5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired for creating over 2 million phony accounts

64met said:

WOW! As someone who not only has my IRA but my checking/savings plus mortage with WF this is a problem. Ty, CA for sharing.

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I have both my mortgage and IRAs with WF but not my checking, savings, etc. I have noticed about a year ago that I started being bombarded by emails from them, offering fantastic deals on credit cards, which I ignored. I've started watching them a lot more carefully...

cbi1972 said:

I never have to wait at the location on Independence Drive in Homewood. I spend longer writing a deposit slip than I do standing in line.

I used their phone system to cancel a debit card and get a new one sent to me. It worked fine.

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About a year ago, my wife lost her wallet on the way to Virginia Beach. Regions was easy. The nightmare was with PNC. It was impossible to get the right hand to communicate with the left. Replacement cards were supposed to be sent to the USPS office there but were routed instead to home, where we obviously weren't. When they were not picked up, they were returned. There was more, but I'll stop here. Thankfully, we had backup cards...

So many comment-worthy statements.

Most involve the tradeoff between the advantages a large bank has in breadth of geographical coverage vs. the advantage a small bank has in individualized customer service.

Others involve the vagaries of the financial marketplace, viewed through the prism of hindsight. Still others involve trying to wring top-tier customer service from a staff that may have never experienced that themselves.

Then, complicating matters both ways, you have the individual customer-contact person who often makes peanuts, but has an inordinate impact on the customer experience.

To address the first: suppose you have all your accounts at a local credit union. You probably get awesome service and favorable interest rates on both deposits and loans. But you lose your wallet in Paris. ATM and credit cards gone. Good luck saving your vacation in 72 hours or less. Big bank may be impersonal, but there's somebody there who can handle this problem.

Bazza, you got a mortgage on the edge of what you could afford in 1996. In Florida. You made out like a bandit, even taking the Great Recessioni into account, and love your benefactor for it. How would you feel if that same benefactor made that same stretch in 2006, and three years later you owed $200K more than your house was worth? Prolly not so many warm fuzzies, and a lot more rants against the machine.

How many times have you walked into a three-figure restaurant and gotten a crappy experience? How much of it is due to the maitre'd? How much to the waitstaff? How much to the kitchen? Often, from a patron's perspective, it's hard to tell who's at fault. But ultimately the patron doesn't care. He wants seamless service for value given. Fair enough. But guys, I'm here to tell you, that's a lot easier said than done.

Banking and restaurants have the exact same problem: they need flawless customer service delivered to the masses in a fast, knowledgeable, professional manner, by a staff that has an encyclopedic knowledge of regulations that the SCOTUS argues over. But they have to do that with wages that attract personnel who can't pass drug tests, or show up only when it's convenient, and are more interested in grabass with their colleague than in processing your deposit or making sure your lactose-intolerant son gets real soy milk.

Raising wages to attract better talent is an option. As a depositor, are you willing to pay for it? As a shareholder, are you willing to decrease EPS by 25 cents? Be careful...at today's multiples, that translates into $4 a share. Before you answer be sure you don't own some either directly or indirectly through a mutual fund. If you have a pension, check the pension fund's investments to be sure you're not cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Guys, I'm not defending banks' mistakes. They are legion. But if you think you can rant away the value of a large bank, you simply don't understand the inter-connections.

There's a reason trillion-dollar banks evolved, and it's not because they set out to screw the little guy.