It can be—but not this way!

Here is one spectacular example of how Standard Bank (SB) shoots itself in the foot with red-taped, .45-calibre bureaucracy:

Every year in the past, we were automatically e-mailed around mid-March a full-year home loan statement for the previous tax year (01 March to end February). This year, this did not happen, so we enquired about it using SB’s online enquiry facility (because SB had deactivated the “homeservemailbox” e-mail address without telling its clients).

It took SB 17 days to respond. In itself, such a long delay is flatly unacceptable. It should happen within a day or two!

But it gets better. The response asks us to provide a variety of details about the home loan, supposedly for “security purposes.”

Hilarious!

SB has all of our details on record, including the e-mail address to which all previous home loan statements have been sent without any need for us to provide any “security purposes” info. So why now suddenly? All that’s needed is to check on whether the info provided in the enquiry (account holder name, ID no., contact nos. and e-mail address) is the same as those associated with the home loan on SB’s system.

Does SB really think that the info provided is **** while agreeing 100% with what’s on its own systems? Because that’s the absurd implication of this inanity.

It is precisely this sort of inept inefficiency, giving clients an utterly pointless run-around, and consequently subjecting them to unreasonable delays and frustration, that ensures people will hold banks in low regard.

Finally, whoever is handling this, don’t contact us at all. Just bring this matter to the attention of someone with sufficient savvy and clout to understand the ludicrousness of this state of affairs, and to fix it. Do not dare tell us about “standard procedures” or such because you will only get an earful of abuse if you do. Don't say you weren’t warned.