Can Banking Get Any Worse?

You would think after the extremely exciting past few months that business would learn some ethics and perhaps more importantly the banking industry would learn to focus on long term profits, ethical practices and just smart business.

Unfortunately it appears they are just as greedy, rude, unhelpful, and deceitful as ever.  Not only have they mastered the art of treating customers badly, they continue to abuse and discriminate against employees that stand for any ethics or smart business decisions.

Take this example.  A productive, ethical, righteous employee is working on getting a loan closed.  He gets a call from a sales agent that is paid almost entirely by commission.  The agent thinks he is getting paid too little on this loan so enquires of the loan processor to see if the borrower has any additional funds left in savings that the borrower could bring to closing to buy discount points, thus increasing the agent’s bonus.  Obviously the processor denied his request.  The fact that he had to argue over two hours on the phone and wait over 5 hours for a manager to deal with the issue after the agent tried to call the borrower to lie and postpone the closing is amazing.  What is even more amazing is that the only thing the seemed to push the managers to act was the possibility of a $17,000 Government fine for changing the terms of a Government sponsored loan so close to closing. The managers obviously have no ethics, but more on that later.

Of course we have the allegations of this bank in question using bank owned property in Malibu as party central rather than trying to sell it.  In addition we had the stunning allegations of racial discrimination in lending as Blacks were forced to use subprime mortgages despite their credit rating.

Speaking of discrimination, let us get back to this productive, ethical, righteous employee.  He closed more loans then other colleagues at his fulfillment site in both July and August despite having vacation and dealing with baseless accusations.  It may seem odd to you that he would be written up despite his performance.  It may seem odder yet that all the accusations were baseless and managers or employee relations were unable to provide any factual documentation.  Accusing him of touching only 6 files in a given two week period when he actually closed over 9 and touched over 20.  In addition they accused him of relying on colleagues to do his work when they somehow managed to overlook the fact he was on vacation and thus unable to do work for a week.  Even more strangely is how rude management is to him, for example walking away from him while he is in mid conversation or dumping excess workloads on him and refusing to help him.  For example coworkers were expected on average to work 30-50 loans at a time but he was diligently working as best he could on 60-80 loans, a large portion of which were from the worst sales agent assigned to the site based on emails sent to him from management.  This doesn’t even touch the fact that his vacation request for the week of Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve had been ignored since May despite the fact that his anniversary is on New Year’s Eve and that a coworker was approved, and some sad policy stated to him about how both Thanksgiving and Christmas can’t both be requested so early on.  Upon complaints to Employee Relations the write up was dropped and one manager disciplined.  This didn’t stop the rude attitudes or the fact that it was only a ‘courtesy’ that the write up was dropped and overall he has serious performance issues.  The vacation request was similarly ignored until he wrote a written complaint to the New York Division of Human Rights when upon it was magically approved.  But this does not stop the direct discrimination based on his sexual orientation.  It also didn’t stop rude comments such as, “I do not care,” which was uttered from his direct supervisor after he asked in a meeting why with the increasing workloads and admissions the site was understaffed that he was targeted in a write up.

But what is banking without directly disturbing the dead.  If your bank is a trustee for a deceased, please wait as long as possible to notify the heirs, preferably at least 3 months.  In which you will have plenty of time to allow unauthorized people under the terms of the will to move in and occupy property that is part of the estate and in addition you will illegally disperse funds to this person

But don’t ask me; ask my father in law who is the heir.  And ask my partner who faces abuse and discrimination and requests to do unethical and borderline fraud loans.  And ask Wells Fargo.  Could banking get worse?  I don’t know, but if we expect a true economic recovery we need to make sure that it gets better.