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Catch your bank doing something right

Opinion & Analysis
The October 18, 2012 instalment of this column was titled “Catch Your Bank Doing Something Right”. A few days later — on my birthday, to be precise — one Chido Makunike penned a piece titled, “Disconnect Between Banks, Customers” for New Zimbabwe.com, partly in response to my article.

The October 18, 2012 instalment of this column was titled “Catch Your Bank Doing Something Right”. A few days later — on my birthday, to be precise — one Chido Makunike penned a piece titled, “Disconnect Between Banks, Customers” for New Zimbabwe.com, partly in response to my article. At the time I saw his rejoinder, I had too much on my plate so I did not respond immediately but for the record, promised to do so later as I felt that his piece propagated far too many misrepresentations for me to let it pass.

Opinion by Omen Muza

In his lengthy piece, he referred to me as “our banking sector defender” which is all well and good because I suppose that’s how I come across to him. While it is flattering that I should be considered a spokesperson — let alone a defender of the whole banking sector — such a responsibility is clearly out of my scope and it is better suited for those in the C-suites of banks or their public relations functionaries who get paid to do just that. “Putting across the banks’ point-by-point arguments about why and how the current criticisms of them (banks) might be excessive” would have been helpful, said Makunike, but clearly, that is the duty of the Bankers’ Association of Zimbabwe and not me, isn’t it?

Though Makunike suggests that the purpose of the piece was to counter what I consider to be “the bank-bashing bandwagon”, it in fact, sought to do nothing of the sort.

Firstly, its real purpose was – against the background of much negative sentiment about banks, which is not helped by the banks’ deafening silence — to recognise some banks’ recent Corporate Social Investment (CSI) activities without any “buts”. Secondly, by shining a light on such activities, I sought to encourage banks to do more CSI work without being judgemental about their current efforts. Thirdly, the article was conceived in order to heighten the readers’ awareness of whether their banks do much else apart from providing financial services, which was the rationale for the title “Catch Your Bank Doing Something Right”.

Makunike suggests that if my article were to meet his high expectations; it should have catalogued “ways in which the heated current criticism of banks might be wrong”. But why would I do that if that was never my intention in the first place?

Makunike finds it easy to put my piece squarely in the context of “some of the banks’ responses to this onslaught of criticism”. I must, however, hasten to remind him that while I am a banker by training and experience, with many friends in the banking sector and of course, business relationships with some banks, I hold no brief for the banking sector. In fact, I must at this point highlight that many a time I have written strongly, if not scathingly about banks’ service levels and I can only assume that Makunike is either not familiar with my column and articles written for it, or he deliberately chose to ignore any facts that would have contextualised “Catch Your Bank Doing Something Right” so that he could seize on the one piece and run with it out of context.

In one such article written in mid-2011, I urged customers to “stop tolerating poor service and the abuse they suffer at the hands of front office staff in banks”. I further suggested that “as part of the pursuit of a culture of service excellence and in order to take charge of their own financial healing customers have three choices: To become ‘soldiers’ and fight for better service; to continue enduring poor, patronising service or to drop out of the banking system altogether and join the ranks of the unbanked”. I concluded my suggestion by wondering which choice banks preferred their customers to make. Hardly the sort of thing a “banking sector defender” would be expected to say, isn’t it?

I don’t deny that there is a “disconnect” between banks and their customers in Zimbabwe, but I categorically deny that my article was an attempt to explain or defend such “disconnect” on behalf of banks, not that there is anything wrong about doing so should I chose to do that now or in future.

In closing, I argue that while good service on its own is of paramount importance and is, in fact, the principal reason why banks exist, in these days where a social licence is almost as important an operating licence, even a stickler for good service such as Makunike would have to admit that a bank — or any other company for that matter — without soul is simply unpalatable.

  • Omen N Muza writes in his personal capacity. He is a banker and managing director of TFC Capital (Zimbabwe) (Pvt) Ltd, a Harare-based financial advisory, research and training company with interests in banking, technology and agriculture as well as the convergence area among them.