I am quickly learning why bank’s are called the
caboose of progress
I work for a bank, not a small bank, but one of the largest banks in the US. We are going through a merger and I am trying to figure out how the h*** the bank that bought us has survived this long.
I will point out up front that the CEO of our bank and the CEO of the bank that we are merging with are brothers…how did
that get past the FTC and stockholders?
I recently went to a “Meet the CEO” gathering to find out a little about the new CEO and his ‘vision’ for the new bank. I walked out of the meeting feeling like I just took a wild ride through the Twilight Zone.
As with any merger, you look for a way to cut costs. This is usually done through a process called “best practices” in which they look at the duplicate functions of the two entities and eliminate the ‘costlier’ or ‘less productive’ of the two. Our banks did this, but to our surprise, this “best practices” usually translated into “we are going to keep the processes of the buying bank and scrap the processes of the bought bank, even if those practices are prehistoric”. Anyway back to the CEO meeting. Our new CEO gave quite a show. He had a nice power-point presentation, fancy lighting and groovy music. As he got going into the meeting, I was starting to feel impressed by his enthusiasm and energy and thought that he really was going to make us, in his words “the best bank in America”. But then he started to explain his vision for cutting costs….get ready….this is so innovative, so breath-taking, so far out there….ready……we are going to cut costs by not buying Post-it notes and pens (DA DA)….yes folks you heard me right….here we stand on the edge of the 21st century. We have phones that can connect with the Internet. We have smart-cards that store money, personal data, etc…we have mapped the human genome, we stand on the verge of human cloning, we have dug under the English Channel, sent a man to the moon and probes to mars, we have seen up close pictures of the moons of Jupiter….and this is our CEO’s innovative way of taking our bank into the 21st century, by cutting costs through an innovative idea of not allowing us to purchase Post-it notes and pens
He even had calculations backing his mind boggling idea. He figured that we could save $750,000 a year by not buying pens! We have revenues in the range of $2-3 Billion a year!!! At our current outstanding stock, that works out to .0004 cents per stock. Well get in the car grandma, our CEO saved us .0004 cents, we are going on a shopping spree
OMG is this man insane? Here are some wild and crasy ideas we could do to cut costs…get rid of 3 of our 4 corporate jets that cost us $50,000 a month to operate, or how about, not sending out our ‘propaganda’ newspaper to every employee at a cost of $15,000 an issue, or how about not allowing our ‘execs’ to fly first class on a whim at a cost of around $2500 per ticket!
Oh well…further evidence of our
caboose of progress. My job revolves mostly around an Access database. One of our systems persons wrote the database and maintains it. Well every month she has to spend about 3-4 days preparing the database for my use. I asked my manager if it would be better, if I could attend an Access programming class so that I could maintain the database and we would not have to waste the systems persons time (I know Access pretty well, but not on the level needed). He took it to his boss and it got a NO! Why? It cost too much and since we already have a person that knows Access programming, we do not need another! WHAT!! The class was $200. Or about 1/3 of his monthly clothing allowance (yes he gets a monthly clothing allowance
) but it was suggested that I could by a programming book and learn it on my own!
Oh well that is the start of my rant, there will be more to follow
Feel free to rant here about your job as it is refreshing to see that other people are going through the same hell that I am!!!!
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Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig
I've got to admit it's getting better, it's getting better all the time