technological age we now inhabit, you perhaps won’t have a problem with this. After all, how many of us do our shopping online, book holidays, download or stream films and television?
I would consider myself to be an ‘early adopter’ of any kind of whizzy new gadget, and also joined the UK’s first telephone-based bank, First Direct, way back in the 1990s, not long after it launched. They introduced online banking services very early too, and I’ve been using them ever since, without issue.
But we are not all the same.
Some people are very unsure about technology, are wary of using a computer and may not own a smartphone at all, so to ask them to ‘go online’ or ‘download the app’ can be like asking them to fly to the moon. When that becomes the only option to access their money, to pay bills, or to manage savings, it becomes a huge problem that the banks have largely ignored, leaving many of their customers in distress or feeling anxious about what to do.
The closure of HSBC in Settle last year brought this problem to the fore for many of their customers and I saw first-hand how bewildering the transition from popping into the branch to speak to a human being behind the counter, to suddenly being forced to bank online can be, when I was asked to help someone out with the process.
Initially, we were directed to the HSBC website to watch a short video, narrated by a very calm voice that tries to make the whole thing sound easy. So far, so good. Except the video assumes ownership of a smartphone, which this customer did not possess, and also assumes knowledge of a ‘Telephone Security Number’ which again, we did not have.
To obtain your Telephone Security Number, you have to call the Customer Helpline. Can you feel the sense of dread rising already?
After negotiating the various options, press 1 for this, press 2 for that, and a lengthy wait, we eventually got to speak to a human, and after several more minutes of (perfectly understandable and necessary) security questions, we were told a Telephone Security Number would be winging its way through the post, along with a digital key device to use when logging on via the website in future, in the absence of a smartphone.
Neither arrived, which prompted another lengthy call to the Customer Helpline the following week, and the person we spoke to had no record of the previous call, so we had to start from the beginning again; an experience that can best be likened to a frustrating game of snakes and ladders.
Eventually, we got two of everything, resulting in, you guessed it, another call to the Customer Helpline to determine which Telephone Security Number was the correct one to use, as we now had two different ones, and what to do with the spare digital key device. The answer to that question made us laugh with exasperation, as the person on the end of the call suggested we ‘drop it into your local branch’.
If we had one of those, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with!
Much gnashing of teeth later, we managed to get the whole thing set up, although using the digital key device, if you are not nimble-fingered, poses another problem as you have to press a lot of buttons on it very quickly to get the codes you need to proceed with logging into your account.
Although this tale has a – sort of – happy ending, in that we negotiated our way through the process to finally get online, it was not as simple or straightforward as popping into a local branch, and without additional help, I struggle to see how this customer would have gained access to what is, after all, their money, not the bank’s.
More help and advice should have been given to their customers to get them online while the local branch was still open. Now it has gone, more consideration needs to be given to those who are struggling to access online services.
Perhaps a pooling of resources, where all the major banks can get together and use one building between them to serve as a ‘local hub’ in places like Settle is the answer. It’s already happening elsewhere, so why not here?
By John Drake
