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Apparently the Bank of America have chosen this moment to announce a gimmicky new ‘deals’ service. It’s called ‘BankAmeriDeals’, and as well as having a ridiculous name, seems to be a ridiculous new way for the bank to try and squeeze just a little bit more hard-earned cash out of its long-suffering customers. This new venture is supposed to be similar to the Groupon deals website, with Bank of America’s account-holders being given offers when they log on to their accounts.
Well, now that all sounds quite nice of them, doesn’t it? Money off shopping just for logging into your bank account? Except for a few pretty obvious problems. First of all, apparently they will choose which offers to give you based on your spending. So if they see lots of transactions at Walmart, then that’s what they’re going to give you. Great, so these aren’t actually treats at all, just an encouragement to spend more on everyday groceries that you were just going to buy anyway. You can also bet your bottom dollar that they’re making money out of this themselves somewhere, probably giving details of your shopping habits to the stores they’re working with. Isn’t that really just a major privacy breach? You can opt out of the scheme, they say, but not everyone’s going to realize why they should.
Now is not the time
Then you’ve got the biggest issue: is this really what a failing, struggling bank should actually be doing? I have my doubts. This is a bank that only exists because us taxpayers provided it with billions of dollars in bailout money. Since that bailout back into 2008, there doesn’t seem to have been any significant change in the way Bank of America does things. According to CNN Money the bank is still struggling to stay solvent, despite an ongoing cost-cutting operation. Despite making thousands of people redundant, the Bank of America’s operating costs have actually risen in the last quarter. Of course, they haven’t made any commitment to cutting the pay of their investment bankers. You know, the ones who got them (and us) into this mess in the first place.
In that context, is it really appropriate for Bank of America to be wasting their staff time and money on a gimmicky deals scheme? Perhaps this is the attitude that led to all their problems: the idea that you can just paper over the cracks, you can just make everything look as if it’s OK on the surface and the fact that it’s nothing like OK can simply be ignored. If I was in charge of Bank of America, I’d be spending my time hauling their investment department over the coals, not thinking up new ways to try and get ordinary people to give me their money through some cheap bribes.
Weasel words
The thing is, Bank of America are just one of many companies who really seem to think that they just need to throw out a few scraps and they’ll have us all on their side. It’s the politician’s mentality: just say a few clever words and you’ll have the public eating out of your hand. Never mind the substance, never mind the things that really matter. The 2008 crisis proved that the wealthy really were living in an entirely different world to the rest of us. The failure of the banks was, when you look back on it now, inevitable. And those in charge of those banks could surely have seen that, if they’d chosen to look. But they just didn’t seem to care. Perhaps because they knew that we would be there to deal with the consequences of their failure.
Rather than changing their attitude, turning themselves around and rebuilding from the bottom-up, all they are doing now is to try to cover up their misdemeanors with gimmicks. Rather than becoming more like us, the banks are pulling further away. They just don’t want us to realize it. It’s almost impossible to know can and cannot be trusted amongst today’s cohort of bankers, businessmen and politicians. There are calls for the Bank of America to be broken up but what are the chances of that happening? The fact is, it won’t. They’ll just continue to try and make us believe they’ve spent our taxes well, while their executives go home each night to caviar and champagne and shake the last cents from the change jar.
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Izzy is a freelance writer with an axe to grind, so would like to thank Jen for entertaining her own ranting (even though she’s not a redhead!). When she isn’t waxing lyrical on the financial system, she writes on behalf of numerous companies including a leading sectional sofa company.
