The Horror Bank

The horror banking experience: With a delay of hours, their forever dysfunctional system selects you in the middle of the night as its next torture victime. It decides to consider a perfectly ordinary charge to your credit card as suspicious. It sends an email instead of a phone alert. The email threatens you with a card cancellation meaning burdening you with a long branch visit to "apply" for a new card, a week long wait for finally getting the new card, after a dozen irritating calls by a totally hostile and again dysfunctional courier company. Plus the cost of it all to be charged to you. Plus days of updating payment information with all those services that get paid by debiting your card. A grand disaster. So your only hope is the call to the ***** line to confirm the flagged transaction. You cant do it by simply replying to an SMS. No, the system wants to be overtoweringly important in your life. So on an otherwise beautiful Saturday morning you wait 12 (!) Minutes in the line to be connected to a call centre lady who is forced by the system to do the full identity verification ritual. After many other absurdities, it forces you to switch on your laptop to confirm 5 random credit card transactions over the last 5 days; who can remember all card transactions over 5 days? Every 2nd sentence gets cut off by the dysfunctional phone exchange operated by Standard Bank. You tremble in fear that the line will drop and you will have to start all over again. But it is your lucky day. After 25 minutes you finally get to confirm the flagged transaction. Your card suspension will be lifted. The system is happy. AI was fed another human as a throphy. And Standard Bank compliance can add another notch to justify their forever growing self-importance, to yye detriment of its shareholders and clients.