Fairly standard in the UK. Businesses don't want to lose face and see the share price drop so they keep everything as private as possible and only release the bear minimum information. Look out for standard phrases like, "A small number of our customers", "We are working hard to...", "Learn lessons....", "No-one will be out of pocket". Of course, these are mostly weasel words and they don't account for the fact that the amount of hassle these mistakes can cause cannot be captured in a pithy soundbite.
The truth is, though, that the massive amount of regulation is both good and bad. It is good that the consumer is protected but it is bad that it is easier for a bank to stay with 50 year old technology that is already approved than risk releasing something brand-new since mistakes are penalised so badly. I think a more open regime would be better, obviously accepting that the bank has to ultimately make sure that their customers don't lose out.
For example, "Dear customer, we are moving all mortgages to a new system which will make it much cheaper to run. Just in case some of the calculated payments are out by a few pennies, we will be giving all customers £1000 towards their mortgage to account for these". Much cheaper in the long run but we seem to prefer the costs of flogging a dead horse with the small amount of "sweetener" we could pay instead.
I don’t remember a single instance of 50-year old banking technology costing customers money, so I don’t see what the supposed downside is. You refer to a “brand-new system” that is “much cheaper to run”. But as far as I can tell, the operational costs of a mortgage are little more than an (exquisitely analyzed) rounding error. There are some new bank(ish) startups here in Europe like N24 and there are some new rules for data portability. But I’ve yet to see any exciting ideas coming from such efforts.
lbriner|4 years ago
The truth is, though, that the massive amount of regulation is both good and bad. It is good that the consumer is protected but it is bad that it is easier for a bank to stay with 50 year old technology that is already approved than risk releasing something brand-new since mistakes are penalised so badly. I think a more open regime would be better, obviously accepting that the bank has to ultimately make sure that their customers don't lose out.
For example, "Dear customer, we are moving all mortgages to a new system which will make it much cheaper to run. Just in case some of the calculated payments are out by a few pennies, we will be giving all customers £1000 towards their mortgage to account for these". Much cheaper in the long run but we seem to prefer the costs of flogging a dead horse with the small amount of "sweetener" we could pay instead.
KarlKemp|4 years ago